In EMI’s up and coming newsletter, Adam Smith, owner of Sound Press and EMI’s strategic partner, will answer the question; How do I audit my client experience to make sure I have processes and systems aligned with my brand? A large portion of Adam’s answer focuses on the Customer Journey map.
As Adam will outline, the Customer Journey map is important to your brand’s integrity, however, most don’t take the time to document the customer experience or understand how it impacts a business’ profitability. Wait. What? Yes, I said profitability.
The Customer Journey map isn’t a marketing term or practice, it’s a business concept that helps drive profitability. Here are a few ways you can improve your margin by having a documented & communicated Customer Journey map:
EFFICIENT CLIENT ONBOARDING – An onboarding process with key client communications will set expectations for everyone involved and create an efficient, cost controlled onboarding experience. It’s hard to overcome bad first impressions. An unorganized onboarding process will lead to miscommunications, doubts about the quality of your services, could jeopardize your ability to collect your full implementation fee, and lead to a shorter client lifecycle. You will likely add more time to client service to address issues. Maybe add more staff or personally take on tasks that you normally wouldn’t as the owner. All efforts to react and respond to problems are costly for any business, impacting your profitability.
CLIENT MILESTONES – Every business has a client lifecycle with stages or milestones. Ensuring you and your team know what and when these touchpoints are, what must be accomplished or communicated at each, and what form of communication is preferred by your client will help you build equity with your client relationships and ultimately retention. As you grow your business, management of your client milestones can become costly. Creating standardized communications with customizable segments that focus specifically on your client’s needed outcomes will enable you to automate what’s considered standard. Resulting in efficiencies that allow you and your staff to focus on what’s important – the customized and most value driven services for your clients.
ELIMINATE DUPLICATION – How many times have you documented a process and discovered that there were duplications of effort? If you’re honest with yourself, it happens often. It’s simply a good practice to understand what is really happening with your client experience, so you can get laser focused on what is most important to your clients and streamline your processes and communications. Whether it’s multiple team members or multiple communications to the client, duplication of effort is costly. I’m not talking about reinforcing concepts, which is important, I’m referencing steps or actions that are completed on several occasions that may burden the client, don’t add value or build equity with your client relationships.
Don’t know how to create a Customer Journey map for your business? There are free templates available to help you get started but it can be overwhelming. Please feel free to reach out to me directly at [email protected] or (513) 309-0719 if you’d like to discuss how you can create a Customer Journey map.
