How to Eliminate Friction in Your Customer Journey

What Is Friction in the Customer Journey?

When most folks think of friction, they probably think of middle school science class. But if you’re a customer experience professional, “friction” is probably a term you’ve heard whenever your teammates talk about reducing customer churn. Within that context, friction refers to points in the brand experience that can have a long-term impact on customers’ relationship with a business. Friction may even cause some customers to quit a brand altogether.

Why Is It Important to Reduce Friction in the Customer Journey?

Did you know that the average business today loses between 10-30% of its customers annually?

Additionally, research by Carlson Marketing shows that U.S. companies lose 50% of their customers every five years. Multiply the amount of churning customers by the lifetime value (LTV) of the average customer at your organization and losing customers at this rate means losing millions of dollars!

Because of this, it’s essential that brands have an experience program in place that can detect friction, help experience professionals understand the problem(s) creating that friction, and correct them. The result is both a meaningfully improved experience and saved customer relationships. So, without further ado, let’s go over how your organization can ensure it’s eliminating friction across your customer journey.

How Can You Eliminate Friction in the Customer Journey?

#1: Understand The Moments That Matter

Like we said earlier, an important part of reducing friction is knowing about and understanding the moments that matter to customers. Brands can achieve this understanding by mapping out a few of their most important customer journeys. Learning about key touchpoints is one of the best ways to become aware of problems as they arise.

One of the most impactful methods to identify these moments and then reduce friction across your customer journey is InMoment’s Touchpoint Impact Mapping. Touchpoint Impact Mapping is a innovative way of understanding the moments that matter to customers. It is unique because it is based entirely on comment data drawn from customer feedback, ensuring a more accurate view of the customer’s memory of their experience. This creates an emotional picture of the journey that highlights what is most important to customers and also allows our clients to prioritize those moments that matter most to their customers.

Watch this video to hear how banking giant, Virgin Money, leveraged Touchpoint Impact Mapping to identify a key friction point and then improve its customer onboarding experience!

How Virgin Money Eliminates Friction in It’s Customer Journey

What’s more, once you’ve identified those high-impact moments, you can use this strategy to immediately begin solving those problems and expediently reduce journey friction. Understanding touchpoints and their drawbacks enables organizations to come up with solutions, implement them, and listen to see how they’re working. Experience practitioners can then point to those changes, and their improvements, when proving their program’s worth.

#2: Talk to Employees

Research has even shown that a highly engaged workforce increases profitability by 21%! So, getting your customers’ take on an experience is clearly important, but many brands, in their rush to do so, overlook chatting with their employees about customer journeys as well. Employees, especially frontline ones, can provide extremely powerful and eye-opening intel about your brand’s experience. How can brands access and leverage that?

The best way for brands to get their employees’ perspective is by letting them constantly submit feedback and ideas in real-time. Rather than relying on, say, an annual survey, organizations should instead utilize experience platforms that give employees a constant voice. This also further allows brands to learn about, and act upon, problems as they emerge in real-time instead of too far down the road for the customer’s liking.

Want to learn more about how employees can help you decrease friction in the customer journey and grow customer loyalty and value? Check out this infographic!

#3: Keeping Tabs on Your Customer Journey

That notion of being constantly aware of journey friction as it happens is at the heart of keeping it suppressed as much as possible. Surveys are important, but this dynamic is another reason why they’re insufficient for reducing journey friction by themselves—a constantly possible problem demands a constantly active solution. Organizations simply cannot achieve that level of awareness otherwise.

Another element of getting a full picture of your experience is leveraging data sources outside of surveys. And that’s going to become crucial in the next few years. Why? Because only 19% of U.S. Gen Z customers are likely to complete a traditional survey.

Instead of relying solely on direct surveys, brands can do this by combining survey listening with other sources of data, like your employees’ perspectives, and putting it against a backdrop of financial and operational information. This approach creates a 360-degree view of your customers and experience, an understanding that your organization can leverage to reduce friction, boost retention, and create a meaningfully improved experience.

Want to learn more about improving customer retention? We just published an entire eBook on the subject—click here to check it out!

How to Translate a B2B Customer Journey Map into a Survey Strategy

Creating a customer journey map is the first step toward designing a superior customer experience (CX) that drives end-user growth. Rather than rushing in and narrowly focusing on a single touchpoint to measure success, a customer journey map helps you evaluate the journey as a whole—providing a bird’s-eye view of the experience your brand delivers. 

So You’ve Already Mapped Out the Customer Journey! What’s Next? 

The urgent question then becomes, how do you take that big picture view and start asking your customers about their experience? 

To move forward, you need to figure out which specific touchpoints you want to study, which metrics you want to gather, what questions you want to ask, and which channels are the most effective to collect that data.

Your customers are more than willing to tell you about the bottlenecks in their journey, but you’ll want to be thoughtful in your approach. So, before you start sending out surveys, think through your voice of customer (VoC) strategy using your journey map as a guide.

That’s what this post is all about. It will help you develop a strategy for gathering feedback at key points within your customer journey so you can take actionable steps toward optimizing your customer experience. Now let’s get started!

When in the Customer Journey Should You Ask for Feedback?

Before you begin asking away, it’s important to determine which pivotal touchpoints (otherwise known as make-or-break moments) within the B2B customer journey are ideal times to gather feedback.

Just to clarify, we are giving you a general idea of when to ask these questions, but this is not a turnkey solution. Every company’s customer journey map looks different, and your approach to asking the right questions at the right time will differ. 

In fact, in all likelihood, you already have some sense of where the bottlenecks are in your customer journey and what needs improvement, so trust your intuition there. 

And if you’ve got any doubt? The following touchpoints represent good places to start. 

1. Onboarding Completion

Why is onboarding a make-or-break moment? Signing up for a new service always takes effort because you’re asking new customers to open their minds, learn about your product, and make a change by integrating your product into their lives. The more seamless you can make this stage, the more likely you are to gain a loyal customer.

2. Support Interaction

Why are support interactions make-or-break moments? We often think of customer support as its own thing, but it’s a vital part of the customer journey. The bane of product-led growth is friction, and by definition, a support interaction is a point of friction. No matter how usable your product is, some people will struggle with it. 

Asking for feedback after a support case is closed will give you feedback on how your support team is doing. This will help determine resources support may need to speed customers through this touchpoint, identify bugs and usability issues, and draw attention to possible feature improvements.  

3. Product Experience (Usually In-App)

Why is product use a make-or-break moment? This feedback will tell you what’s working as anticipated and what needs to be reconsidered. Customer feedback can and should influence your roadmap and guide the prioritization of development resources. Plus, SaaS companies are always trying out new features, and there’s no better time to survey your customers about those features than at the very moment they’re using them.

4. First Experience of Value and/or Pre-Renewal (Loyalty Check)

Why is the incomplete and/or pre-renewal experience a make-or-break moment? After a user has been up and running for a bit, they should be experiencing the benefits of using your product and services. It’s time to make sure they are. Asking for feedback at this touchpoint is meant to surface all kinds of things about their relationship with you (that you won’t hear after a support interaction, for example). Product, service, pricing, you name it. A survey response might give you the opportunity to fix an issue you didn’t know about and retain their business. And make sure to ask again pre-renewal to make sure your relationship is still on the right track.

How Might Your Approach Vary Depending on Your Business Model? 

Let’s say you’ve got a self-serve product where customers get started quickly and they can see your product’s value upfront. In that case, it makes sense to ask the loyalty question (Net Promoter Score) early on in the customer journey because they’ve reached a point where they understand your value proposition. 

On the other hand, if you send in consultants who spend weeks or more helping your enterprise users get up to speed with your product, you’ll probably want to wait a while to send that first NPS survey.

Just make sure that, whenever you ask the question, it makes sense to do so at that time. For example, asking someone how they feel about a new feature (PSAT) when they’re not currently using that feature makes no sense. Instead, ask them about the feature using an in-app survey, while they’re engaging the product. And of course, you wouldn’t want to ask someone about a support experience they had weeks earlier. Use common sense and put yourself in the customers’ shoes to deliver surveys that flow with their experience. 

Remember: Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day, and Neither Is a Mature CX Program 

Companies don’t generally implement voice of customer surveys at multiple journey points all at once—they roll out gradually, sometimes over 2-3 years. They might do one, then add another 6+ months later. A helpful tip is to start with the touchpoint that will give you the biggest bang for your buck in terms of learning, retention, and driving Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

So What Questions Do You Ask?

When gathering voice of customer data, the most common feedback questions revolve around the things that drive product-led growth—like ease of use, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty. With this in mind, the following metrics can help you assess these elements at key touchpoints: Customer Effort Score, Customer or Product Satisfaction, and Net Promoter Score. You’ll typically want to follow the rating question with an open-ended one asking the customer to explain the reasoning behind their score.

Now, you may be wondering: why not simply make up your own customer feedback questions tailored to your business, products, and customer experience? It may be tempting, but these metrics will give you a benchmark and scores that you can monitor over time to track whether you’re improving. 

Need a Few More Reasons to Use Standard Metrics? 

It’s much easier to get internal buy-in when using tried-and-true metrics employed by companies around the world. People can waste countless hours arguing over what questions to ask, but using established metrics can instantly end that debate. 

These metrics are also extendable and extensible. In other words, you can extend the same questions to different products and features without reinventing the wheel. This makes it easier to roll out a CX program across a portfolio of products and brands. 

And finally, these established metrics will stand the test of time, surviving personnel changes. Simply put, it’s an evergreen survey strategy.

Note: If you’re not 100% familiar with each of these surveys, don’t worry—here is a primer on how these CX metrics all work together. 

What are the Metrics You Ought to Consider Tracking? 

Choose your metric based on what you want to learn, and whether it will make sense to your customer in context. Remember, a survey is part of your customer’s experience. 

What Is the Customer Effort Score (CES)? 

Customer Effort Score (CES) lets you know how much work it takes for customers to accomplish something (e.g., onboarding, solving a problem). 

CES surveys ask the customer “How easy was it to ________?”  and is scored on a numeric scale. It’s a metric that is used to improve systems that may otherwise frustrate customers.

As a CX metric, CES helps with that “ease of use” component that increases Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). And while there’s no standard format for CES surveys, they usually look like a 5- or 7-point scale asking how easy it was for a customer to achieve whatever goal they were trying to accomplish. Take a look at our post about how to use CES to evaluate your onboarding experience for more details. 

What Is Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)? 

SaaS companies typically use CSAT surveys to get a read on specific interactions, such as a recently closed support ticket or a fresh purchase. You can format your CSAT survey as a numeric scale (e.g., 5- or 7-point). You’ll typically want to follow the rating question with an open-ended one asking the customer to explain their score. 

What Is Product Satisfaction (PSAT)? 

A Product Satisfaction (PSAT) survey measures customer satisfaction with your product or a specific feature, and you’ll often ask it with an in-app survey. Like CSAT, it’s flexible and you can ask the question in a variety of formats (binary +/- or on a 5- or 7-point scale). 

What Is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) 

There’s an excellent chance you’re already conducting NPS surveys at regular intervals, and that’s great! By combining NPS data with other key metrics listed here, you can get a good sense of the customer experience you offer across the entire journey. If you aren’t already using NPS, ask it after your customer has had a chance to experience value from your product or ask it prior to renewal.  Both are good times to assess user loyalty.

Net Promoter Score measures brand loyalty, and unlike the other three metrics listed, it follows a standard format, which allows you to compare your results against industry leaders in your field. The standard NPS question asks: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” 

That NPS question should always be followed by an open-ended question asking respondents why they gave you the score they did. You will then use their answers to (1) have a customer service agent or a success manager follow up with the detractors to try to fix the problem and (2) use the response to improve your customer experience.

Remember: Less Is More

Have you ever taken a “brief” survey that stretched on far longer than promised? Most customers don’t want to take 3-4 minute surveys, and you can reduce friction and improve your survey response rate by using microsurveys. 

Let people write a novel in response to your open-ended questions, that’s great—you’ll learn a lot from them! But put yourself in your customers’ shoes and keep your surveys short and sweet, gathering a relevant metric upfront. 

Which Distribution Channels Should You Use to Gather Feedback?

Emails, SMS, and in-app surveys are the three main survey channels typically used to gather customer feedback on a post-acquisition journey. Once again, use common sense and think about the channel that makes the most sense for the user. Product experience, as mentioned above, is almost always best asked through in-app surveys at the moment they’re in your platform or app. Support experience is often assessed with an email survey. SMS can be a great channel for gathering feedback if you’re already communicating with customers via phone—for example, following up on a cable technician’s visit.

Just like the question of “when” to collect data, the question about how to distribute surveys will sometimes produce different answers based on your business model. For instance, if you’ve got a more complicated onboarding process where end-users interact with customer success a fair bit, they won’t be surprised to receive a survey via email. On the other hand, if you have a largely self-serve product where onboarding is straightforward, it makes sense to conduct the CES survey in-app.  

The best distribution channel can vary by touchpoint, so consider a multi-channel strategy. To start, determine the best survey channels for your business.

Understanding the Big Picture 

As you gather data and begin to analyze it, it’s important to remember that none of these metrics or the touchpoints they evaluate exist in isolation. The real secret to a successful CX strategy is to take a step back and look at the entire journey—understanding how it’s all interconnected. 

This is where it helps to have a cross-functional team, often led by someone with responsibility for CX operations, that can step back and look at an implementation plan. They can then unify all the data and connect information across the tech stack (e.g., Zendesk, Salesforce, Gainsight, InMoment. 

Without this holistic approach, it’s easy to develop departmental silos (where everyone focuses exclusively on their own touchpoints) and technological silos (e.g., the Sales team sees what’s in Salesforce, and the Customer Support team sees what’s in Zendesk, but nobody sees the big picture). 

Tasking a team with developing a big picture approach to evaluating the entire customer journey is an essential ingredient in creating a consistent customer experience. And a consistent, seamless, enjoyable experience will build loyalty and boost customer value in the months and years to come.

How to Leverage Customer Journey Analytics to Improve Experiences

Each key touchpoint throughout the customer journey plays a huge role in how a customer judges their experience as a whole. This means that at every touchpoint, the stakes are high and there’s a risk of damaging your brands’ reputation. And the scariest thing? It’s not enough to do the work to understand the customer journey at one point in time; businesses need to constantly keep up because customer journeys evolve overtime. That’s where customer journey analytics can come into the picture!

With the appropriate analytics and action, your company can prevent mistakes along the customer journey from happening. Our eBook, Understand and Predict Your Customers’ Needs with Customer Journey Analytics, breaks down a three step process to improving your brands’ customer journey. Let’s get right into it!

  1. Get the Inside Scoop
  2. Pinpoint the Target Areas
  3. Strategize for the Future

Step #1: Get the Inside Scoop 

The customer journey can often feel like a never-ending puzzle. How do we create the best experience for a bunch of strangers? Well, that’s correct, customers are technically strangers, which makes it infinitely harder to cater to them. A logical first step then is to get to know your customers!

With powerful customer experience technology, InMoment can help your brand eliminate silos and combine data according to segmented groups, so you can feasibly sort through all sources of customer feedback, whether they’re solicited (phone, email, or text surveys etc.) or unsolicited (social, third party review sites, and more). Seeing these data points altogether can give you a general idea of how your customers behave, what they care about, and more. When you have an inside scoop on how your customers are interacting with your brand, suddenly, customers aren’t strangers anymore but people you can get to know better and better!

Step #2: Pinpoint the Target Areas

One of the benefits of having data collected from a myriad of sources is the ability to statistically analyze trends, patterns, and anomalies. By measuring what topics have the most traffic, your company can focus its priorities on the issues that matter. Leveraging customer journey analytics to identify the impact of a topic often proves to be a big time saver!

InMoment’s advanced analytics can generate all the associated comments and details about an issue, where it’s happening, the words and themes most commonly associated with it, how widespread it is, what impact it has on your business, and more. It can also generate actionable alerts so you can closely monitor problems that arise—and take action. 

Step #3: Strategize for the Future

With so much data to manage, businesses often forget the potential for feedback to predict customer concerns and behavior. These predictions allow brands to execute dynamic offers, personalized incentives, and customer-focused policies that build loyalty and drive new business. By utilizing your customer journey analytics to predict future problem points and subsequently implement an effective strategy, your company can proactively meet customers’ needs.

Predictive models work the best when they forecast risks and opportunities, including churn/attrition, revenue, customer segments, likelihood to return/recommend, and potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities. With these forecasts, your brand can maintain an informed and preemptive action plan that will keep customers loyal. Customer journey analytics are not only useful today, but for making business improvements in the long run!


You’ve just learned a bit about how to leverage customer journey analytics in your CX Program—but if you’re looking for a more in depth guide to understanding and predicting customers’ needs, read our eBook!

The Automotive Customer Experience Is Changing. Here’s How Your Brand Should Adapt

There was a time when the automotive customer experience was fairly straightforward. Customers would shop around for a vehicle, buy one, and then rarely interact with that brand again outside of service stops. However, as customer experiences have grown more complex, so too have their expectations, meaning that a formerly simple set of interactions have grown into their own ecosystem of multiple journeys and touchpoints.

What follows is a set of simple steps that your automotive brand can take to adapt to this changing landscape, enabling you to stay a step ahead of both the competition and your own customers’ expectations (any organization that can anticipate what its customers might want before even they know will be a winner in its vertical).

How to Adapt to the New Automotive Customer Experience

  1. Understanding Customer Frustrations and Delights
  2. Directing Frontline Training Efforts
  3. Predicting Happy and Unhappy Customers
  4. Identifying Moments That Matter

Step #1: Understanding Customer Frustrations and Delights

This tip may seem obvious, but bear with us, because there’s a more productive way of going about understanding customer experience sentiments than waiting to react to a bad Yelp review. Customer experience (CX) orthodoxy tells us that it’s just fine to address problems and delights as they occur in real time, but “fine” doesn’t take your brand to the top. What does is having designed your program around concrete financial goals, listening to the audiences most pertinent to those goals, and then directing investments only toward the areas that matter most to them. Why spend big on a piece of your program if it does nothing to solve CX challenges?

Step #2: Directing Frontline Training Efforts

Once you understand what about your customer experience delights or frustrates your clientele the most, you can have a much easier time deciding how and when to train employees accordingly. This is a huge step toward achieving Experience Improvement (XI) because your training efforts are coming from a proactive, informed place that you’ve established in our first step. Empowering your employees to better address problems will also boost their morale and investment in their work, which correlates directly with happier customers.

Step #3: Predicting Happy and Unhappy Customers

This step takes some time to get to, but like we said earlier, being able to future-proof your customer experience and anticipate what your customers will want or reject is a total game-changer. This knowledge can only be built up after taking time to understand your customers as people and training your employees to respond with that mentality. Of course, reaching this step is not a one-and-done; it takes constant proactivity to future-proof your experience, but your bottom line will be stronger and your clientele will thank you for the work.

Step #4: Identifying the Moments that Matter

Being able to spot the moments that matter in your customer experience is the culmination of everything we’ve talked about so far: gearing your program toward spotting problem areas, training employees to proactively tackle brand shortcomings in their interactions with customers, and gaining an understanding of what customers will want down the road. Identifying the moments that matter is crucial to creating a truly customer-centric culture and building a foundation of powerful human stories to take your brand to the top. After all, the best brand experiences aren’t built on just the best tech or consultation; they’re built on the best and most human connections.

Want to learn more about the evolution of the automotive customer experience and how your experience program can help you get ahead? Check out our latest eBook here!

Why Your Brand Needs to Desilo Customer Journeys Today

As customer experiences grow more complex, so too have customer expectations. This has become especially true in recent years, as customers take an increasingly multichannel approach to interacting with brands, purchasing products, and relaying concerns. For this and other reasons, there’s never been a greater need for brands to meet this multichannel expectation and desilo journeys than right now. Let’s get into how and why organizations should accomplish this.

A Broader View

One of the most pressing reasons to desilo customer journeys is to achieve an omnichannel view of customers. Brands can do this by integrating call center transcripts, web data, and operational metrics from across multichannel journeys (with the help of a proper experience platform). Feeding this data, this context, back into the organization helps your brand create a meaningfully improved experience for your customers.

Additionally, though creating a better customer experience is the primary goal here,, brands will find that they can also accomplish key business objectives with this more holistic view of their customers. These include greater customer acquisition, better customer retention, heightened cross-selling to your existing customer base, and lowering cost to serve, all of which result in a stronger bottom line.

A Smarter Approach

Another reason brands should desilo customer journeys is because doing so makes your Voice of the Customer (VoC) and other feedback tools smarter. As experiences have grown more multichannel, customers have grown to expect brands to remember them, their preferences, and whether certain interactions have occurred already. Desiloing journeys allows brands to achieve all of this while also removing irrelevant questions and making feedback collection more conversational.

This idea only makes sense when you consider that each piece of a VoC program is a chance to learn something new or different about a customer. The more disparate pieces of info you can collect and assemble, the more complete the picture of your customers becomes. A multichannel approach to VoC can thus help brands round out that aforementioned omnichannel customer view that’s so important to experience improvement.

The Road to Success

While customers should be the primary beneficiary of journey desiloing, employees benefit from this approach as well. The biggest benefit that employees can reap from desiloed journeys and data is having a complete set of information on customers’ interactions and expectations. When employees have that knowledge and the ability to act on it, they can take pride in having delivered a better customer experience, which boosts their morale. It also helps them understand how their work fits into the customer journey and how it connects with that of other teams.

To sum up, desiloing journeys allows brands to get a 360-degree view of customers that’s essential for improving experiences, create a multichannel experience that treats customers more like people than support tickets, and gives employees a chance to work toward the same commonly understood customer experience goal. This results in both a fundamentally connective experience for customers and transformational success for the brands that can provide it.

Click here to learn more about desiloing customer journeys (and to see an example of that process in action) in my Point of View on this subject.

What Customers Expect from a Modern Brand Experience

The experience world has seen a certain term crop up more and more in recent years: omnichannel. This word has gradually become a regular part of customer experience (CX) practitioners’ vocabulary, and indicates a grander shift in CX thinking from focusing on transactions to creating a more seamless journey for customers. This article will briefly introduce what customers have come to expect of brands, and how those organizations can begin to think about meeting that expectation.

The Sum of All Parts

The main reason why many CX practitioners have shifted their customer experience thinking from individual transactions to entire relationships is because, well, that’s how customers see things. Individual transactions and interactions are important, yes, but customers think about a brand relationship in its entirety. This trend has only become more prominent in recent years, and it’s key to designing a meaningfully improved experience.

One of the most important reasons why customers think this way, especially when it comes to expecting a seamless experience, is because they now interact with brands in many different ways: via an app, over the phone, in-person, on a website, etc. With this increase in touchpoints has come a customer expectation that brands will recognize and remember them no matter how they choose to transact. This expectation is at the core of creating a truly omnichannel experience.

The Problem with Legacy Systems

It’s reasonable to ask why more brands haven’t immediately created omnichannel experiences if customers have come to not just desire them, but expect them. Unfortunately, many organizations have legacy systems in place that rigidly silo experience data. Call center data stays with call center teams, website data stays with digital teams, so on and so forth. This setup makes it much more difficult for brands to even know where to start desiloing customer journeys, let alone to successfully execute that goal.

Another issue to consider here is how brands use CRM systems. Though many of these databases’ data isn’t all that divided, it’s common for too few people to have access to it. This reduces data democratization, which makes it harder for a brand to achieve the 360-degree customer view needed for desiloing journeys.

Where Brands Go from Here

It’s become clear that customers expect brands to recognize them at every touchpoint, and to use that recognition to enhance their experience. Customers also expect to be able to seamlessly jump from one channel to another in any given interaction. Many companies’ experience programs aren’t built to accommodate this trend, resulting in lost opportunities for both a better experience and a stronger bottom line.

How might brands circumvent these problems, desilo their customer journeys, and create a more seamless experience for all? Click here to learn more about how your organization can break these barriers down and achieve Experience Improvement (XI) in my Point of View on this subject.

A Cheat Sheet for Mapping Out Your Brand’s Customer Journey

One of the most important elements of a customer experience (CX) program is a customer journey map. These maps serve as visual guides to the interactions customers have with your brand, including product purchases, talking to employees, and more. Customer journey maps can help brands hammer out the steps customers take on the road to a better experience and, just as importantly, do so from the customer’s perspective.

Today, we’re going to walk you through how to quickly create an effective customer journey map that touches on elements like key evaluation points, positive and negative experience components, and more. Let’s jump in.

A Certain Point of View

Though a customer journey map focuses heavily on seeing your brand’s experience through customers’ eyes, it actually starts with a different perspective: yours. The first step to building an effective customer journey map is considering that journey as your organization sees it. 

First, identify the key interactions that customers have with your brand. Are these interactions limited to one-step transactions, or are they a bit more involved? The answer to this question varies from company to company—it’ll even vary between the different stakeholders that you bring in to help just at your brand. This can make creating a shared framework a more involved process, but brands can’t build a truthful, effective customer journey map without it!

The Next Level

Once you, your team, and stakeholders from other departments have agreed upon your customers’ steps, it’s time to expand on every step by identifying some key elements. These elements include: the customer’s desired outcome; time or duration; attitudes and thoughts; emotional responses and needs; customer pain points; strong and weak areas; and the importance of and satisfaction with the step.

At first glance, hammering these details out for every step in your customer journey map may seem a bit overkill. However, similarly to getting everyone’s opinion on what those steps actually are, doing this legwork enables a more educated approach to your customer journey map. This, in turn, will give your brand a greater understanding of its experience, the strengths and weaknesses of that experience, and what you can do to meaningfully improve it.

Bridging The Divide

Now that we’ve talked about building out the customer journey and the elements of its every step from your brand’s point of view, it’s time to circle back to what we talked about up top: understanding the journey as your customer sees it. Starting with your brand’s perspective on the customer journey is important because it gives you a perspective to compare and contrast to your customers’.

The Value of Understanding the Customer Journey

In short, a customer journey map encourages brands to consider what makes their experience great while also giving them a means of seeing why customers may (or may not) agree. Brands then have a better chance of knowing how to bridge potential divides and work toward a more connective, meaningfully improved experience for customers, employees, and the organization itself.

Want to read more about uncovering the real customer journey? Check out our eBook on the subject here, where we break down the process in five simple steps!

Stop Managing Experiences—Start Improving Them

InMoment® today announced its mission to challenge the customer experience industry and offer an elevated approach focused on Experience Improvement (XI)™ for the world’s customers, employees, and top brands. This involves dramatically increasing the results from experience programs through a new class of software and services specifically designed to help leaders detect and ‘own’ the important moments in customer and employee journeys. Read more in the full press release here.

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