The Bedrock of Customer Experience Management
Customer Experience Management (CXM) is the phrase du jour. For good reason.
As digital technologies advance, so do customer experience expectations. The introduction of seamless, on-demand, quickly gratifying experiences, offered by the likes of Amazon and Disney, has raised the customer experience expectation bar. Now, you’re expected to deliver the same experience that consumers enjoy with customer-obsessed companies like Fidelity, Mastercard, Tesla, and Apple, regardless of industry.
Therefore, it is critical to truly understand where you are meeting, exceeding, or failing your customers’ expectations across the complete pre- to post-purchase customer journey lifecycle. Enter the power of customer journey mapping. Customer journey mapping is the bedrock of customer experience management (CXM) – it is where it all starts.
The Customer Journey Mapping Platforms Landscape, Q1 2024
In Forrester's overview of 13 notable customer journey mapping platform vendors - titled The Customer Journey Mapping Platforms Landscape, Q1 2024 report, customer journey mapping solutions are defined as:
"Solutions that enable organisations to collaboratively create, visualise, organise, and share customer personas and customer journey maps. These platforms help to evaluate journey performance and improve CX quality by identifying, prioritising, and monitoring a program of journey improvements."
The report offers insight into the value that CX professionals can derive from a customer journey mapping platform and lists how different vendors focus on extended use cases for journey mapping. Quadient, a pioneer in the customer journey mapping space with our Inspire Journey solution, is proud to have been included as one of the 13 notable customer journey mapping (CJM) platform vendors.
Let's explore what the Quadient Inspire Journey mapping solution can do for your business:
1. Jumpstart Customer Experience (CX) Transformation
To design and deliver an experience that not only meets, but exceeds customer expectations, you need a real understanding of their journey. CX leaders can use journey mapping solutions to easily create, visualise, and collaborate on customer journeys across teams and departments.
Journey mapping solutions help you:
- Understand how customers are interacting with your business
- Identify how and when customers want to interact with you
- Action CX projects that address gaps in current and future journey states
- Drive cross-departmental collaboration and alignment
- Improve the end-to-end customer experience
- Capture and strengthen customer loyalty
Inspire Journey’s intuitive platform lets CX leaders create maps that offer remote collaboration and sharing across the organisation so that every user can visualise the paths that different customer personas take across channels.
In addition to virtual collaboration and sharing features, Inspire Journey offers robust data integration capabilities that let you infuse maps with business-wide data to unlock valuable, accurate, and real-time insights for a 360-degree view of the customer experience. This information helps to prioritise what CX transformation project will most impact customer satisfaction and loyalty. See how Hilti mapped 100+ journeys using Inspire Journey.
2. Drive Business Value and Operational Efficiency
Many organisations still manage customer communications and customer experience with a hodgepodge of legacy and modern business systems. This often results in it costing more for businesses to do less, while creating frustrations for employees and customers.
Advanced journey mapping solutions can help you identify key pain points, from either an operational, partner, or customer experience perspective, and implement solutions that reduce friction. Improving one improves the other.
Customer journey mapping not only elevates the customer experience, but helps you:
- Reduce contact centre call volume and inquiries
- Rapidly resolve problems across digital and physical touchpoints
- Lessen the amount of time spent on redundant tasks and processes
- Formulate better CX KPIs tied to measurable business results
- Improve employee experience and productivity
- Better measure CX quality and prove ROI
- Increase operational efficiency
By integrating with popular CRM systems like Salesforce via pre-built plugins, Inspire Journey lets you prove the business impact and ROI of your CX projects. See how British Gas transformed its operational model to become customer-obsessed via the capabilities of Inspire Journey.
3. Extend the Power to Customer Communications Management
Quadient was one of the first vendors to recognise the power of customer journey mapping in customer communications transformation. With the release of Inspire Journey, we became the first Customer Communications Management (CCM) vendor to offer CJM integration out of the box. Today, we remain the only vendor in the market to offer native CJM integration with omnichannel CCM solutions.
By linking communications directly to the customer journey, CX and CCM teams are empowered to quickly improve communication processes and offer customers more value. This transforms customer journey maps from static artifacts to real-time enablers of actionable CX insights and enhancement opportunities. By connecting customer communication templates to every journey touchpoint, you can optimise the design and delivery of omnichannel communications for a winning CX.
CX-driven customer communications management helps you:
- Create efficient workflows and remove unnecessary touchpoints
- Identify the right channels for connecting with specific personas
- Get the right information to customers when and where they need it
- Increase the content value and relevancy of communications
- Empower cross-functional teams to support CX optimization
Realise the ROI of Journey Mapping Investment
Customer journey mapping continues to prove its ability to drive positive CX outcomes and is being adopted quickly – with the market reporting double-digit growth. Forrester’s State Of CX Teams Survey, 2023, reports that 84% of CX decision-makers say that their CX program plans to maintain or increase its investment in journey mapping tools.
With a relatively low upfront investment, a robust CJM solution can deliver ample ROI by:
- Creating new efficiencies and reducing costs
- Increasing customer lifetime value and cross-sell/up-sell potential
- Creating an experience that your customers are happy to recommend
Contact the Quadient team to learn more about how Inspire Journey provides the foundation of a winning CXM strategy.
Source: Forrester, “The Customer Journey Mapping Platforms Landscape, Q1 2024: Forrester's Overview of 13 Customer Journey Mapping Platform Vendors,” By: Michelle Beeson with Martin Gill, Joana de Quintanilha, Sara Sjoblom, Victoria Manes, Bill Nagel, January 25, 2024, Landscape Report, Doc #180436
