Customer journey maps as a key tool to inform and shape value
Karen Chiang is Managing Partner of Ibbaka. See her skill profile on Ibbaka Talent.
Many organizations are failing to optimize their customer engagement and are leaving money on the table because they have been unable to implement value-based methodologies. Without having a clear understanding of how you are providing value to your customers, it will be challenging to define, position, and defend your pricing...making it incredibly difficult to get to a transaction.
A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at TSIA Interact on some of the obstacles to implementing value-based pricing and offered some recommendations on what companies need to consider when trying to implement a value-based methodology as it applies to market segmentation, package offer design, and of course pricing.
Today, however, I'm going to cover a key tool that we can use to really help us understand the value being delivered as we interact with our customers — the customer journey map.
What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map is a representation of the steps that your customer goes through as they interact with your company. Essentially, it illustrates your customer touchpoints through each phase of their engagement with you. When defining customer journey maps it is not enough to concentrate on the buying process; rather, you need to consider the entire lifecycle of the engagement that you expect to evolve with your customer. As such, the customer journey map should cover everything from awareness through marketing, sales, customer services, and support, upsell and renewal, and potentially to end of life. The nuances and definitions of these phases are defined by the nature of your business. Remember, it is important to capture all the interactions your customers have with all aspects of your business: product, service as well as your unique capabilities.
The key tool linking to other aspects of shaping value
Customer journey maps are often used to shape and improve customer experience; however, here at Ibbaka, we use it to help our customers understand how value is being delivered and perceived by their customer over time. Customer journey maps help inform what can and needs to be adjusted to improve engagement. Engagement is a two-way process. For example, on the talent side of our business, there are many touchpoints of recommendations that occur during adoption where we need to validate the value delivered while also quantifying the value realized by our customers to measure the impact of the recommendation as an outcome. Customer journey maps play an essential role. It is the foundation on which to inform other systems needed to execute and track your ability to deliver and capture value.
Indeed, they are instrumental in informing not only ways to improve customer loyalty and reduce churn but also can be used to inform that type of data needed to measure the efficacy of your value propositions, your product strategy as well as your pricing. We rely on customer journey maps to help frame the pricing and value calculators that we build to track the evidence of how value is being delivered and consumed.
Internally, for Ibbaka as a company, we use customer journey maps to:
First and foremost, shape how we consistently deliver value to our stakeholders (customers and the communities in which we participate)
Organize and align our marketing, sales, customer success, service delivery, and product development
Ensure we are on target to deliver on our vision, mission, and key strategic choices
Evaluate and inform our business investments
The process for building a customer journey map relevant to pricing
Before I get into the process, I would like to remind us that like most of our thinking that is associated with value-based methodologies, the customer journey map must always be developed with your customers’ point of view. You need to discover and validate your understanding of your customers’ perceptions. Our own point of view will always have a low priority compared to that of our customers.
Sketch out at a high-level the phases of interactions you have with your customers. A typical example that is commonly shared on the web looks as follows.
Identify the critical touch points. The example above provides examples. What is the content, tools, data, product, service and associated components that you should offer at each phase of the journey that your customers will appreciate and value?
Identify the key stakeholders that are involved at each stage of the process. These are both internal on your team as well as your customer stakeholders. By doing this, you will be able to understand the typical relationships that you will need to build and maintain over time. It is also important to note that different stakeholders will have different engagement levels throughout the process. Your team will need to be prepared to address those stakeholder interests at the appropriate time.
Identify the value that is being transacted at each stage of the journey. For value-based pricing to work, it is critical that value be understood, communicated, and felt. Value is the building block for understanding segmentation, being able to properly package your offer and to justify your pricing. Framing value in the context of economic, emotional, and community value drivers makes this process a lot easier.
Define the intended outcome that your customer is trying to achieve. We all need a goal by which we can stand by to affirm accomplishment. This is where the outcome and its associated metrics become really important. Mapping outcomes to measurable metrics allows you to track the efficacy of your engagement. It helps you to establish common ground, measure the value you deliver, understand how your customer consumes that value, and where the opportunity to improve resides.
Understand the capabilities and skills needed to facilitate each of the phases. Sometimes to facilitate the engagement, knowledge needs to be exchanged and transferred between you and your customer. Many times there is a need to get to a common language and understanding to establish clarity of expectations.
Continue to validate your understanding by conducting ongoing market research. Find ways to gather data to inform the customer journey. Is there information you can gather from your CRM, your customer support tools, and especially from the data within your application?
Your next steps
How are you leveraging customer journeys to better shape the way in which you are delivering value to your customers?
I’d love to connect with you to learn more. You can reach me through info@ibbaka.com
Ready to take your customer journey to the next level? Validate the efficacy of your pricing with a value calculator.
