There is a way to better identify and share customer experience (CX) metrics. And it is a tool that your company – like many others may already be using… but not for that purpose. I am talking about journey mapping. Recently I have done more and more workshops for our clients on how to use journey mapping for defining CX metrics so I wanted to put that thinking into a new report for all clients to read.

Why journey mapping? It helps overcome some of the key challenges for CX measurement programs: Only if you understand the end-to-end journey your customers take for accomplishing a goal are you likely to have the right metrics in place to judge CX performance. If you don't understand the journeys, you'll rush to judgment with ill-timed surveys, miss important moments of truth and fail to align operational data with customer perceptions. That means you’ll fail to identify ways to improve critical touchpoints. 

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Digest...

A traditional marketing funnel might have stages such as Awareness, Consideration and Purchase, while our Marketing Hourglass consists of seven connected stages – Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat and Refer.

By taking the marketing hourglass approach and giving equal attention to building trust and delivering a remarkable experience, you set your business up to create the kind of momentum that comes from an end to end customer journey.

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Have you started journey mapping yet? Or are you still wondering why it's an important tool to have in your customer experience management toolbox?

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Based on the latest round of 436 interviews in seven countries, here are the facts:

-Buyers spend nearly as much time offline as they do online.
-Social media, although gaining traction, is not yet mainstream.
-Solution providers, especially their subject matter experts, are a more credible source of information than the buyer’s peers.
-Buyers want to engage with sales reps early on in the purchase process.
-Thought leadership is both an effective door opener and a short-list determinant.
-Buyers are more likely to consider solution providers that personalize their marketing to address their specific business issues.
-Industry knowledge and knowledge of the buyer’s unique business issues top the solution provider selection criteria list.
-Buyers favor providers with whom they have previously done business.

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Key findings include:
86% of senior-level marketers agree that it’s absolutely critical or very important to create a cohesive customer journey.
56% of enterprise companies have a customer journey strategy, vs. 33% of mid-sized companies and 27% of small businesses.
The top three challenges facing senior-level marketers: budgetary constraints, quantifying marketing’s ROI, and creating personalized experiences.
Among marketers who have fully integrated customer data (only 17%), 97% said they are now successfully creating a cohesive customer journey.

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Becky Carr, CMO at CenturyLink Technology Solutions, discusses the rebranding of Savvis into CTS and how she is driving demand for the technology company.

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B2B end-user buyers worldwide were most likely to begin researching work-related purchases on search engines (35%) and manufacturers’ websites (27%), and 18% got started on consumer sites. What content are they looking for once they get there? The research found that those polled worldwide expected a mix of “traditional” digital and rich media content. Technical brochures and specification sheets (61%) and instruction manuals and how-to documents (46%) were the most helpful forms of content, followed by video.

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Digest...

My big concern is that most journey maps focus on the needs of one buyer persona.  But our research shows that B2B technology purchase decisions are made by teams.   Fulfilling the journey of a single buyer may not get the job done.

If you think about, B2B Buying is a lot like The Wizard of Oz or other similar quest oriented stories.  You have one lead character (the champion) who is the focus of the quest—without that person, there is not story.    But she is joined by others on the journey.  They want different things.  While supporting the main character, they will also follow some different paths.  

As a technology marketer and seller, it is crucial to understand all the players on buying teams and what decisions they are responsible for.  You need to understand their buying process in detail. (If we had asked the right questions about what it takes to buy, we might have been able to address the approved vendor issue earlier in the process and helped our champion accelerate the process).  There will be commonalities across customers, but some unique attributes for each one (everyone’s quest is a bit different).  You should ask them what their buying process is.   Then make sure you are addressing all of the sub-decisions that have to be made, by different people, to get to the final decision.

One good idea is to map the journey of the persona of your internal champion.  That persona is the most invested in seeing the purchase move to completion.  As part of their journey, they’ll want to understand and assist other’s in completing their work.   You may find you then need to map the journeys of other key players, but the “champion map” becomes your lead.

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Digest...

To connect authentically to what customers need and want, customer journeys trump the traditional sales cycle. The sales cycle has been an inside-out process, tied primarily to sales goals and operations. The customer lifecycle with a company comprises an ongoing journey before, during and after individual sales events. Sales and marketing teams need to be part of continuous customer engagement for the entire journey. Persistent nurturing of customer experiences also plays an important role in customer retention and advocacy, and sales has a responsibility here.

Deep and broad customer understanding is necessary to: map customer journeys from customer perspectives, segment customers realistically and comprehend customer needs and wants. Continuous customer intelligence is invaluable for nurturing better customer interactions that will make it easy for customers to buy from a company — and want to come back for more. Many current marketing processes provide what the sales team and others can put to good work: collections of customer action / transaction data, and the results of various analytics such as behavioral, social media and marketing automation.

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Understanding your customer buying decision journey Getting cut through is a key challenge for marketers today since there are so many online influences on. Marketing topic(s):Consumer buying behaviour. Advice by Danyl Bosomworth.

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65% of executives responding to a new survey from gyro and The Fortune Group say that subjective factors that can’t be quantified make a difference when evaluating competing proposals.

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Advanced/ Digest...

Start now to update your approach and:

-- >  Put the customer at the center of marketing thinking. Today’s market realities demand that B2B CMOs replace internal sales-driven marketing funnels with a full customer-life-cycle approach that aligns with the ways customers now make purchase decisions and build relationships with their vendors.

-- >  Map the B2B customer life cycle to define your marketing strategy. As the customer buying journey progresses from discovery to exploring options, your marketing efforts must help customers navigate to their final purchase destination with relevant content targeted to the questions they are looking to answer at each stage.

-- >  Adapt to changes in B2B customers’ behavior. In what Forrester defines as the age of the customer, two elements are essential to success: a customer-obsessed approach to defining the business and marketing strategy and an in-depth understanding of customers’ behaviors and needs. The onus is on B2B CMOs to integrate intimate knowledge of customers into marketing activities that serve the varied needs of these customers as they move through the decision process.

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Intermediate/ Digest...

The primary problem with the funnel is that the buying process is no longer linear. Prospects don’t just enter at the top of the funnel; instead, they come in at any stage. Furthermore, they often jump stages, stay in a stage indefinitely, or move back and forth between them.

One popular alternative to the funnel is the Customer Decision Journey popularized by McKinsey. A key advantage of this model is that it’s circular, rather than linear. Prospects don’t come in the top and out the bottom, but move through an ongoing set of touchpoints before, during, and after a purchase.

So where do we go from here?  The funnel and Customer Decision Journey aren’t going away.  They are useful models, and will continue to be helpful in certain contexts.  But marketing today requires a new mental map to navigate a changing landscape. We need a model that informs marketers how to enable and empower, not just persuade and promote.  There are a variety of alternatives including journey, orbit, relationship, and experience.

Whatever model you choose, what’s most important is that it addresses: first, the multi-dimensional nature of social influence; second, non-linear paths to purchase; third, the role of advocates who aren’t customers; and fourth, the shift to ongoing relationships beyond individual transactions.

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The buyer’s journey is an important framework for marketing strategy — but what does it look like? How are buyers getting from step one (“Do I have a need?”) to a justified decision?

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