Customer Journey Mapping: What Everyone Should Know

Imagine you are coming home from the airport after a nice, relaxing vacation. On the way home, the airlines you just flew with sends you a survey to gauge your experience with the flight. You give them a mixed review, that though the flight itself was fine, you had problems with retrieving your luggage from the baggage carousel. After sending off your survey response, you think no more about the customer service aspect of your trip. But that’s not the whole story.

The idea of customer journey mapping is that a business wants to understand every touchpoint a customer has with their business, to understand all opportunities for improving the customer experience with the business, thus driving repeat customer behavior and increasing customer loyalty. So, in this scenario of using an airline for travel, the airline would want all the relevant data about how you, as a customer, engaged with their business and their entire market of air travel.

By understanding which website you visited to buy your flights, what aspects of the flights available mattered to you while booking, and how the check-in process went for you, they’re able to gauge the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. By getting touchpoints of feedback along your trip, from waiting to board to getting to your destination, the airlines can understand opportunities for creating memorable customer experiences. And by understand your outlook on the airlines after your whole trip, they can gauge whether you’ll return to the same airlines for another trip or whether there’s any action they can take from a customer success perspective in order to improve their standing in your books.

Customer Journey Mapping in terms of Business

Customer Journey Mapping, or CJM, is about gathering all that data in order to not only understand a customer’s perception and rating of your business, but to understand all of the interactions they had with your business and how each of those interactions went.

Gathering this volume of data from your current or potential customers is a huge undertaking, let alone combing through all that data to understand the whole picture of the customer journey from it. In the past, businesses would stop at gathering customer experience data, from ratings, comments boxes, and reviews, and use that data alone to continue to make business decisions about their customers. Now, all industries are experiencing a shift in how businesses connect to customers. To succeed in the era of customer empowerment, companies must find ways to connect to customers and undergo digital transformation. From customer experience management (CXM) to customer relationships management (CRM) to customer journey management (CJM), businesses are taking on different viewpoints on how best to understand and thus improve customer experience.

Understanding each aspect of customer experience can help drive growth, but that comprehensive view of the whole customer journey is the most effective way of understanding all the opportunities available for the business. And we’re not the only ones saying that. The Better Business Bureau recently wrote that “When you optimize each of these points, you provide the customer with a better overall experience. A better customer experience increases retention, therefore increasing your overall sales.” Understanding and harnessing the data of each touchpoint a customer has with your business just gives you more chances to make an impact in their shopping and decision-making, so that they remember your business and come back for more.

Your Personal Customer Journey Mapping Experience

At OSG, we have technology and solutions designed for understanding the whole picture and journey of your customers. Our solution, OSG o360, is designed for to map out your current and future customers’ journeys to give you insights into opportunities for your business growth. By understanding how customers find and understand your business, what matters to them about your products, and their perception of your brand before, during, and after their transactions with you, you can plan smarter for the future.