How real is your customer journey?

I have worked with many businesses who are keen to ensure that they have a powerful customer experience in place.

They want to ensure high levels of customer satisfaction and internal efficiency, so they have taken the time to build a sales process in their business.

If you are not yet sure of the value a great sales process could bring to your business, then you should check out our blog on the 6 Benefits of Great Sales Process

Even the best sales process in the world only has real impact if it is properly implemented.  Creating a great customer journey is only step one of ensuring that your business really takes control of the way in which it interacts with customers.

There are so many examples of companies who have plans in place to enable them to manage their customers effectively, but that are not being delivered everyday in their business, and this really impacts on the amount of revenue they generate.

To ensure that all the good work you have done at planning stage has real impact, we need to make sure that the journey is well embedded, consistently delivered, well measured, and highly influential.

For this to be achieved, a really great implementation plan is required.  At Elation we have built our own sales process mapper that takes a business through the task of making the journey a reality in their business.

We use this mapping process to ensure that for each step on our customer journey, we think about the 5 steps to embedding great process.

The process requires that for each step of the journey you consider and plan the 5 key areas that will impact on the delivery of the process.

1. Resources – being clear on who will implement each stage in the process and assigning clear ownership means that your team will know what is expected of them and you will be confident that each task is being carried out effectively.
2. KPIs – understanding how much of each activity needs to take place to generate the outcomes you need, gives clarity to your team on their performance measures and also allows you as a business to control the volume of work being done.
3. CRM – understanding what recording and tracking needs to be in place to monitor the journey effectively is key. Whether you are using an excel spreadsheet or a fully embedded sales CRM you need to be sure that it accurately tracks each stage in the journey for monitoring purposes.
4. Marketing – your customer journey will need to be supported by great marketing input. Whether this is the creation of a suite of materials to support the journey, or the use of market intelligence to inform the content mapping of your marketing needs in your process, this will allow you to make really good marketing decisions.
5. Training – at all stages of the journey the skill with which each stage is delivered is key to its success. You should review each step of your customer journey and make sure that all the resources have the highest level of skill in this area.

A really great quality customer journey mapping activity involves creating the plans and processes that will bring your sales process to life in your business.

If you involve your team in an interactive session on this subject you will get great collaborative thinking and you’ll probably have some good fun too.