I wish I’d said it but I read somewhere about creating a “customer journey map” and I rather like that term. I’ve worked with clients to develop their “customer relationship map” mostly to understand who within their company has or should have the closest relationship with each customer. Both are interesting “maps” to work on with the intent of leveraging research to achieve the best customer retention rate possible.
Understanding the customer journey doesn’t have to be so complicated even if the sales cycle for your products/services is complex and sophisticated. If you have competition – and what company doesn’t – your company has the ability to lose customers just as well as your competition can lose them. Creating a customer experience map can reveal strengths and flaws within your company that directly affect sales and retention rates.
Tracking the entire customer experience can actually be fun. Since I always see a game when a problem or challenge is present, the entire company can develop a games-way-of-thinking to determine the full customer experience.
There are so many online and offline tools available that can help with the process but the process is really quite basic and can be completed manually:
- How did the customer find you?
- On what basis did the customer make their decision to buy from your company?
- How deliriously happy are they about what they bought from your company?
- What exactly will keep them within the fold and loyal? (critical!)
From those four milestones, your company can assign responsibilities to the employees who are relevant at each stage of the customer journey. For instance, if your company has a greeter or receptionist (many still do), your receptionist could be armed with finding out how the customer found out about the company. Now who in your firm checks up on the experience the customer had with the receptionist? Don’t laugh but many relationships with customers are strained or severed right at the front door (physical or cyber space).
See how the customer journey process can be broken down into small components of research? Add some fun to the process and you have a company-wide game that will be of benefit to sales and customer retention statistics.
