Journey mapping – getting to know your customers’ challenges and bringing value to your company

Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog

For a while now, the business environment has not been the classical one we know from traditional marketing and administration books. That’s because the overall landscape has changed for good due to the internet and digitization of things and processes inside the business and consumer worlds. As a result, we now have an unprecedented amount of customer touchpoints and ways for customers to explore, interact, and connect with your business. That’s exactly what Connected Marketing does for your brand. By empowering your business with data-driven solutions that will improve your customer activation and help delight them with a unique experience, Connected Marketing provides the tools to extract the most of this connected world.

And everything starts with your customer journey. Customer journeys are the result of the experience that your brand delivers to your customer. Every business has a journey and your customers will experience more than one during their time with your brand.

The key to understanding who your customer is and what experiences they make when they interact with your brand is to map those journeys. Mapping journeys is a fun and impactful way to improve your understanding of what needs and pains your customers have. Additionally, you gain insight into the level of experience you are delivering to them right now.

In a nutshell, to start the journey mapping process, you need to work in four main pillars:

What type of customer journey are you dealing with?
Who is your customer? Do you know him/her?
What does the journey look like today? What is the level of experience you are delivering to your customers in relation to the specific touchpoints?
What should the journey look like in the future? In an ideal world? What would the perfect journey be for your customer and what is the level of experience you aim to deliver?

These four points are the main drivers of the journey-mapping process and, with them, you can direct your team to design the best possible journey so your customer can have a unique experience during their interactions with your brand.

The first point is to identify the type of journey. Are we talking about a transactional journey or a relational journey? That is important in order to check the level of complexity involved with the mapping process and how the processes will be connected thereafter.

The next thing to do is to create an empathy map of your customer. It’s time to really get to know the customer. What wishes, needs, and pains are involved? How does the customer communicate, behave, and think? Can we identify any patterns? It is fundamental to put your customer at the center of every decision and to be able to see and feel the same as the customer during their journey.

Next, we do the actual mapping of the journey. This is the time to put your team and the others that have access to the journey in a room and to contuct a dynamic mapping process. Establish the beginning and end of the journey you want to map and all the touchpoints in between. Every interaction point that exists in this journey, physical or digital, must be mapped here. Then, you and your team will discuss how your customers interact with each touchpoint. Are they successfull? Did they like the interaction? What is the takeaway message you leave them when their journey ends?

The final part is to identify your current journey. By imagining an ideal world with no limitations (money, time, resources, etc.) you should build, with your team, the optimal journey for your customer – the best journey for them with the ideal level of experience you want to deliver . It’s a brainstorm and ideation process.

At the end, you should have a clear map of your current situation and a clear map of your vision (where your brand wants to go). The next step is to implement MVP methodologies and start improving your journey!

Get in touch with our experts to find out more about journey mapping as part of the Capgemini’s Connected Marketing and the ecosystem approach of Connected Marketing.

Download our ‘put your customer first with connected marketing‘ whitepaper to learn more.

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