Every stakeholder knows that customer retention has a profoundly positive impact on ROI. They also know that achieving and sustaining profits takes extensive research with a disciplined analytical approach to enhance CX and track the customer journey. Why? customer journeys follow a zigzag path between online and offline touchpoints, frequently bumping into obstructions that threaten to derail a potential sale. Mapping customers’ feedback as they travel through the entire engagement process has emerged as a unique and effective method for detecting defective touchpoints in competitive markets. This article covers its vital aspects from end to end.
What is customer journey feedback?
The goal is to develop a customer journey map visually representing customers’ motivational drivers. These range from fundamental needs to emotional perspectives, connecting to:
- Aspiration groups
- Word of mouth and other Influencers
- SM, salespeople, and support agent interactions
- Navigating websites and apps
The more touchpoints you can cover in a fast-moving CX, the more defined your customer profile. The feedback generated creates vivid insights into customers’ thoughts and feelings, a fast indication of brand changes needed to offset pain points, and the costs involved.
Why is CX feedback across the board essential?
It takes a single defective touchpoint in the customer journey to initiate churn or deflect an otherwise smooth transition to the cash till. Realistically, you’ll never capture every customer stop and start, but observing the crucial ones takes you significantly deeper than what’s on the surface.
Methodically structured customer journey maps spur stakeholders into rethinking their brand strategy. So, staying ahead in volatile commercial environments calls for customer lifecycle insights that create meaningful value proposition differences aligned with feedback-driven customer journey optimization.
Journey Mapping vs. Traditional Experience Design
A few years back, businesses were content to analyze feedback when customers generated it willingly in moments of happiness, sadness, frustration, or anger. In such instances, the brand’s responses would be reactive. The motto was, “Don’t trouble trouble until trouble troubles you.”
Contrary to this traditional head-in-the-sand approach, there’s been a mind-boggling turnaround where strategists actively seek customers’ opinions, feelings, thoughts, and perspectives – complementary or not – at every possible interaction point (as described above), including after-delivery-satisfaction.
It marks a popular shift from a passive/reactive mindset to proactive/dynamic actions, designed to create personalized customer experiences. The latter, by definition, cuts out unnecessary touchpoints and erases obstructions to encourage skeptics to buy confidently and convert prospects and new customers into loyal brand ambassadors.
Tools and technologies
Reactive customer feedback relied on old-school surveys and call center recordings. Surveys in the day were non-digital, paper questionnaires, eventually merging with online versions. For example, NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT, and Customer Effort Score (CES) are transitional formats that bridged the cross-over to proactive customer journey feedback mapping to:
- Evaluate body language and voice intonations from videos and audio recordings.
- Translate the feedback into ratings and metrics that define trends and patterns, product development requirements, and marketing strategies.
CX leaders who pivoted using feedback
One of the most powerful story trends that emerged a few years before the pandemic was the flood of industry-disrupting startups that turned powerful market-dominating enterprises upside down and inside out. Notable examples were:
- “Buy now pay later” entities (BNPLs) like Affirm that took full advantage of customers’ feedback, highlighting unaddressed credit card (CC) pain points. They uncovered that CC users detested interest rates peaking above twenty percent APR for debt buildup. Conversely, the BNLP disruption formula centered on merchants paying a reasonable fee for customers’ extended payment plans featuring zero interest charges.
- When gas prices spiked and sustainability rose to prominence in our conversations and priorities, Gen Zs and Millennials revolted against the accepted go-to car brand options. How?
- They opted for a relatively tiny electric car manufacturer as the spearhead to attack GM’s and Ford’s traditional gas guzzlers pumping pollution into the air.
- Their support energized market momentum for Tesla (a startup at the time), helping it to gallop to a market cap that made its founder the world’s wealthiest individual.
- Global or statewide restaurants and hotel chains (like Houstons, Hilton, or Embassy Suites) listened intently to their patrons.
- They wasted no time in merging with the latter’s green orientation.
- Customer feedback guided strategies with solutions that reduced food, power, water, and packaging waste.
- The innovative industry participants also connected with the massive demand for faster, more efficient, seamless, and contactless service provider interactions.
Differentiation that propels competitive status and your bottom line arises directly from touchpoints that sometimes seem irrelevant until customer feedback shows they’re anything but. According to a McKinsey report, companies can no longer afford narrow perspectives with only intuition to back them up. Industry rainmakers must develop personalized experience strategies based on analysis surveys covering every vital touchpoint in a customer’s journey to create differentiation possibilities.
Pillars of a feedback-driven journey strategy
Enhancing customer experience should be front and center of every marketer’s thinking, creating value propositions that resonate robustly with your customers’ thoughts and emotions. In other words, the “chicken or the egg” dilemma doesn’t apply here. Why? It’s always the customer first. So, with buyers dictating your strategies, rely on the six pillars of successful customer mapping for guidance:
1. Get your customer profiles right
Mapping a customer’s journey is not as complicated as it sounds. Still, it demands a detailed focus on segment participants’ demographic and behavioral profile, so you know who you are looking at. Envisioning your typical customer is critical to building a meaningful and insightful journey map from third-party and internal data analysis.
For example, a fragrance manufacturer behind a high-end scent and perfume brand may create a profile along the following lines:
- Unmarried, college-educated, Millennial females earning $100,000 plus in upper middle to executive positions.
- Resides in year-round warm climate locations like Florida, Arizona, and California.
- Shops primarily online, with some brick-and-mortar store navigation.
- Favorite social media channels include X, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
- Influencers driving motivations include Taylor Swift, Kylie Jenner, Ariana Grande, Addison Rae, and strong sustainability advocates.
- Loves to travel (usually business class) and participate in avant-garde events like the Burning Man festival.
- Reflects brand loyalty to Sephora, Ferragama, Le Labo with citrus, eucalyptus, or mint fragrances.
2. Identify and prioritize customer touchpoints
Developing a touchpoint map depends on your team being in touch with customers’ step-by-step progress through the selling funnel, from attention, merging into interest, followed by conviction that leads to a sale. This may involve dizzying “in-out-back-again-type” omnichannel offline and digital activity, connecting scores of dots that include the following:
- Website and app navigation.
- Bot chats on various landing pages.
- CTA reactions linking to other landing pages.
- Phoning human agents for responses to complex questions.
- Mobile scanning of brand reviews.
- Visiting traditional stores to test different products.
Knowing the touchpoints is one thing, getting the order correct is another level up. It takes a fastidious approach, considering customers can abort the CX whenever negative emotions enter the picture. Knowing when and why is at the crux of the mapping program. So, establishing a sequence is crucial.
Notably, the description above covers a prospect’s progress toward the buy cart – let’s call it Phase 1. What happens after the first purchase? Phase 2 touchpoint mapping kicks in, projecting the visualized customer path to repeat sales and brand ambassadorship. This will include:
- More web/app interaction, bot chats, and agent support.
- A shift to earning loyalty points and accessing rewards.
- Trying new lines.
- Referring friends.
- Leaving reviews, not only reading them.
- Entering and participating in customer forums.
It involves developing an entirely different touchpoint map. Here, the objectives are to retain new clients and increase their motivation to buy more often.
3. All roads lead to customer retention
Why is this goal a crucial must-achieve for every business, no matter the industry? It’s simple ROI math:
- New customer acquisition cost is up to 7X the customer retention (CR) cost.
- Loyal customers generate $1.67 for every $1 earned from new ones, spend 33% more, and are 60 to 70% more willing to try new lines.
- For every 1% CR improvement, you can expect a 5 to 19 percent jump in profits and a 3% rise in company value.
- 70% of consumers admit that earning brand loyalty is no walkover and more challenging to retain.
- Current marketers agree to varying degrees that their CR efforts lead to:
- Incremental brand value (88%).
- Better marketplace insights (63%).
- Customer growth (61%).
- Enhanced engagement (80%).
In short, the key to sustained profitability is to merge your prospect journeys into long and rewarding customer lifecycles.
4. Map the drivers behind each touchpoint
Several technologies help businesses understand customer frustrations, sadness, shock, and anger on the one hand, as well as feelings of gratitude, relief, pleasant surprise, and happiness at the touchpoints you’ve mapped as per (2) above. These connect to call center recordings, SM videos, audio channels, text reviews, and other brand/user interactions. They fall into categories that share AI or ML-enhanced algorithms to analyze facial expressions, voice tone, and between the text lines.
For example, today you can deploy:
- Facial recognition software to scan videos and configure thought patterns, feelings, and moods. How: From AI-interpretation of scowls, smiles, glares, facial tension, or relaxation.
- Voice analysis systems that instantly slot customers into psychographic categories from observing tone, pitch, and speaking speed.
- Advanced sentiment ratings that evaluate digital messaging and survey responses (in NPS, CSAT, and Customer Effort formats) as positive, negative, or neutral for a brand. In a fraction of the time it would take a team of twenty humans, they absorb, sort, and psychographically categorize:
- Massive text data volumes in emails, customer support chat transcripts, and social media reviews.
- Modern wearable technology, including smartwatches, fitness trackers, VR headsets, smart jewelry, web-enabled glasses, and Bluetooth headsets.
- These monitor heart rate and other biometric indicators to assess responses under different circumstances.
It takes the guesswork out of calculating the touchpoints that work for or against you, opens blind spots, and rectifies disruptions before they derail the customer journey.
Consider the case of an e-commerce triathlon equipment distributor that picked up significant numbers of website navigators bouncing after:
- Filling the cart
- Entering the wetsuit services page
- Reading a blog
- Connecting with chatbots
One obstructive touchpoint can be a handful; a string of them can be disastrous to customer acquisition and retention, unless one can zone in on the dissatisfactions and quell them. It supports mapping the entire journey wherever you can.
4. Utilize tools and tech to map feedback-driven journeys
The digital era provides real-time dashboards integrating journey pain-point detection from end to end, converting NPS, CSAT, and CES data with qualitative insights from several sources (see above) into real-time action. However, selecting the correct partner that can provide the customer lifecycle insights aligned with your operational scale is vital. For example, companies like:
- Medallia, a company that meets enterprise clients’ demands, is not suitable for SMBs unless the latter’s stakeholders are ready to climb a steep learning curve.
- Zonka, on the other hand, suits SMBs down to the ground with the only caveat being limited integrations.
- Sogolytics is a middle-roader – an entity that:
- Appeals to all organization sizes.
- Offers state-of-the-art touchpoint tagging resources.
- Makes visual journey tracking and survey overlays a breeze.
5. Leverage a comprehensive list of proven KPIs
Again, Sogolytics and other professional entities have high-tech data analytics at their fingertips that can seamlessly and almost instantly convert reams of text/video/audio observations into insightful metrics attached to every primary touchpoint. These include comparing internal baselines and industry benchmarks to several KPI shifts, such as:
- CES, CSAT, and NPS scores.
- Spikes or drop-offs in:
- Complaints.
- Resolution speed.
- Website or app bounce rates
- Numerous scientifically constructed ratings of qualitative material that denote happiness, frustration, anger, and neutrality.
Stakeholders confronted unaddressed pain points reflected in the KPIs can act quickly to close the loops with decisive strategies and tactics that may range from:
- Moving an untrained support agent from the arena to implementing a compelling training program for all employees interacting with customers.
- Fixing a malfunctioning landing page chatbot to an overhaul of the entire website customer interaction system.
- Getting back to a single disgruntled call-in customer to the establishment of new protocols for maximum queue times and channeling to the right support agent.
The examples above are only a few of many that only broad customer journey feedback mapping can uncover. It creates the opportunities to engage your customer base the way it wants you to engage, not the way it’s necessarily easy for you to do so. It also allows you to show you’re listening to their suggestions with messaging around “You Said, We Did” communications.
Build on data — and call in back-up as needed
The mapping process, engineered by AI-powered software, is complex and requires balance. Resist becoming too scientific and fretting about issues that aren’t a priority. Simultaneously, you want to know you’re not bypassing vital touchpoints by over-emphasizing others. In short, don’t just guess the journey—measure it.
Here’s where experience and expertise are worth their weight in gold. Sogolytics team members understand how to cover a journey audit checklist with internal championing like the backs of their hands. Moreover, the organization is at the cutting-edge of future trends in journey mapping that are taking it to new personalization and digital data analysis levels, accommodated by incredible predictive journey modeling advancements. When you connect with us, expect the results that provide strategic uplift, such as:
- Real-time touchpoint feedback
- Visualized and personalized experience loops backed by data
- Predictive alerts for drop-off points
- Unified dashboards for a holistic customer journey map view
Contact us today to see how Sogolytics maps better journeys and for a no-obligation conversation about your journey mapping needs. Explore smarter feedback strategies for every step with our guidance; we guarantee you won’t regret it.
FAQs
1. Why is customer journey feedback mapping crucial for CX success?
A: One defective touchpoint in the CX journey is enough to initiate churn or deflect an otherwise smooth transition to the cash till. Most customer journey maps effectively spur stakeholders into rethinking their value proposition and brand strategy, staying ahead in volatile and competitive markets.
2. How do touchpoint analysis surveys improve personalized experience strategies?
A: They deliver insights into psychographic motivations driven by otherwise hidden thoughts and emotions.
3. What’s the difference between customer journey mapping and feedback-driven journey optimization?
A: Customer journey mapping is all about picturing the customer’s experience by identifying and addressing pain points and emotions connected to how one’s business deals with the problematic issues. Optimization focuses on the actions the map indicates are essential, using relevant data to test and improve interactions and customer engagement.
3. What’s the difference between customer journey mapping and feedback-driven journey optimization?
A: Customer journey mapping is all about picturing the customer’s experience by identifying and addressing pain points and emotions connected to how one’s business deals with the problematic issues. Optimization focuses on the actions the map indicates are essential, using relevant data to test and improve interactions and customer engagement.
4. Which touchpoints should be measured in the customer lifecycle?
A: All those identified as critical to upholding customer retention over the long term.
6. What are the biggest roadblocks in feedback mapping, and how can I overcome them?
A: Establishing a team culture that responds quickly to disruptive touchpoints as they emerge and follow up with comprehensive testing and retesting.
7. How can businesses act on feedback across the journey?
A: Trial and error, trying to navigate a complex arena independently. It’s the one customer experience field that requires professional guidance and a mapping partner in your corner.
