Everyone who has taken a long road trip with children has heard that incessant question from the back seat: “Are we there yet?” In a customer journey that same question is often asked, but buyers and sellers have different agendas and ideas about what getting “there” means.
The sellers know their target destination – purchase the product, open an account or subscribe to a service. The buyer may start the journey, take a few detours and end up in a different place. The best outcome is that both buyers and sellers have a delightful journey and end up at the same place, getting exactly what they need. So how can a journey map help?
The customer journey map
For marketers, the journey map is a way to visualize the customer experience. As marketers, we can see various stages of a customer journey and, based on what we know and understand about the customer, we create touchpoints and interactions to move the customer on to the next step to get to our desired goal. This shows the journey over time, not a snapshot. The key in this is understanding the customer. And to understand the customer we need data about customer behaviors and interactions.
If we track many customer journeys and collect data on how customers are interacting with our content and touchpoints, such as what device are they using, did they open the email, click on the link, fill out the form, and on and on, we start to see patterns in behavior correlated with certain groups. Now we start to understand the customer journey from the customer’s point of view, based on what customers actually do.
Gaining these experience insights is valuable for marketers and allows us to better understand the customer and improve the customer journey.
Get the experience insights you need
If you want an answer to the “are we there yet” question, OpenText™ Core Experience Insights will help you get there. Core Experience Insights allows organizations to map customer journeys and track customer activity for every event, across all customer journey touchpoints.
To learn more about OpenText’s customer journey solution, visit our website.
