How Customer Experience Mapping Can Help Improve Service

Customer experience mapping is one of the most useful techniques to analyze the quality of customer experience from customers’ perspective. The analysis takes into account all interactions taking place between clients and the company, starting from the point when first contact is made, leading up to after-sales services. For businesses, it is important to understand how consumers make decisions. Experience mapping helps breakdown customer interaction processes in order to help managers understand and create better experiences.

Creating Customer Experience Maps

The first step in creating maps involves throrougly studying consumer behavior and interactions . Managers must first identify all touchpoints and channels being used to interact with clients. Ideally, a large sample size is selected that represents customers from varying demograhics. The information can be collected from various sources including call logs, surveys, personal interviews, feedback comments, customer conversations on social media platforms and focus groups. Many companies have successfully intergrated the use of big data in order to collect information for customer experience maps. Once this information is collected, it has to be processed into meaningful insight that can help managers create a customer journey model. Conventionally, the experience map is created into a visually appealing story containing a timeline, touchpoints and other milestones in the customer journey. It is important that the experience map is created from the customers‘ presepctive.

Experience Maps Help Analyze and Innvoate

Experience maps are designed to study and improve service experience, they help managers completly dissect the whole experience into distinct phases that can be studied and analyzed individually. It helps managers create a roadmap for better experience in the future. Moreover, it creates opportunities for new idea generation and innovation. The technique uses qualitative and quantitative data, hence providing multidimensional insight into the service process. By taking all market segments and demographics into account, the technique offers a promising analysis and understanding of the problem areas. Experience maps enable managers to send out a message to all departments for creating consistency. With the help of maps, complex customer service procedures can be illustrated in flowcharts and timelines. This is extremely helpful for managers, since a better understanding of current procedures is likely to assist them to design improved service protocols in the future.

Boosts Collaboration Between Departments and Teams

Experience mapping not only helps managers but also enables CSRs to pinpoint loopholes or weaknesses in service delivery. Managers can use these maps to effectively plan and coordinate with their team members on future course of action. Additionally, it also aids communication across departments in an attempt to win their support to provide quality experiences. Through the use of experience maps, delivering better service becomes a company-wide goal as opposed to something only customer service departments look into.

Promotes Continuous Improvement

The process of customer experience mapping encourages managers to continuously find ways to improve experience. As visual illustrations are available for managers to analyze, it enables them to highlight the pain points for clients, and effectively coordinate with other departments to address shortcomings. Experience mapping also provides a way for managers to assess the current level of service and analyze it by taking internal feedback. This process makes it easier for managers to involve frontline representatives in an attempt to create new solutions for creating better client experience.