Many companies treat Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) as a major undertaking, and for good reason. For those who have never done CJM, a first-time journey map can provide valuable insight into how customers experience the brand. It brings employees across the enterprise to a greater awareness of customer needs. It highlights major customer pain points and creates focus for improvement efforts.
Once companies complete their CJM project, many feel they can check the box and say they are good for 3-5 years. However, that would be a mistake.
With the pace of technology evolution, customer expectations are changing very rapidly, as are companies’ abilities to improve the customer experience. While the customer journey map may not need an overhaul quickly, it should, by nature, be a living thing that evolves along with customer needs and wants.
But there are even more compelling reasons to do more frequent journey mapping.
It’s about investing in CX and getting a measureable ROI
When implemented well, targeted CJM efforts identify opportunities to align customer needs with business needs. After all, undiscovered pain points and frustrations can drive customers away from a company and devastate the company’s business outcomes.
Sometimes, opportunities to use CJM for company improvement can be identified through customer feedback. In other cases, they are found by exploring the root cause for poor business outcomes, such as account churn, reduced spending or increased cost to serve.
Take, for instance, a client in the insurance business that was seeing high attrition rates for customers of retiring agents. Their finance team calculated the three-year cost of this higher attrition rate at over $100 million. After uncovering the root cause and customer needs through a CJM process, this organization changed its processes. Retention was improved dramatically, resulting in recovery of over half the costs from higher attrition. No one needs a calculator to understand that the ROI on this journey mapping effort was huge. (See more on the story here.)
While not every customer journey mapping exercise identifies an opportunity that results in a return the size of the example above, strategies that result from targeted CJM often have a worthwhile ROI. If your company can generate ROI for targeted CJM efforts that exceeds 500-1000%, why would you not spin up new journey maps on a continuous basis?
Targeted journey mapping not only creates alignment between a company and its customers that results in mutual benefit – it is also a way to transform a company step by step into a more customer-centric organization.
CJM helps you create an investment portfolio for customer centricity. Just like any other investing decision, you invest in the opportunities with a strong payoff and a reasonable chance of success.
What do you think? Is customer journey mapping worth it? How do you even determine what major investments to make in CX? What kind of planning do you do to ensure its success? Comment below.
Read more about Customer Journey Mapping on the CX Café:
Five Steps to Uncovering the Real Customer Experience Journey
Walled Gardens and Customer Journey Mapping
Customer Journey Map redefined: Customer Journey Management
