Key takeaways:
- Companies are investing heavily in refining customer acquisition and experience, setting new standards.
- Amid economic uncertainty, the focus is shifting towards prioritizing long-term customer experience improvements.
- Tailoring customer experiences to suit each group’s unique preferences is crucial.
- Implementing a structured customer journey map offers a clear framework for better coordination and adaptation.
- It facilitates the optimization of strategies to meet evolving customer needs and preferences.
The amount of attention and money spent by companies in the last few years on perfecting customer acquisition and customer experience may be unparalleled in history. Customers got used to a standard that not so long ago was only seen among the best of the best. As a consequence, the expectations are through the roof, and very few customers would think twice before “punishing” a company that didn’t deliver by switching to the competitor, maybe even leaving a bad review on the way out.
As the world economy is facing an uncertain future, the budgets allocated for customer acquisition are not as bottomless as they used to seem only a couple of years ago and the focus is shifting to the customer experience, where the improvements are more long-term and if done right, would as a general rule generate a better return on investment. The one-size-fits-all approach is rarely the correct one, even more so in the customer experience arena where most companies are dealing with multiple target groups that differ significantly. What works great for one group is almost a no-go for another, what one group ignores the other group responds to.
The conclusion is very simple: Each target group has to be treated separately and engaged with in a different way – each needs its own customer journey. By considering all the relevant factors in targeting a single target group, creating a tailored customer journey is not that much of a problem. But when you have to create 5 different journeys for 5 different target groups while sometimes combining parts of those journeys together, it becomes quite a task to keep them all organized and easy to navigate. If they get unintentionally mixed up, the benefits of a tailored customer experience will go up in smoke and it will actually cause more harm than good.
Customer experience professionals and marketers sometimes opt for a partial solution, where the different customer journeys are roughly outlined somewhere, but the details and overall logic stay in their heads. Even this non-formulated information is often fragmented – each team member “possesses” only a few pieces of the puzzle. If any of them decide to leave, it’s very uncertain how much of this specific knowledge will be passed on to their coworkers.
To keep all necessary information in the company and to have it available for everyone anytime, it’s necessary to have it written down in a form that’s easy to navigate and edit – whether some team members decide to leave or not. Putting all customer journeys on a customer journey map is a great way to achieve exactly that. The whole logic behind the customer experience gets outlined and put into context.
Creating a great customer experience is often about details – a small tweak here or there can make a big impact. These details are easiest to identify – or in other words, it’s easiest to realize they even exist – when you can look at the big picture of your customer experience strategy. Without a customer journey map it’s very difficult. When you eventually spot and address such a detail, it’s necessary to make a record of this change in your materials – if you don’t have a customer journey map, editing all the references of this detail (and realizing and addressing the consequences of its change) will be very cumbersome and prone to error.
Having a clean framework to operate in will give you much-needed freedom and confidence to create more and more complicated CX concepts because you know that it can be all clearly formulated and reasonably easy to change.
