Sending out social campaigns isn’t enough when it comes to success in marketing. Rather, real growth and understanding comes from customer journey mapping — a practice that many customer success teams swear by.
By analyzing customers’ interactions with their brand at every touchpoint, CS pros can uncover where customers engage the most and what areas of their marketing strategy need improvement. Doing so allows them to alter their tactics and deliver more impactful experiences in the future.
For vcita CMS Team Manager April Ayers, customer journey mapping unlocks the power of visual storytelling, which ultimately opens up communication channels and makes it easier to pinpoint customer interactions — and helps ensure customers aren’t being approached too often.
“At any given moment, sales or customer success and marketing teams are reaching out to the same client,” Ayers said. “Their messages could be redundant or the cadence could be parallel. Identifying when each team reaches out to a client and at what point in their journey has helped us tremendously.”
Below, Built In Seattle checked in with Ayers and OpenMarket Client Programs Manager Julie Soveiro to discover how they use customer journey mapping to deliver more personalized customer experiences.
OpenMarket offers mobile engagement solutions with the aim of helping enterprises transform their businesses.
How does customer journey mapping help you deliver a better customer experience?
Customer journey mapping gives us a framework to deliver the correct experience at the right time. For example, when a customer is in the implementation stage, we deliver training to raise engagement during the adoption phase that follows.
What other teams or team members do you collaborate with to support customers throughout their success journey, and how does mapping help clarify everyone’s roles and responsibilities?
We collaborate with sales, product, technical, operations, customer care, engineering, marketing and senior leadership teams during customers’ success journeys. Customer journey mapping includes the roles and responsibilities of each team during each specific phase of the journey. For instance, implementation managers lead the onboarding process, while account managers lead all discussions regarding use cases and compliance. Once the implementation is complete, account managers are the main point of contact for the customer.
Customer journey mapping gives us a framework to deliver the correct experience at the right time.
How do you tailor the customer journey map to meet the unique needs of different segments or types of customers?
Our customer journey mapping for strategic customers has a larger assigned team and additional touchpoints. The account director stays on for the duration of the customer lifecycle with the account manager, and then we add a technical success manager for additional expertise.
Vcita’s business management and client engagement app is designed to help small and medium-sized businesses more easily interact with their customers.
What’s one way customer journey mapping helps you deliver a better customer experience?
A visual story is powerful. Customer journey mapping helps identify redundancies, increases sales and aids in long-term retention. Everyone knows first impressions are important in communication and they are just as important when multiple teams are communicating all at once to a client.
For instance, customer journey mapping helps identify areas where a client is being bombarded by different channels reaching out to them. At any given moment, sales or customer success and marketing teams are reaching out to the same client. Their messages could be redundant or the cadence could be parallel. Identifying when each team reaches out to a client and at what point in their journey has helped us tremendously. Information is powerful, but too much information is distracting, so we found ways to make sure we were not crossing over each other.
What other teams or team members do you collaborate with to support customers throughout their success journey, and how does mapping help clarify everyone’s roles and responsibilities?
We work with marketing mostly in terms of a customer success journey. The way we are structured is that once a client upgrades, they are granted access to our customer success team through marketing or sales. We have a very simple structure from either team to ensure that introductions have been made. In either case, we are the prominent contact from that point forward and make sure to have open lines of communication with our marketing team on what is being sent and when. It also helps that we have full visibility into each team’s communication with clients, from marketing all the way to support. A huge part of customer journey mapping is ensuring that you can see what is happening on a daily basis.
Customer journey mapping helps identify redundancies, increases sales and aids in long-term retention.”
How do you tailor the customer journey map to meet the unique needs of different segments or types of customers?
We have done this in a lot of different ways and are always experimenting with what works best. As of now, we are heavily focused on verticalization. That means that a client can receive a unique journey or story according to the vertical that they are in. Our product works with a broad range of client verticals, which is great, but that also presents challenges, because what works for one client might not be great for another. We have found that verticals tend to have unique but consistent needs, so that is our target for now.
