Customers are one of the most important assets for every business; thus, understanding and serving them well is crucial to the success of your brand, especially when designing a seamless customer journey call center experience.
According to research, 73% of companies that provide an above-average customer experience perform better financially than their competitors.
Likewise, 60% of customer-centric companies are more profitable than those that don't focus on customers. Because of this, businesses employ numerous efforts to understand customer needs continuously, such as feedback, surveys, and social listening.
When you partner with a customer-centric provider like a call center, one other way to drive major improvements to your customer service is by looking into your customer journey maps.
Curious to know what a customer journey map is? Read on and let this infographic discuss everything you need to know about customer journey maps for call centers.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a visible illustration of a customer's journey that helps organizations accurately and easily tell the story of their client's experiences with their brand across all contact points, making it especially valuable in the call center customer journey.
Whether your customers interact with your business through social media, email, or other channels, mapping your customer's journey will provide a visual aid that can ensure no customer slips through the gaps in your operations.
Why is a Customer Journey Map Important?
- It aids in improving the customer experience
Challenges in serving customers are common in any business environment. For example, when you constantly hand off tasks to different divisions within the organisation, it may lead to disjointed processes and result in an inconsistent, frustrating customer experience.
By charting the complete customer experience, your call center has the opportunity to identify the gaps in your services, where you aren't fulfilling expectations or where you're outright turning away prospects and clients. Doing this allows your organisation to deploy resources to provide an optimal customer experience.
- It enhances internal collaboration
Each department has its own metrics to measure. Thus, teams often focus on just their part of the customer journey without minding the business's overall operations. As a result, it becomes challenging to encourage all divisions, call centers included, to collaborate and contribute to improving customer experience holistically.
When you show everyone in the organization the complete customer journey, all members can see their part in that process and how their work affects not only the customer experience but also the output of their colleagues.
By creating a customer journey map, you'll have the opportunity to efficiently utilize internal resources through collaboration, align cross-department goals, and streamline customer initiatives.
- It promotes innovation
Market trends and customer demands in the call center industry constantly change. Understanding your client's current needs is crucial for your business to innovate its processes.
A customer journey map can improve your team's awareness of the state of your call center's customer experience. It can provide valuable insights into customer interactions, enabling your organisation to determine areas for development that will help you design and deliver meaningful customer experiences at the touchpoints they value most.
- It grows a customer-centric culture
Most businesses know that being customer-centric is key to the success of their organization. However, doing so can be challenging to develop and set up among a team.
For call center work, learning about your customer's journey map allows you to connect them to every facet of your organization and provide them with excellent service at all times. Maintaining or improving their satisfaction with your brand can lead to better sales and more advocates, which can elevate your business even in very competitive markets.
- It speeds up operations and builds more brand confidence
While teams may have a laser focus on customers and their needs during the early stages of business planning, there's a tendency that this may fade away once an organization starts implementing strategies and developing more campaigns.
When this happens, monitoring customer journey maps can encourage continuous reflection. Checking on the alignment of your goals during the design process can help your call center team determine whether it's on track or not.
Fortunately, a journey map is a living document that your call center departments can regularly refer to as needed. These maps will provide insights into your customer's needs and act as an objective criterion during development, allowing your teams to move forward faster and more confidently.
How to Make a Customer Journey Map: 5-Step Guide for Call Centers
1. Determine your persona
Once you have understood the benefits of establishing a call center customer journey map, you will need to address the type of customer who will undergo the journey.
Remember: there's no universal customer. Everyone brings their own experiences and personality to the customer journey, so to grasp the multidimensional qualities of your customers, you can utilize personas. Using collected customer data, you can create personas for a new point of view to develop approaches in your call center operations.
Personas are depictions that represent various segments of customers. These will give you valuable insights by summarizing your customers' motivations, goals, behaviors, and interests.
2. Identify your customer phases
Next, you must identify these persona's phases to organize your customer journey map. Each stage will represent the principal goal your customer is attempting to accomplish in their interaction with your call center team. Thus, you must ready with pointers that mirror this process.
Based on your call center's customer personas, you can determine the actions that help customers transition from the consideration stage to the purchasing stage. These include how, when and where they:
- Found your business
- Explored your products or services
- Selected your business over your competitors
- Paid for a product or service from your business
- Kept in touch with your business
3. Enumerate all customer touchpoints
Mapping all touchpoints ensures agents meet customers consistently across channels with the contact center customer journey.
It would be best to consider online and offline touchpoints as well as interactions resulting from marketing campaigns. You can start by listing every social media to paid ad engagements, emails, calls, and live chats to ensure you have all the valuable data on how your customers interact with you.
Afterwards, you must finalize your contact channel list and establish clear communication procedures to ensure your call center agents effectively meet customers at each touchpoint.
4. Find ideal customer interactions
Each customer interaction is an opportunity to deliver remarkable customer experiences and demonstrate that your business deserves customer loyalty. By taking note of exceptional relations in your daily operations, you can determine how your team will be able to do it again.
Operation documentation helps log all your customers' efforts during an exchange, so your team can respond appropriately. Defining their pain points helps provide the proper response at the right time. Recognizing barriers that cause these issues can highlight how your team works to solve them.
Additionally, using a call center spiel with the best approaches for how your agents can most effectively communicate can make all the difference. Summarising all call center tools your agents can leverage to manage customer interactions successfully may bring greater returns for the next exchanges.
5. Ensure interactions end on a positive note
The final step of the customer journey is determining how your call center can resolve every interaction while pleasing the customer.
Your organization should track and analyze metrics to know what works and what doesn't. It pays to monitor how well your agents recognize customer moods and how fast they meet customer needs during the customer journey. Studying this can help retain current patrons and even attract new clients, which is a major win for the business.
Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices for Call Centers
- Create journey map objectives
Clearly define the objectives of your customer journey map. Knowing whether your journey map aims to enhance the buyer experience or establish a new product or service will help your organization correctly utilize and maximize its benefits.
- Conduct customer surveys
Feedback is a must for any development. For call centers, it would help to survey your customers and directly ask what it's like to do business with your company. These efforts will give your team a more precise picture of the customer's journey, which you can then use to adjust your processes accordingly.
- Determine frequently asked questions
Occasionally, customers don't understand their specific pain points and rely on a feeling to know that something isn't working for them. In the call center industry, your team should be able to determine frequently asked questions to respond to their needs quickly. It can also identify areas in your service where confusion easily arises, which your group can resolve immediately.
- Create a journey map for each persona
Demographics, psychographics, behaviour, preferences and many more can determine how an individual interacts with your business and makes purchasing decisions. It's best to group overarching personalities into buyer personas and create a tailored customer journey map for each one.
- Update journey maps after every launch
The customer's buying process is affected when you launch a new product or service. Even an upgrade in your operations, such as adding a chatbot or a virtual assistant, may require a significant adjustment for them. As such, you should review the customer journey map before and after implementing changes in your operations or offers for a smooth transition.
- Make the map accessible to cross-functional teams
Call centers can't maximize customer journey maps' value if they're only accessible to one or two departments. Make the most of this work and gather cross-functional teams to provide feedback and ideas. Afterwards, make the map copies accessible to each group, so they always keep the customer in mind during their operations.
A Guiding Hand During a Customer's Journey
Producing an accurate customer journey map is essential for all businesses, especially call centers that deal with customers daily. Putting yourself in your customer's shoes and understanding their experiences when doing business with you will undoubtedly create positive ripple effects throughout your company.
By knowing how to map their journey effectively, your brand can create valuable changes and more effective strategies to improve your business operations and, in turn, customer experience.
If you want to partner with a call center in the Philippines that can cater to your customers, wherever in the journey they may be, check out Select VoiceCom! Contact us today to learn more about our professional and affordable services to gain a competitive advantage in your field!