Do you understand your customer journey?
Being clear on your customer journey is essential to improving their experience with your business. Here’s how to map your customer journey.
1.Decide where you want to start
Trying to outline everything at once (especially from nothing) is a sure way to confuse you. You need to start with one specific part of your journey.
Not sure where to start? Use your existing feedback to identify where your customers currently experience discomfort in your product or service. From here, decide a clear start and end point around this experience. Next, begin identifying each step they take to get from the start to the end point. This will form the start of your customer journey map.
Example: You have multiple bits of feedback saying that it’s difficult to find your store on the high street. From here you decide you want to map out the journey a customer will go on from ‘Deciding to come to your store’ to ‘Entering the store’. You then map out each step in between. For example, looking for the store address, driving to the store, finding parking and so on.
2.What are your strengths and weaknesses at each step?
For each step that you outlined in the previous step, identify what the specific strengths and weaknesses you have. This helps identify what opportunities you have to improve as well as where you can better communicate your strengths to improve feedback.
This is important because it shows you what you can do now, in the short term for a quick win as well as areas that may take more effort to improve. It’s important to be really honest with yourself at this stage, use your other feedback to help you.
Example: A strength is that your address is clearly listed on google but a weakness is that it directs people to a side door that they can’t actually enter. This causes confusion and frustration when they arrive at your shop.
3. Prioritise your improvements
Once you’ve mapped out all your opportunities to improve, it can be tempting to start tackling everything at once. This is a bad idea. If you change too much at once, its impossible to assess what is actually having an effect on your customers experience meaning you have to be considered about what you change and how you measure the effect.
Prioritise what order to work on these, there are many ways you can prioritise so pick criteria that feels relevant to you. Again your existing feedback may help you here.
Example: You have identified 3 areas to improve, 1 is a simple fix that can be done in a matter of minutes with little cost so you action that straight away. 1 will require a lot more information to really drill down on the issue, this will take a lot of time to define and implement but will be relatively low cost. The last won’t take long to do but will be quite costly, both you think will have a similar impact in your business. At this point decide wether speed or cost is a bigger priority for you.
Still not sure where to start?
Mapping and understanding your customer journey can be daunting, so having a business coach like Caitlin by your side can ease the process massively. In fact, having someone removed from your business can be a benefit as its a neutral party helping you to see more clearly.
I work with you directly to define and improve your customer journeys, helping you to better understand your customers, improve customer retention and loyalty and give you that competitive edge.