The need of Customer Journey Mapping in Contact Centers
The point at which an individual decides to buy or purchase a company’s offerings, he or she turns into a customer of that firm. This marks the beginning of the customer’s journey. Regular engagement and long-term relationships are the other two cornerstones of this journey.
Organizations looking to improve the experience of their customer can optimize their initiative by documenting this journey through the customer’s own perspective. Such a formal documentation is usually described as the Customer Journey Map and can be an ideal tool to comprehend every detail about the customers. It can be used to identify how the customers have reached that specific point in the journey and what is that they want to achieve. It can also play a vital role in improving the company’s own schemes to offer a better experience and turn them into loyal advocates of its brand(s).
While a contact center, the primary communication hub of an enterprise, usually assumes that a customer’s journey starts when he are she contacts it for the first time, the journey mapping can indicate the true beginning, along with the various touch-points the customer has already gone through before reaching them. It can be effectively used to offer a unique and enhanced experience to the customer, as the contact center personnel are now aware of the customer’s perspective.
In order to ensure the focus remains on the customer, all the sections of the contact center can add to the journey mapping process and make it available to everyone. Every aspect of the road map depicts a vital element about the customers and their behavioral traits as well as their requirements. The factors such as customer loyalty, and brand-inclination would be highly critical for the management level. These factors can be addressed by using the right insights derived from the constant interaction with the customer.
The management could also consider various other critical factors such as optimization of process-flow, effective use of analytics, and quality training for improving the performance and efficiency of the staff. Discussed below are some of the effective ways of utilizing the customer journey map in contact centers.
Eliminating the gaps
It must be ensured that the customer’s journey has to be seamless and unspoiled by disparities. Such gaps could arise due to various reasons such as unnecessary transferring of customers from one department to the other, or even one touch-point to the other. For instance, the customer who wants to receive the support through chat is compelled to make a phone call for trivial reasons. Another such disparity could arise due to the shift from one channel to the other. This usually happens when the customers have to move from the social networking site to the company’s website to complete a rather simple task, which could eventually lead to unwanted complexities for them.
By using the customer journey mapping effectively, contact centers can minimize the need of transferring their customers across departments, devices, channels or touch points. This would not just reduce the hassle from the customer’s perspective but also from the operational point of view.
Developing the analytical blueprint
The customer journey mapping can also serve as an efficient analytical blueprint to ensure the focus remains on the customer. The thorough analysis of interactions with the customer can help conceptualize a consistent experience across all channels and touch points. The management can also identify the vital metrics that can be helpful in measuring the satisfaction levels. Once done, these key performance indicators should be maliciously aligned with the aptitude of the frontline agents as well as with the mid-management profiles. For instance, social media can be an effective source for various insights. However, identifying the right KPIs is important, as high number of clicks and lengthy dwell times might not always indicate contented customers, and could well be the signs of confused customers. To ensure these analytics lead to right insights, care should be taken to eliminate any confusion and misconceptions the customers might come across.
Maximizing Operational efficiency
An efficient journey mapping convention can have a major impact on the overall process flow in a positive way. It can be used at varied levels to make the necessary adjustments and maximize agility in the process flow. Also, following the journey map consistently can reduce the need for massive process overhauls, which might otherwise be needed to eliminate rigid bottlenecks in the process. With a journey map in place, the core focus is always on creating a process flow that feeds off from customer’s perspective rather than anything else. For instance, it can help find the solutions to rather complex issues such as the identifying the best channel for certain types of customers or level of autonomy needed by frontline staff to maximize resolutions in the first attempt. This would not just improve the operational efficiency but also lead to increased transparency in the contact centers.
Once the customer journey mapping is analytically and logically conceptualized, it is important to share it with all the staff members. Thus, in their desire to maximize the customer experience, contact centers can effectively utilize the journey map to identify the loophole if any, which could be highly beneficial in laying down the operational as well as decision support framework.
Key Takeaways
- Organizations looking to improve the experience of their customers can optimize the initiative through the customer journey mapping.
- The customer journey mapping is a vital depiction of the beginning of a customer’s journey followed by interactions, engagement and long-term relationship.