Customer experience map, customer funnel, roadmap – so many terms. But they all want the same thing: To give you the tools to digitize your company in a customer-centric way. If you succeed, you’ll be rewarded with a treasure at the end of your journey…
So that Black Friday does not become Black Monday
At the end of the year, shopping mood prevails everywhere, also in companies – where to go with the remaining budget and what do I park for next year? Many CTOs feel the same way – they quickly buy a CRM, or a MAM, DAM, PIM… It is often forgotten that the new software must fit into the existing infrastructure and architecture of the company. This results in heterogeneous software landscapes and IT ecosystems that reflect the complexity of companies, the needs of their various departments, subsidiaries in different countries, but also the individual preferences of individual decision makers.
Inside-out? Tastes only with sushi
The fragmentation, heterogeneity, and sometimes sheer chaos that reigns within a company are thus externalized. The customer finds himself in an experience that is not determined by his needs, but by the constraints of the company: a customer experience nightmare. The means of choice is therefore called outside-in – bringing the needs of external target groups into the organization and making them the maxim of all actions.
Inside-out: tastes as sushi, but can’t be a customer strategy.
Customer-centric digitization à la carte
How do you put the customer at the center of your company? How do you orient your products, processes and your corporate image to their needs rather than yours? The obvious answer: You must first understand your customers. That’s why companies often conduct time-consuming, lengthy customer surveys and target group analyses that eat up time and resources. By the time you reach a conclusion months later, the market has already moved on and your customers‘ needs have changed. Our recommendation from many years of consulting experience: better ask your sales and marketing, i.e. the people who deal with a large number of your customers on a daily basis. They know their needs best. To make this knowledge quickly available, either individual interviews or joint workshops are the means of choice. It makes sense to get external help from professionals to avoid distorting the results.
The result is recorded in a customer experience map that depicts the entire customer value chain. All points of contact of interested parties and customers with your company and your products are recorded. The goal is to create a consistent, comprehensive, and positive customer experience that seamlessly integrates all communication channels. And that generates purchases, repurchases, and referrals.
Customer experience maps easily break any format when printed out.
Most companies are surprised by how many different touchpoints they serve and how little these are often coordinated. Drawing the customer experience map together is like a treasure hunt. The paths are winding, many riddles have to be solved on the way to the goal, but at the end there is the reward. And in the future, you’ll be able to find the path you’ve so painstakingly found even without a map.
Once the customer experience map has been drawn, its optimization can be planned concretely and in detail. This includes prioritizing the touchpoints and tapping into activation and commercialization potential. This creates a „big picture“ of how customers can be served even better.
Marketers with funnel vision
Another approach to customer-centric digitization is the analysis of the customer funnel: on their customer journey, customers pass through various phases, from initial attention to purchase conclusion to recommendation. The funnel in which they move becomes narrower and narrower. Their behavior is tracked and the performance of the touchpoints is measured. The customer funnel is created by storing the touchpoints of the customer experience map with performance data – on traffic, conversions, and sales. Along this funnel, optimization potential is thus made visible, which can be raised through growth hacking by placing targeted call-to-actions (CTAs). In addition, bottlenecks can be identified and bypassed.
As a result, the customer experience and the customer funnel derived from it form the basis for ideas that lead to more traffic, more conversions, and thus more sales.
For marketers, the customer funnel has a hypnotic effect – especially when enriched with data.
Space for new ideas
How can the customer experience be improved? This question, just like the joint consideration of the customer experience map and customer funnel, gives rise to a large number of ideas that are noted down as „user stories“ and provided with an estimate of the effort required. Each story comprises a smaller task that can be implemented by an agile team within a sprint of one to two weeks. From our project experience, 700 user stories are not uncommon, depending on how fine-grained the approach is. These stories are grouped into „epics“, which are collections of stories dedicated to one topic. Companies need one to three months to implement an epic. The highest level is initiatives, which are again a collection of epics. Initiatives require several quarters to a year to implement.
Roadmap – the X marks the spot
Since not all user stories can be implemented immediately, they must be prioritized. A comparison with the customer experience map and customer funnel helps here. Which touchpoints deliver the best performance, which adjustments achieve the greatest improvements in the customer experience? This is how the roadmap is created for all measures that are target-oriented for the customer-centric digitization of your company. Like a treasure map, it shows you the way to the best possible experience for your customers and helps you to exploit your sales potential in the long term.
So …
Aligning your business with your customers, their needs and their product experience is a complex, lengthy process that never ends. The right tools and experts can help you make the right decisions and necessary course corrections. The key is not which tool you start with, but that you start. It’s worth the effort – there is no greater treasure than customer satisfaction for any company.
About the Author
Arne König is Content Marketing Manager at yawave, a content suite that allows content to be centrally managed and shared via omni-channel publishing. He has been working in content marketing and as an author of trade books and novels for 20 years.