Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) enables a business to identify opportunities for growth by understanding customer expectations and perceptions at various touchpoints. It is an effective way for business leaders to look at the entire journey from the customer’s perspective and thus create a visual map to bolster business success.

CJM is a tool that enables a business to serve customers in a more empathetic way by focusing on why they need what they need. It helps business leaders gather actionable information on the pain points and emotional drivers that trigger customers’ buying decisions. These data points and insights further help in making adjustments to the customer experience by transforming interactions into more pleasant and positive engagements.

This blog highlights Customer Journey Mapping’s importance in business planning for both B2B and B2C businesses. Enterprises plan for long-term and short-term growth by taking into consideration their annual financial results and aligning themselves with customers’ interests. This helps to lay a solid foundation for expansion and desired outcomes. To ensure that business plans are achievable, focused and successful, leaders must use CJM as a tool to derive insights from the customer perspective. Takeaways from CJM can provide specifics both for strategic and tactical initiatives.

Our research across industries demonstrates direct impacts on key business results through CJM that includes around 30%-50% of Revenue growth, Customer Retention, enhanced employee engagement, and NPS (Net Promoter Score) improvements.

We further explain how insights from CJM support broad business goals as follows:


1. Revenue Growth
CJM helps business leaders understand the specific needs of customers and thus deliver products or services over and above those expectations. Keeping customers at the heart of the decision-making process improves customer engagement scores phenomenally. This boosts loyalty among existing customers, creating a positive impact on an organization’s recurring revenue.

Over time, it enhances the credibility of the organization, enabling it to do business with conviction and confidence, thus improving brand presence and facilitated increased market share. Revenue growth is a substantial outcome of CJM, as improving market share means that, along with retention of existing customers, more new customers sign up for services / products.


2. Customer Retention
Trust is a critical factor in sustaining any relationship, and through CJM opportunities are highlighted and prioritized to generate system reliability and create an experience that is consistent for the customer across all channels. CJM provides a platform to include the customer’s perspective in business decisions and endeavors. This, along with personalized engagement, enables a positive experience for customers, thus enhancing customer loyalty as they feel truly valued and understood.

The majority of customers choose to stick with a business for ease and convenience. Our research suggests that they are even willing to compromise on price in exchange for a better experience.


3. Operational Excellence
One of the goals of mapping customer issues and experiences is to reduce customer effort by eliminating excess hand-offs, simplifying interactions, reducing turnaround time, and expediting problem resolution. Leaner workflows lead to improved operational efficiencies and productivity.

Our research suggests operational excellence is one of the biggest influencers of Net Promoter Score and CJM supports in enhancing efforts for greater operational excellence through a focus on customers.


4. Employee Engagement
In the process of developing CJM, the entire organization is aligned to a common vision of keeping customers first and foremost for decisions and initiatives. It supports in developing a consistent understanding of customer expectations and needs across the board.

Insights from CJM are translated into a concrete action plan and are shared across relevant functions / departments for necessary actions and focus. These communications result in greater harmony and alignment which is key to improved employee engagement scores.


5. Cost Optimization
Insights from CJM also support cost optimization efforts. Leaner processes and reduced hand-offs allow for reduced leakage in deliverables and thus more efficiency as per expectations of business leaders and the management. There is also improved employee engagement, leading to better productivity and reduced effort / cost on rework. The practice of supporting decision-making through CJM also has a direct effect on reducing customer service costs. Every positive business outcome, be it operational excellence, employee engagement, or customer retention, ultimately results in cost optimization.

Today, only a third of organizations nationwide understand and implement customer journey maps, of which only a fraction makes it a regular part of their practice. Interestingly, our research has shown that organizations that do so regularly also transform into leaders in their markets.

The takeaway: be a change-maker and adopt customer journey mapping to boost business success!

Interested in learning more about how Customer Journey Mapping can help your business? Call us at 1-800-549-7170 or send an email to nitin@goldresearchinc.com

Gold Research is an award-winning Customer Journey Mapping and Research firm with extensive experiences in journey mapping, path-to-purchase research with a special focus in deploying “real-time” and behavioral/neuroscience research formats to gather in-the-moment customer insights.