With sky-rocketing demands of tech-savvy customers, the pandemic has spurred the growth of digital channels and led to businesses prioritizing customer journey mapping to deliver seamless digital experiences.

A recent research by Salesforce on the state of customer experience reveals that 80% of customers consider CX equally important to the kind of products or service offered by the company.

In the new normal, customer journey mapping has emerged as a pre-requisite for analyzing customer expectations and delivering personalized customer experiences across all touchpoints. Cross-device and multiple-channel access of services has made mapping customer journey a tedious task for businesses.

In this blog we will discuss the top challenges brands face while mapping their customer journey and the ways to overcome them in 2021:

1. Complex Web of Multiple Channels

Proliferation of multiple channels, devices and evolving technologies have made the purchase funnel a complex web making it difficult to identify and track the influence of touchpoints on the customer. It has become even more difficult for brands to decipher whether the customer has been converted or not.

How to mitigate : It is thus important for brands to identify, track and map customer behavior and preference patterns to gain key insights into the different paths your customers take towards the final purchase. Brands need to leverage the power of analytical tools to visualize and quantify the buyer's journey. Integrating the analytical capabilities with your content strategy will help you leverage data for customer engagement at the right place and at the right time.

2. Monitoring User Behavior Across Channels

Customer journey involves a wide range of activities across multiple channels and devices like a mobile application, reviews on the internet or brand communication on a social media channel and much more. Capturing these cross-channel activities through existing technologies, departments and processes and then responding to the customers with relevant and personalized content is a challenge.

How to mitigate : Brands need to leverage a unified and central solution by breaking down departmental silos and processes to create a more collaborative model which can help analyze the customer journey across channels. System integrations and data unification across all touchpoints-digital, web, emails or social media platforms can help you deliver personalized brand communication across all customer touchpoints.

3. Mapping Every Buyer Persona in a Single Map

Trying to map every buyer persona in a single customer journey map makes it both complicated and misleading. Every buyer persona targets a set of audience with unique pain points, buying patterns, behaviors and path to purchase.

How to mitigate : Brands must design a map that targets every unique buyer persona. Creating standalone visualizations for your customers helps you target your content planning and personalization strategies to elevate customer experience.

4. Missing the Moments of Customer Silence

The real challenge for marketers during their customer journey mapping strategy is identifying the point of abandonment, denial and silence of customers. Most companies fail to capture and track these moments of silence which often leads to the eventual loss of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

How to mitigate : Brands need to identify these moments of silence and track the reasons for such inactivity. It is imperative to ask relevant questions like - why are customers abandoning the process and why are they dropping? What systems, supports and integrations can be created to factor in these disengagements and how can we create relevant content and personalized communication to improve customer engagements.

Customer Journey Mapping : Elevate CX in 2021 & Beyond

Businesses must identify the pain points of customers and be proactive in communicating with them at the right time with tailor-made solutions to meet their expectations.

With the right technology solutions and partners, you can push the customer mapping barriers and orchestrate the right customer experience for your buyers. Do you want to see how a real Customer Journey Map looks like? Do you need to design a Customer Journey Mapping tool to help streamline your customer experience initiatives and track all your customer touchpoints?

You can reach out to us to understand and develop the fundamental metrics to identify customer touchpoints across all devices and create the right avenues to engage with your customers for driving better business value and attain higher ROI. Get an in-depth look at our investigation process and how it helped our customers define the course of their products. Reach out to us at marketing@espire.com for your queries.