Three key benefits of customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is by no means a novel procedure, but it is an important and valuable one. Journey mapping is one of the most versatile tools for developing a company’s offering, as it allows one to visualise multiple levels of information coherently.

A journey map visualises the experiences of customers in their path towards the desired outcome, often being the purchase of a product or service. It documents the interactions between the company and customer, assisting in displaying the dependencies of the relationship, step-by-step.

In this blog post, I'll go through the three key benefits of journey mapping, with an additional extra benefit that’s often forgotten at the end.

1. Increase customer value by understanding your customer

The secret to developing good services for real users firmly lies in understanding the experiences and emotions of individuals. An empathetic approach increases the likelihood of coming up with solutions that are truly valuable.

Customer journey mapping offers a tool for switching one’s viewpoint from business operations to customers’ experience, providing insights to customers’ feelings and interactions with the company and its service offering.

This change of approach enables shifting focus from internal processes to delivering value to users. When your company has a strong understanding of its customers and their needs, it is considerably easier to adjust the company's offering to create maximal customer value at every step of the customer journey, and trough this, increase revenue streams.

2. Identify operational bottlenecks for quick and effective improvements

Improving customer experience is often viewed as costly and time-consuming. However, customer journey mapping doesn’t only offer ideas on how to improve customer experience, it also reveals procedures and processes that are unnecessarily time-consuming for employees.

Customer journey mapping also allows you to identify costs related to processes that don’t serve the purpose of creating a good customer experience and ways of working that don’t create meaningful customer relationships.

Removing these inefficiencies improves customer experience, but is also highly likely to cut unnecessary costs.

3. Find new valuable opportunities

In addition to finding pain points and fixing broken processes, journey mapping has more to offer: it serves as a tool for recognising opportunities for differentiating from competitors and conquering new opportunities.

This is done via streamlining processes and often also by stripping the offering to its core. This core offering enables securing a place in the market and avoiding sacrificing good customer experience by trying to offer everything to everyone.

After mapping is completed, having some hours of group processing is vital. It is necessary to set a direction and a timeline for actions and responsibilities. This ensures that action is taken and positive alterations are made.

+1 Customer journey begins with employee experience

In especially larger organisations, the variety of employee roles is wide and based on a high level of specialisation. This may lead to processes that are not transparent due to a lack of a common understanding of a shared vision of the company's customer experience and individuals’ roles within it. It can be difficult to avoid silos. In an organisation where it’s not clear what a colleague or neighbouring department does, it can be challenging to create good employee experience.

Customer journey mapping helps to reveal how customers interact and experience interactions with different company representatives. Visualising customers’ experiences enables breaking down unnecessary silos and helps different sections of an organisation to work towards common goals.

Reviewing your company’s customer journey allows you to effortlessly clarify the roles and responsibilities of employees, creating meaning behind assignments and tasks. Generating an increased feeling of purpose can in turn lead to good employee experience and empowerment. And as we all know, happy employees and energetic interactions with customers are an essential part of a good customer experience.

Whether it's your first time or you've reviewed your customer journey in the past, having an up-to-date understanding will help you to create real value to your customers, and through customer value, revenue for your company. Download our free canvas and start working on your customer experience today!