What is Client Journey Mapping?
Client journey mapping is a method of plotting out every step of your customer’s experience and identifying the components of your business that they interacted with.
The Main Benefits
It can be easy for teams to focus exclusively on their own roles and responsibilities and lose sight of customer needs. These mapping sessions allow employees to recognize how their role fits into a larger process and build empathy for clients. With this new perspective and increased collaboration, processes can be optimized and new innovations can be established to improve customers’ experiences. By engaging in these mapping exercises, teams can:
- Identify operational inefficiencies
- Prioritize product development
- Implement client engagement changes
The Mapping Process
At WatrHub, we engage in frequent client journey mapping sessions to consistently assess our clients’ experiences. We focus on a specific client and use post-it notes to display their engagement with us from the kick-off point to the present. We bring together a member of each WatrHub team and go through the following steps:
- Present the user journey to the group.
- Identify the team members and things (e.g. platforms and tech tools) that the client interacts with on both the front end and the back end.
- Have each team member identify the top three positive experiences and worst three negative attitudes experienced by the client.
- Work as a team to determine the client’s functional and emotional needs during their worst attitude experienced.
- Ask the team what within our current capabilities could we have done to address these issues and identify the desired transformations.
- Brainstorm innovations to improve future client experiences.
This process allowed us to improve on the negative instances, while determining how we could enhance and scale the moments of delight.
Identify Operational Inefficiencies
The mapping sessions allow us to understand our clients’ engagement with our team and our product. Upon starting our first few sessions, we noticed that there was a pattern of dissatisfaction at a specific point in the client journey. This caused us to investigate and improve our process. We recognized that there was a gap in communication to our research team. We solved this by implementing a new tracking method in our operational process. We were even able to mitigate the issue in the following sessions since making the change.
Prioritizing Product Development
These mapping sessions allowed our product team to learn how clients are using WatrHub data and recognize product related issues that they’ve been facing. This facilitated discussion around potential developments that would improve our clients’ experiences. During one instance, a development was made to our product package to add “Direct Response” slides. These provided clients with further insights into highly actionable targets. We noticed increased client delight during the following mapping sessions due to this product development.
Implement Client Engagement Changes
Our client success team was able to make process changes to enhance client delight. One particular instance that stands out is the decision to kick-off client projects as a webinar, and conduct a follow-up alignment meeting in person. Our original client success process was to meet our clients in person during the kick-off meeting. Due to scheduling issues with a couple of our clients, we decided to do one of the first alignment meetings in person instead. When we mapped out the journeys for these clients we found that the clients we met in person for the alignment meeting, versus the kick-off meeting, had a better overall customer experience with us. We speculated that questions likely arose after they began receiving and actioning WatrHub data that we were able to answer while present, and the client therefore got more out of an in-person alignment meeting. In other words, we were better aligned than those who we had kicked off in-person! This was a client success process change to engagement that we have since implemented across all of our new clients.
Outcome: Increased Client Satisfaction
Identifying experiences of delight and friction have allowed our operations, product and client success teams to make necessary changes for a better client experience. It’s easy for teams to become segregated and deeply focused on their own tasks. Client journey mapping allows front-end employees to understand how products and tools are created, while enabling back-end employees to understand how their work is used by clients. Increased knowledge transfer among employees fosters a culture of continuous improvement which increases client delight and retention.
Interested in learning more about how client journey mapping can help your team with retention? Reach out to Alexa MacDonald, a Client Success Manager at WatrHub.