Personalized Customer Journey Maps Online... Did I mention It’s Free?
Posted by Steve Elliott on Mon, Jun 20, 2011
Before I direct you to the free stuff I want to get you thinking about the importance of Customer Journey Mapping and how the practice could benefit a company in times of crisis. I was thinking about this last week as I read an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “More Target Than Tar-zhay”.
A series of recent stumbles at Target has many retail experts questioning whether the discount retailer is “losing its cachet”. Target made it trendy to shop for low-priced designer clothing and housewares while also picking up detergent, popcorn and socks. The WSJ cites that the company has been struggling to gain back its pre-recession sales strength.
Target rings up more than 40% of their sales on these “cachet” items like home goods, decorations and stylish apparel. I have personally spent my fair share of cash at Target over the years. After furnishing my college apartment and my office at work I am probably running a 40 / 60 lifetime ratio.
The origin of all the speculation is the ratio of cachet items to more practical items sold at Target has drastically shifted over the past 18 months. Shoppers are “stocking up on toilet paper and foodstuffs, but the stores are having a hard time enticing customers to spend money on stylish clothing and home goods.” This is important to understand because the shift affects Target’s profit margin and may be an indicator that Target is now viewed differently by their customers. Target could be in the midst of a subtle brand shift that will have a substantial impact on their bottom line over time. So how does Target determine what is really going on?
As a disclaimer I have no inside knowledge of Target’s process so I don’t know if they have a formal Voice of the Customer program. I would venture to guess that Target hasn’t lost its cheap chic factor but rather that people’s buying patterns have temporarily shifted. My presumption is that in tough economic times people do not buy as many sweet shag rugs and frilly lamps if they are forced to pay 90 bucks for a tank of gas. That is my hypothesis but how do the decision makers at Target find out exactly what is going on with customers and their buying patterns at each phase of the journey? How do you get beyond the speculation based simply on financial results? How do they analyze the customer experience at each stage of customer interaction across multiple channels and then break down what is really going on?
That brings me back to customer journey mapping.
Any company in crisis mode or looking to improve their customer satisfaction could seriously benefit from a dynamic visual to help management to see customer experience trends in real-time. A static journey map could be useful but a dynamic journey map could be especially valuable in a time of crisis. The ability to quickly get the pulse of your customers sentiment using an interactive journey map with live data is a real game changer.
At Vovici we have been working to take our customer experience wheel and make it dynamic. The goal is to let customers add their personalized journey maps by industry vertical using a data driven visual presentation. Once the process is mapped it is easy to link in the latest results of each listening post in the process. Try clicking the images in this post to view a process wheel with results linked in at key stages in the journey map. This creates a powerful visual by providing a macro view of the experience and also creates a platform to design a better process. This visual can bring together the many ways you gather feedback like VOC, VOE, EFM, Call Centers, Social Listening, and more. This is accomplished by strategically designing listening posts across many channels at key steps in the journey map, feeding in the live results and taking action based on the big picture.
A management team equipped with the latest direct, indirect and inferred feedback scores mapped back to their customer journey map would be much better equipped to react in a crisis (real or perceived). Interactive maps can be used to efficiently and continuously target company resources to improve customer loyalty and satisfaction.
We developed the visual online mapping tool pictured above to facilitate innovation through the mapping process and to get companies engaged in journey mapping. We are looking for volunteers to participate with us. This is a great way to get a cool visual map of your process in action. Nancy Porte (@nporte on twitter) and I plan to work with a select set of companies in July. By the end of the experiment these participants will have a branded process map showing all of their listening posts, moments of truth and even satisfaction and loyalty statistics. Your interactive journey maps will be dynamically generated through a wizard process. It is fast and easy to do. If your company wants to participate post a comment below and simply say “I want to play”. If you are selected to participate you will hear from us shortly!