Mapping your customer’s journey can provide you with a clearer understanding of his experience with your organization. Essentially, you produce a visual representation or “story” of the customer’s interactions with your company. Journey mapping yields the following benefits:
It enables you to identify whether (and where) you may be confusing customers.
It provides an understanding of what information you are transmitting to customers at their various points of interaction.
It uncovers stress and failure points on the customer’s typical path.
It reveals where customer information is siloed by your legacy information systems.
It exposes touchpoints whose internal management and ownership are unclear.
It enables you to target limited resources for maximum effect by avoiding duplication and possibly even reducing the amount of time spent interacting with customers.
It helps you create the foundation upon which to deliver an integrated and seamless experience across all the different functional areas of your organization.
It may lead people within different functional areas to actually communicate with each other about what they are delivering to the customer.
Remember, though, that mapping your customer’s journey isn’t an end in itself. It’s the starting point to realizing your customer experience intent.