When seeking to create competitive advantage through great customer experiences, it pays to engage in customer journey mapping. Before you can do that though, you first need to gather your touchpoints. In this post, we’ll examine how to go about gathering an inventory of those touchpoints and how you can use software to make the process more efficient and effective.
Step 1: Set-up the interface for brainstorming touchpoints.
In traditional customer journey mapping, you typically start with a large piece of paper or a wall and fill it with touchpoints using sticky-notes. In fact, you can also do this as a first step and then use it as a basis for entering it into a digital interface. Or you can skip that and go directly to software. One advantage of going directly to software is that you can access pre-built templates for mapping those touchpoints onto and an existing list of touchpoint examples that you can configure to suit your needs.
Why you do it: The right interface helps you brainstorm a comprehensive list of touchpoints.
Step 2: Brainstorm and select your touchpoints.
Once you have your interface, you use it to visually compile a list of all the touchpoints that happen in your business. If you want to expand touchpoints beyond customer-facing touchpoints, such as internal employee-facing touchpoints, you could do that as well or make that part of a different touchpoint inventory list. In the software interface, it is easy to add new touchpoints, and/or clone existing ones to configure them to represent a new touchpoint that you need.
Why you do it: A comprehensive set of touchpoints helps create better customer journey maps.
Step 3: Connect your touchpoints to each other and other elements
Using the touchpoint connection interface, make connections between touchpoints and with other elements such as teams and technologies and these connections will then automatically appear when you are plotting them on a customer journey map.
Why you do it: Through connecting the dots of the customer journey you gain a richer understanding of how to create competitive advantage at each possible touchpoint.
Now that you have it you can use it map your customer journey experiences according to touchpoints and elements that connect to them. Sign-up of for a free 30-day trial today to get started breaking down siloes and creating more aligned customer journey experiences.