How do you identify and prioritize the pain points and opportunities in your customer journey?

Customer journey mapping is a powerful technique to understand and improve your customer experience. It helps you visualize how your customers interact with your contact center, identify their pain points and opportunities, and prioritize your actions to enhance their satisfaction and loyalty. In this article, you will learn some customer journey mapping techniques and tools that you can use to create and optimize your own maps.

1 Define your goals and scope

Before you start mapping your customer journey, you need to define your goals and scope. What are you trying to achieve with your map? Who are your target customers and segments? What are the key stages and touchpoints of their journey? How will you measure your success? Having a clear and specific purpose and scope will help you focus your efforts and avoid getting overwhelmed by too much data and complexity.

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Fred Gatty

Organizational Development Consultant, Coach, & Learning Enthusiast dedicated to helping organizations optimize their human capital potential.
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Start by mapping out the different touchpoints a customer has with your business. This includes everything from the initial search for your product or service to the post-purchase follow-up. Once you have identified the pain points and opportunities, prioritize them based on their impact on the customer experience and the business. Focus on addressing the pain points that have the biggest impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Use the insights gathered to develop solutions that address the pain points and improve the overall customer experience. Continuously test and iterate to refine your approach and ensure ongoing improvement in the customer journey. Fred is a thought leader, author, and organizational development consultant.

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2 Create your customer personas

A customer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on real data and insights. It helps you understand your customer's needs, preferences, motivations, and challenges. To create your customer personas, you can use various sources of information, such as surveys, interviews, feedback, analytics, and CRM data. You can also use tools like HubSpot or Xtensio to create and manage your personas. Try to create at least one persona for each customer segment that you want to map.

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3 Map the current state

The current state map captures customer actions, thoughts, emotions, and pain points at each stage and touchpoint of their journey. To map the current state, you can use customer interviews to get a detailed description of their journey, customer observations to take notes of their behaviors, expressions, and reactions, customer feedback to look for patterns and themes that indicate satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and customer analytics to identify trends and gaps that affect the customer experience. Additionally, tools like Miro or Lucidchart can be used to create and visualize the current state map with quotes, images, icons, and colors illustrating the customer journey. Try to make it as detailed and accurate as possible.

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Petra Seals
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It's also important to use your own frontline employees to help map the customer process. They know it intricately because they are a part of it every day. Including your frontline team also has the added benefit of starting the change management process early. Allowing the team to a part of the problem solving making it more likely that they become positive forces for change.

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4 Identify and prioritize the pain points and opportunities

Once you have mapped the current state, you can analyze it to identify and prioritize the pain points and opportunities in your customer journey. Pain points are problems or frustrations that your customer faces at any stage or touchpoint of their journey, while opportunities are chances to improve or enhance the customer experience. To identify and prioritize these pain points and opportunities, you can use techniques such as a customer empathy map, customer effort score, and an impact vs effort matrix. The customer empathy map helps you empathize with your customer by exploring their thoughts, feelings, needs, and wants. The customer effort score measures how easy or difficult it is for your customer to complete a task or achieve a goal with your contact center. Finally, the impact vs effort matrix helps you prioritize your actions by evaluating their impact on your customer experience and your effort to implement them.

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Sandra Braga

Customer Service Specialist | Quality Assurance | Office Administrator | Client Success | Customer Experience | Administrative Analyst
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I agree that when it comes to customer service, the first characteristic of a good attendant is empathy. Without this, you cannot extract important information from the customer to achieve your goal, which is to bring the solution and customer satisfaction. I understand that if you, in addition to empathy, seek the root cause of the customer's problem and then identify if there was a failure and at what time this occurred, it facilitates your action in contacting people and certain related areas to help solve the customer's problem.

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5 Map the future state

The future state map outlines the actions, thoughts, emotions, and outcomes you want to achieve at each stage and touchpoint of your customer journey. To map the future state, you can use techniques such as a customer journey vision statement to guide your map and align stakeholders on your goals; a customer journey storyboard to create a sequence of scenes illustrating customer interactions; and a customer journey blueprint to document the processes, resources, roles, and responsibilities required. You can also use tools like Miro or Lucidchart to create and visualize your future state map. Aim for realism and feasibility by using data, evidence, and feedback to support your decisions.

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6 Test and iterate your map

The final step of customer journey mapping is to test and iterate your map. This means validating your assumptions, measuring your results, and making improvements based on your learnings. To do this, you can use techniques such as customer journey validation, measurement, and optimization. Validation helps you verify if your map matches the reality of your customer experience. Measurement helps you track and evaluate the performance of your map. And optimization helps you improve your map based on your validation and measurement results. You can also use tools like Miro or Lucidchart to make the map as dynamic and adaptable as possible. Consider using feedback loops, data dashboards, or agile methods to update and refine it.

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How do you identify and prioritize the pain points and opportunities in your customer journey?

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1 Define your goals and scope

2 Create your customer personas

3 Map the current state

4 Identify and prioritize the pain points and opportunities

5 Map the future state

6 Test and iterate your map

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