Customer Journey mapping is a popular and effective tool that many companies are using to understand their customer’s experiences, pain points and touchpoint satisfaction.  Most companies love the fact that they can:

• Show the customer experience from an end-to-end perspective in a single document – helping create the alignment across the organization that silo’s prevent and customers crave
• Tell the customer story in an interactive manner and highlight the pain points they experience – and when/where they experience them
• Use customer-driven imagery and verbatim quotes to create stories that have longer lasting impacts than a powerpoint chart.

Most companies that use customer research in developing their maps use qualitative research techniques to capture customer sentiment – focus groups, interviews, mobile ethnographic research, etc.  We totally support this and use these to generate critical insights and deep customer understanding. 

However we were surprised to learn that over 90% of journey maps have NO quantitative information in them.  The impact of this is significant – and we think one of the 2 leading reasons why CX isn’t respected in the C-Suite.

The C-Suite is “wired for numbers” – and numbers are the language they use to make strategic and operation decisions and set priorities.  “What gets measured gets managed” and if there are no numbers, it is just a nice story. 

Quantitative data can come from:

• Journey data – what % of customers experience specific activities or pain points
• VoC data – satisfaction at touchpoints, overall customer loyalty and customer retention
• Quant research – differences in journey perception by demographic groups and customer segments, what % of customers are triggered to make a purchase from advertising vs. word-of-mouth, etc.
• Support analytics – trends and % of different types of challenges, time to resolve and cost to serve metrics
• Customer financial metrics – customer lifetime value for different customers and experiences

With quantitative data, the C-Suite and other senior leaders can:

• Focus on the 20% of the opportunities that generate 80% of the value
• Dimensionalize the differences between problems encountered
• Tell the story with a higher degree of specificity to their colleagues
• Understand the business impact of changes

Without quantitative information customer journey maps looks “soft and fluffy” – not the hard-hitting business imperatives that C-Suites respond to.   We find that proactive customer journey management delivers real results:

• Revenue growth of 30% – 50%
• Retention improvements of 30 points
• NPS increases of 30-50 points

Call 1-800-549-7170 or send an email to nitin@goldresearchinc.com for a free consultation on this topic.

Gold Research is an award-winning Customer Journey Management firm with extensive experiences in B2C and B2B 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.