“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” While Yogi Berra decidedly wasn’t referring to customer journey mapping when he said those words, the spirit of his quote does speak to the importance of the customer journey: understanding every step customers can take to interact with a brand is essential to minimizing the likelihood that they’ll go to a competitor.
What is Customer Journey Mapping?
Customer journey mapping has gained a tremendous amount of traction as a means of categorizing—and optimizing—each touchpoint that a consumer has with a brand. The information gleaned from the process can help brands increase customer acquisition, engagement, satisfaction, sales, loyalty, and more.
While companies in virtually every industry can benefit from customer journey mapping, it’s especially helpful in categories that are experiencing significant change, disruption, and competition. Based on that criteria, banks and other financial institutions are ideal candidates for customer journey mapping.
The Value of Documenting the Customer Journey
The ultimate value of documenting the customer journey, growing your business, comes from effectively implementing strategies and tactics based on what you learn from the exercise of putting the map together. Both of those steps—creating the customer journey map and executing on its findings—require three components: people, data, and technology.
Delivering an Experience Based on the Customer Journey
Delivering an exceptional customer experience, driven by the customer journey, takes not just a team effort, but a teams effort. In other words, each functional team—whether it’s data analytics, market research, product development, strategic planning, IT, customer experience, or more—needs to excel autonomously and cross-functionally. To that end, many companies are organizing working teams around various aspects of the customer journey, helping to ensure that siloes are removed and speed and agility are increased.
Hiring for a Customer Journey-Driven Environment
Hiring for a customer journey-driven environment means seeking individuals with certain skill sets and interests. Professionals who are flexible, adaptable, multi-dimensional, and accountable make the strongest contributors, individually and organizationally.
Our Expertise
At TalentBridge, we bring unique experience and perspectives to identify and place the right candidates that will help our banking clients achieve the goals of their customer journey program. We draw on our 25 years of experience in the banking and financial services space, as well as learnings from working in other categories that emphasize various aspects of the customer journey approach, such as team agility.
To learn more about how we can deliver exceptional talent that will help you deliver a great experience wherever your customers may be on their journey with your financial services brand, please email Marian Tison (mtison@TalentBridge.com).