Key takeaways:
- Drag-and-drop feature for easy editing and rearrangement of touchpoints.
- Integration with various online tools for real-time data and KPI tracking.
- Detailed persona description with a grading system for better customization.
- Informative dashboard presenting all KPIs and performance metrics in one place.
- Integration of AI for analyzing data trends and providing valuable insights.
It’s no secret that one of the biggest weaknesses of customer journey mapping is the unavailability of the software that could handle it. When you find a mockup picture somewhere on the internet of how a proper CJM should look, it easily makes you thrilled to get one just like that. If you try to actually create it, you’ll soon realize that it’s not that easy to find software that would seamlessly allow you to make what you want. If you do, there will likely be many “if only it allowed me to also do [fill in the gap]” sighs.
So let’s try to list all the features an ultimate customer journey mapping tool should have and then let’s see whether it by any chance doesn’t already exist.
1. Touchpoint customization
Every industry and every company is different, therefore it would be really weird if any pre-made touchpoint structure would fit every user. It would be great if you could customize the touchpoints in various customer journey maps to your liking – do you need 5 text fields? No problem. Do you need to add some data? Why not? Multiple images? Sure.
2. Drag-and-drop
When the customer journey map becomes complex and the number of touchpoints looks scary, it’s essential that it stays as easy to edit as it was when it contained three of them. All it takes is a simple drag-and-drop feature – you take a touchpoint and can freely move it around and place it where you want, without affecting or messing up anything else.
3. Integration with online tools
A lot of touchpoints are representations of various tools companies use for running their business – analytics tools like Google Analytics, e-commerce tools like Shopify, social media sites, or advertising platforms like Google Ads or Meta Ads. While it’s fine to include these touchpoints in the CJM (as you certainly should), they would bring much more value if they also contained real KPIs like the number of new visitors from Google Analytics, CTR from Google Ads, number of YouTube subscribers, etc.
4. Thorough and graphic persona description
Personas are a key feature in CJM – if you have more than one target group (which is almost always the case) they’re a very convenient way to tell them apart and customize the customer journey by attaching individual personas to relevant touchpoints. Besides this, it would be great to be able to properly describe the persona – the more thorough the description is, the better can be the customer journey of a given persona customized to its distinct characteristics. Not only with a text description but also with sort of a grading system where you can add various characteristics like creativity or willingness to spend money and assign them a value from 1 to 5, ideally in a visual manner that would make it super easy to read.
5. A truly informative dashboard
When the CJM is done right, it contains a lot of very useful information. The pity is that this information is hidden in the touchpoints and extracting it manually would take too much time and be highly ineffective. If there was a feature that would take all the KPIs and present them in a single place, you would be updated about the customer journey performance within a couple of seconds anytime you felt like it.
6. Someone (or something?) to crunch the numbers
As it was mentioned above, a well-done customer journey map contains a lot of information. But even if they are displayed somewhere together, all of them won’t physically fit there anyway and would miss some context even if they did. Dashboard is great for real-time updates, but not for picking up on trends or noticing patterns. What if there was someone who would go through ALL data in a CJM and come back with insights like “In weeks when you post only 2 times on Instagram, the sales are 20% down compared to weeks when you post more”? But wait – why should a person do this data stuff? Isn’t that exactly what AI should excel in? Yeah – so how about integrating AI into the CJM to crunch the numbers?
Well, we can do it all
By now it’s probably clear that the whole article is basically a list of Out of Dark features. We were aware of the gap in the market, so we took everything that we felt an ultimate customer journey mapping tool should include and then spared no expense to put it all together. Customer journey mapping is a great concept, but to survive in a company, it has to be done correctly. It also has a huge potential to do more than simply “map the customer journey”. By adding a few bells and whistles (which we did), it can become a very powerful marketing and CX tool that even CEOs would find handy.
