Digital customer journey mapping in today’s world

How to increase collaboration and deliver the experience your customers want?

Digital personal finance company SoFi is committed to helping its members get their money right, so when the lender discovered that users were abandoning its online loan application process in high numbers – in as many as 28,000 sessions each year – its executives knew they needed to act decisively to uncover the problem. They turned to customer journey analytics and journey mapping to understand where and why the issue was occurring, and in doing so, identified and resolved a technical error that could lead to as much as $9 million in lost revenue annually.

As SoFi and an increasing number of user- focused companies are learning, opportunities to improve customer experience (CX) frequently lie hidden within the pathway customers take as they move from information gathering to purchasing. The digital customer journey can make or break a customer’s relationship with a brand. Every touchpoint, and every digital event required to make that touchpoint work, can improve brand loyalty and drive conversion – or cause frustration and drive the customer to the competition.

And with the COVID-19 pandemic having shifted more customer interactions onto digital channels, it’s more critical than ever for enterprises to deliver the experience customers want. New, digitally driven behaviors are becoming ingrained in how customers interact with brands; once those behaviors are adopted, customers are unlikely to readily switch back to traditional methods of purchasing and interacting.

That makes it critically important for organizations to pinpoint how buyers move through the purchasing journey and where CX fails to meet customer expectations and needs. Doing so is notoriously difficult, however, as is understanding how events on one page affect other aspects of the journey. Often that’s because a typical 10-stage digital customer journey can include more than 1,000 events, such as scrolling, clicking or tapping button, tilting or adjusting page orientation, and unseen AJAX calls to load content. Any time a website or mobile app view fails to provide the right information or react in the way customers think it should, frustration and churn can result.

In the following whitepaper, we’ll detail everything you need to know about customer journey maps in today’s digital world. You’ll learn what a customer journey map is, how critical it is to supporting stakeholders across the enterprise and the must-have digital capabilities organizations should be looking for in their journey mapping solutions today.

What is a customer journey map?

• Does your organization know the answers to the following questions:
• What behaviors are customers exhibiting during a journey?
• What behaviors are they not exhibiting?
• What are the most common events occurring on a page or screen?
• Where are customers getting frustrated?

Customer journey mapping can provide these answers, and more. It’s an essential part of understanding where and how companies can improve CX.

A customer journey map visually shows all the steps customers take from the time they first begin interacting with a company until they end their journey. In the digital world, that means tracing a customer’s actions from the moment they visit a website or app until they leave naturally, complete a purchase or abandon the site or app.

Research firm Gartner lays out two key objectives a customer journey map must be able to fulfill:

• Identify specific CX problems and opportunities.
• Gain alignment and consensus on how to address those problems and opportunities

Many companies feel they have a good handle on what the typical buying pathway is for a customer, but customers’ lived realities are rarely the same as a company’s imagined business processes, Forrester has found. A customer journey map shows the real-world experience customers have with a digital product, and that’s critical to identifying where gaps in CX exist.

Journey maps typically provide a bird’s eye view of the customer journey – the behaviors customers exhibit, what they’re engaging with on a page or screen, the actions they’re taking (or not taking) and where they’re struggling to move forward. These insights help organizations understand which areas of the site or app may need more or different information or functionality, learn where errors are occurring and identify opportunities to increase conversion or decrease time to sale.

Creating an effective and accurate journey map requires a large volume of data and highly detailed analytics capable of identifying the most common journeys customers take when purchasing a specific item or service. Among the touchpoints customer journey maps can include:

• Customer service - Interactions on phone, email, web chat or social media.
• Email marketing – The newsletters or messages customers choose to open or ignore.
• Website or native app – The pages and screens they visit and read, and in what order.
• Advertising – The ads they are seeing and clicking on, and where.
• Third-party reviews and social media influencers – The outside evidence that affects customer decision-making and leads them to click through to a website or app.
• Surveys – What surveys customers are responding to and what sentiment their responses indicate.
• In-store or on-site visits – When customers choose to visit brick-and-mortar locations, and for what reasons.
• Post-purchase activities – When customers are looking for additional support online or calling the contact center, and why.

Why are customer journey maps so important for digital channels?

According to research conducted by Salesforce, 67% of senior marketing industry leaders say creating a connected customer journey across touchpoints is critical, but only 23% are extremely satisfied with their ability to turn customer data into better experiences. In addition, about 70% of brands are falling short of or barely meeting customers’ expectations, according to Forrester.

This research shines a light on the heart of the problem with digital CX today – customer journeys often fail to add up to the experience buyers want.On digital channels, that’s frequently due to the sheer volume of pages and screens available as well as the interactions and events that can take place.

Pinpointing all of the different journeys that occur on a website or app can be a complex process. It usually involves associating customer actions with a specific journey, which can require hundreds of hours of manual tagging, and even then, it’s often unclear how journeys are connected or why customers abandon or convert at a particular stage.

It can be difficult to tell which interactions are meaningful and worthy of further investigation, and which ones are simply unusual outliers.

Obstacles to improving digital CX are also multiplied by challenges with internal collaboration. CX is usually managed internally by a wide variety of stakeholders, each of whom have their own role to play:

• DevOps teams want to understand where CX struggles exist, how they impact the customer journey and how to prioritize development pr ojects. They often spend as much as 75% of their time searching for and recreating errors rather than focusing on innovation. DevOps teams typically already use application performance management solutions like Splunk, Dynatrace and AppDynamics.
• Digital analysts want to understand which users are struggling, and on what pages, screens and events, and the behavioral differences that drive customer loyalty and higher share-of- wallet. They want to monitor CX challenges and understand the monetary impact of customer struggles. Digital analysts typically use solutions like Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics and often can see the journeys that happen in specific areas within a digital channel but not how or why customers behave a certain way.
• Product owners want to understand what’s causing user abandonment and in which journeys abandonment is occurring. They want to know where users are struggling and how those struggles affect revenue. Ultimately, they want to drive retention and share-of-wallet and typically use solutions like Medallia, Optimizely and Adobe Analytics.
• Contact centers want to quickly understand where customers are facing issues on digital channels and how to best support them in real time. Contact center employees know how to resolve issues but can’t always identify what specifically a customer is struggling with and why. Many contact centers use LivePerson, CRM software or Salesforce.

With so many stakeholders using so many different solutions to monitor and investigate digital CX, it’s not surprising that organizations overlook or fail to fully understand barriers in the customer journey. The right data isn’t available to everyone, leaving insights used by digital analysts, for example, inaccessible to DevOps. Decisions are often made without all available data, which leaves each stakeholder group to hypothesize which updates and improvements are needed most or have the greatest impact on revenue.

Each group charged with improving CX, from DevOps to the contact center, in essence speaks a different language, which makes collaboration difficult. Customer journey mapping, however, brings these groups together – the right journey mapping solution aligns stakeholders around the most critical improvements for digital channels and is backed by shared data and intelligent insights. DevOps can then quickly prioritize the most important errors to focus on. Digital analytics can understand which campaigns work best and why. Product owners can see why users are struggling or abandoning a journey and how it affects revenue. And contact centers can see exactly what’s causing customers to call in. Effective journey mapping provides a single source of truth and enables consensus, smarter decision-making and prioritization of new projects.

How a large retail bank streamlined its customer onboarding process with journey mapping and analytics?

A large U.K.-based retail bank offered its customers an online self-service account switch progam that was designed to make it easy and seamless to change from the competition to the bank’s services. The self-service program had already been used by more than three million customers. The bank knew that any friction in this service, like page errors, confusing content or AJAX errors for example, could impact its CX and lead customers to consider a different bank. To assess problems with the program, it had been using web analytics that shared statistics and trends but didn’t show employees why friction was occuring.

To enable faster review and resolution of issues, the bank adopted artifical intelligence-powered digital analytics that integrated with its existing web analytics tools. The bank could then easily see the entire customer journey throughout the self-service account switch program and capture, replay and analyze every interaction. As a result, the bank was able to analyze 800 million page interactions each month and identify and solve problems like:

• An urgent error that prevented as many as 4% of customers from being able to log in.
• Errors that prevented customers with non-English characters in their names or postcodes from setting up an account.

Discover how

What enterprises need to effectively map digital customer journeys?

To tap into the powerful alignment and insights that customer journey mapping can provide, enterprises need to look for advanced, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven solutions that answer not just how and where customers are experiencing CX problems, but also why. Consider the following capabilities and how they could impact your organization’s CX.

Tagless capturing: Creating a detailed digital journey map starts with correlating pages, actions and events with a specific journey. Organizations typically must define, or tag, each of those elements up front in order to capture and analyze how customers are moving through a website or native app and where problems are occurring. It’s a time- consuming, manual process that can take hundreds of hours and a substantial amount of work on an ongoing basis – whenever changes or updates are made or new pages or events are added, tags must be updated and reconfigured.

In reality, this resource-intensive process often leads businesses to pick and choose which elements they use for customer journey mapping, but when they don’t include every event in a journey, they are unable to get a full picture of what’s happening. Blind spots in digital journey mapping can also occur when using traditional web analytics tools, like Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics, that are unable to capture journeys on native mobile apps and uncover how customers are utilizing them in combination with websites. To be effective, modern enterprises need tagless capturing that automates the entire process. Solutions that provide tagless capturing ensure that 100% of events are included on a customer journey map. This capability allows organizations to vastly expand the number of events captured in a customer journey.

It propels organizations’ understanding of the customer journey forward by identifying what’s occurring both on the user side – what the customer sees and experiences – and on the server side – what technical elements like API calls or AJAX requests are contributing to a journey. It saves substantial time spent on tagging and on diagnosing and recreating errors and enables enterprises to pinpoint exactly where CX barriers exist and make decisions using all available data.

Powerful outcomes become reality with tagless capture. For example, a top fashion brand noticed that conversions had dropped by 1% on one of its digital customer journeys. By digging into its Augmented Journey MapTM, which utilized tagless capture, it was able to identify where and why the abandonment was occurring: It was caused by a dead link that kept customers from updating their payment information at checkout. With tagless capture, the brand was able to rapidly identify and resolve the issue, eliminating potentially $1 million in revenue loss annually.

Intuitive visualization: Customer journey maps must be visual, providing an overall visual representation of the customer’s pathway to purchasing or completing their journey. With 100% of events captured, visualizations can show all of the different journeys customers take and how they’re connected. Modern tools can also provide struggle scores, or the rate at which customers encounter obstacles within a specific event, in real time.

At the same time, however, most decisions about improvements to web pages or apps require highly detailed insights. Organizations need to be able to easily zoom in on a customer journey map and see details for specific pages or screens, such as page performance, number of sessions with struggles, and the devices or geographies associated with customer struggles (and what exactly is causing them). Session replay capabilities enable contact centers, product managers and DevOps to watch in real time or post-session what users are experiencing on a specific page. This provides powerful context for decision-making and customer support.

In action, the right visualization tools can make revenue-driving changes possible by rapidly showing the most meaningful sessions. Take the experience of a European state-owned insurance agency. On one of its self-service digital journeys for purchasing a policy, customers were frequently abandoning at the price quote stage. The insurance company’s digital journey mapping tool showed that abandoning customers were all getting to the price quote page from a specific product page. By swiftly drilling down into just those sessions and watching session replays, the company was able to identify and resolve an API call error that could have caused up to $300,000 in revenue loss a day.

AI-powered analysis: Enterprise teams need to quickly understand where abandonments are happening and why. To do so, customer journey maps must go deeper than general page views to analyze each specific event and behavior in a journey. Solutions with intelligent capabilities automatically categorize all interactions and determine where errors with specific events are causing abandonment. AI can also create a baseline of what typical behavior is on a specific element and send alerts when anomalies occur – for example, prompting DevOps to investigate when the percentage of people who check out after visiting a certain product page changes.

It’s also common for a struggle or error on one page to impact customer behavior at later stages. For example, if a customer experiences an AJAX call error on a product page, he or she may go back to an earlier page to try to solve the problem or find information before abandoning. Because AI can track 100% of interactions and show the spectrum of journeys that customers take, it can identify where problems at one stage are causing abandonment later in the journey.

Consider what a large state bank was able to uncover with AI analysis. Its marketing team had just launched a 30-day campaign targeting self-service personal loans for $7,500-$20,000. Just a few hours into the campaign, its AI- powered digital journey map showed high abandonment rates on the loan application page and alerted DevOps and marketing to an abnormally high struggle score on the page.

It turned out that an error prevented customers from adjusting the loan amount below $10,000, which could have cost the bank about 2,700 new loans each month. The high level of customer interest in loans of $10,000 or less also revealed a new target market for the bank.

Turn tomorrow’s digital product struggles into crucial drivers of CX

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool to increase revenue and retention and decrease time to sale. It’s one of the most impactful ways to align stakeholders and put data and insights into action on digital channels. By adopting AI-powered customer journey mapping, organizations can turn digital CX into a competitive advantage and tap into revenue-generating insights, just as SoFi did.