What is a Customer Journey?
A customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand. Instead of looking at each interaction separately, a customer journey documents the entire experience from the customer perspective. A customer journey map illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through when engaging with your company, whether it be a product purchase, an online experience, retail experience, a service or any combination. As you would expect, the more touchpoints you have the more complicated and valuable the customer journey map.
While a customer journey map will show a linear progression through the various interactions, that is rarely the reality as customers can retrace their steps and choose different paths. The purpose of the exercise of documenting the customer journey is to accurately portray the customer experience and to identify actions (what is the customer doing at each stage?), motivations (why is the customer proceeding to the next step? Why are they starting at that touchpoint?), questions (where are there uncertainties?) and barriers (what structural, process, cost or other barriers stand in the way of moving to the next stage?).
What are the benefits of a customer journey map?
Once you understand your customers’ journey, you can start to realize multiple business benefits, including:
1. Better understanding your customers
2. Identify and correct operational issues
3. Aligns the organization on the customer experience
4. Helps the organization understand customer effort
Customer effort score (CES) is a powerful metric that measures how much effort a customer had to exert while doing business with an organization. Customers rank their experience on a seven-point scale ranging from "Very Difficult" to "Very Easy." This determines how much effort was required to use the product or service and how likely they'll continue paying for it.
How NICE can help
NICE CXone excels at connecting customer journeys across any channel by empowering agents to provide quick, personalized and proactive service. As noted, customer journeys today are increasingly omnichannel – they may start with an interaction with a chatbot, escalate to chat and end with a voice conversation with a call center agent. CXone is the call center software leading brands are utilizing to deliver consistently exceptional customer experiences.
Omnichannel Routing provides the intelligent routing needed to quickly get all interactions to the agent capable of delivering the best service experience for your customers. And it enhances business agility by allowing agents to quickly be deployed anywhere for maximum operational flexibility. You can also implement contact routing and interactive voice response (IVR) changes in hours, not days or months.
As a complete contact management solution, CXone goes beyond omnichannel routing to provide workforce optimization, analytics and reporting, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, all in a single unified and intelligence cloud customer experience platform.
