Sustaining a healthy revenue relies on the loyalty and growth of customers. To achieve long-term success and expansion, businesses must adopt a customer-centric approach, where the primary focus is consistently delivering value to their customers. This value extends beyond the product itself and encompasses the overall experiences customers have with the brand.
To understand a customer’s experience, start with a map.
Customer experience maps serve as a valuable tool to gain a deep understanding of the experiences you provide, allowing you to ensure a positive impact and constantly enhance those experiences.
What is a Customer Experience Map?
A customer experience map is the set of touchpoints that customers and people on their way to becoming customers have with your brand.
It is different from the customer’s journey in that each interaction has a set of attributes to it, so we have some way of understanding that interaction in a layer beyond checking the box where it occurred.
Customer experience maps can take various forms, ranging from simple touchpoints with attached sentiment to visual representations of a timeline with peaks and valleys. These maps aim to capture the impression of each interaction, rather than just the interaction itself, allowing businesses to guide customers through an ideal experience by strategically placing the highs and lows at the right time.
To create comprehensive customer experience maps, it is important to include touchpoints that occur before a customer makes a purchase. However, the mapping process should not stop at the sale but continue to track important touchpoints such as onboarding, check-ins, and renewals. This holistic approach provides a deeper understanding of the customer journey and allows businesses to continually improve and optimize the overall customer experience.
Customer experience maps can be used to document and track what individual customers or customer segments are going through and thus be used reactively, or you can create a map of the ideal customer experience and try to replicate it with each customer.
You can take a more precise approach and define specific moments when we aim to engage with the client and strive to create these interactions by understanding the steps involved in the ideal experience.
Measuring experience for customers and companies
At B2B businesses, customers refer to two distinct groups: the company or account as a whole and the individuals who work there. This can impact how you create your maps because you need to take sentiment from both perspectives into account.
You should treat experiences specifically as an individual, but there are certain aspects of mapping it that you would be required to do at the account level.
For example, 30-day check-ins would be based on the account reaching that milestone, even if the contacts you reach out to have only been in your database for 15 days.
It also depends on how the account interacts. If you have an account where you communicate with five people during each interaction, and that’s representative of the company itself and the company’s experience, then you can just match one-to-one — you don’t need a separate map. It follows that if the individuals are having a good experience, the account is having a good experience.
When that’s not the case (for instance, if you’re working with multiple points of contact on different aspects of the product or service delivery), then the account experience is only as good as the worst individual experience — and that should impact how you operationalize your customer experience map.
For example, you wouldn’t want to request a review from someone if another contact from their company is having a terrible experience, even if the person you reach out to is happy.
The Benefits of Customer Experience Maps
The advantages of customer experience maps rely on their intended purpose. If you create a map of the ultimate customer journey and aim to implement it in your interactions, the primary benefit is that you enhance customer satisfaction and drive customer retention and business expansion.
By tracking the experiences of individual customers, customer experience maps provide valuable insights into their journey, helping you understand what creates the most positive experience. These maps enable you to pinpoint areas of friction and respond effectively, while also helping you identify areas where you’re succeeding.
Furthermore, customer experience maps can also serve as a powerful tool to help everyone within the company understand and empathize with the customer's journey. It is crucial to have a deep understanding of what the customer has already experienced and anticipate what they will go through at each delivery point, as well as what aspects enhance their experience and what can potentially worsen it.
Sharing these customer experience maps throughout the organization can greatly contribute to operating in a customer-centric manner. Increasing employees' awareness of the impact of every touchpoint a customer goes through, even the ones they may not be directly involved in fosters a culture that prioritizes the customer's needs and desires. This ultimately leads to a more cohesive and effective approach to delivering value to customers and ensuring their satisfaction and loyalty.
