From our business division for Customer Experience Solutions to numerous blog posts covering the topic and tools (Mitel CX, Dialpad), we are big believers in the business benefits of the customer experience (CX). After all, the numbers speak for themselves:
What better way is there to get to know the CX your business provides than to see every single interaction that customers have with your brand, across every touch point? That’s where omnichannel customer journey mapping comes into play.
This article will explore different approaches to and components of customer journey mapping, show you some of the leading tools available, and provide actionable strategies to implement omnichannel customer journey mapping at your organization.
In today’s digital world, customers interact with brands through six different channels on average.5 Omnichannel customer journey maps visually represent how your audience interacts with your business across every touchpoint. This intel enables organizations to design a customer-centric sales and support funnel across websites, mobile apps, social media, physical stores, and contact centers.6
While customer journey mapping is not a new concept, it is typically from a multichannel perspective. With multichannel customer journey mapping, each channel is mapped on its own. While easier to implement, it fosters disconnected experiences across touchpoints. Omnichannel customer journey mapping fosters a unified, consistent CX—regardless of channel. Consistency is key to building a brand experience that delivers results, with some surveys showing a correlation of 10% higher revenue growth with high brand consistency.7
Customer-centricity is the cornerstone of an omnichannel customer journey. Unlike a multichannel approach where channels operate in silos, omnichannel customer journeys have cohesive end-to-end experiences with the customer at the center. Omnichannel customer journeys take a higher degree of integration to implement as they require centralized customer data across all touchpoints—from websites and social media platforms to contact centers and physical locations.8 With a connected journey, customers can switch between platforms without losing context, and businesses gain the data intelligence for omnichannel customer journey mapping.
Customer journey mapping uncovers a wealth of conversion and sales opportunities that can affect revenue growth by up to 20%.9 When implemented correctly, it improves the alignment between internal teams and customer needs, which boosts CX and leads to higher customer retention. Here are a few specific examples:
Clarifying Organizational Responsibilities
Enhancing CX
Providing Operational Advantages10
As a leader of UCaaS, RingCentral is a natural example for omnichannel customer journey mapping tools, and as a leading CX platform, RingCentral Contact Center is the ideal example platform. RingCentral Contact Center connects all customer touchpoints into a unified interface, including phone, email, chat, SMS, and social media. These cross-channel customer interactions are logged and consolidated, providing the full context of the customer journey.
With this data, visual representations of customer interactions can be created for the entire customer journey, including speech analytics to understand customer conversations and sentiment analysis to gauge customer feelings. AI-powered insights and real-time analytics offer detailed metrics to continually improve the omnichannel customer journey, including channel preference tracking, resolution times, satisfaction scores, and optimization opportunities.
Equally important, this mapping data integrates with leading CRM platforms, including HubSpot, Salesforce,and Zendesk. By integrating RingCentral Contact Center with a CRM, businesses can access customer history across all channels, view previous interactions regardless of channel, understand the full context of a customer’s journey, and track where and when customers previously interacted with the business. Additionally, RingCentral integrates with a number of apps that offer advanced customer journey visualization tools, including Looker Studio, Adobe Marketo Engage, and TheyDo.
While omnichannel customer journey maps will be tailored to the organization and purpose, there are foundational components that will be common to most if not all. These include:
Customer personas and segmentation: These data-derived profiles represent distinct segments of your customers, capturing specific demographics, behaviors, goals, and pain points for each group. By knowing each segment, you can understand how they interact with your organization and personalize and enhance the CX across touchpoints.
Touchpoints across digital and physical channels: Journey maps must catalog every possible interaction between customers and your business, including online touchpoints (e.g. websites, mobile apps, social media, chatbots, digital ads, third-party reviews, etc.) and offline touchpoints (e.g. physical stores, phone interactions, in-person events, direct mail, print collateral, etc.).
Stages of the customer lifecycle: The customer lifecycle is typically composed of five stages: awareness, engagement, conversion, retention, and loyalty. Each stage requires different communication strategies that you can tailor according to customer personas.11
Emotional tracking: Advanced tools can identify high and low points in customer emotions throughout their journeys. This intel helps teams identify pain points to resolve.12
Omnichannel customer journey mapping can help businesses deliver seamless, consistent, and personalized customer experiences across all touchpoints. By integrating data from every channel and leveraging the insights, organizations can uncover valuable opportunities to enhance CX, increase retention, and drive revenue growth. Platforms like RingCentral Contact Center exemplify how unified communication and CRM integration empower businesses to optimize the entire customer journey.
If you want to learn more about CX and how to improve it, visit our Customer Experience Solutions page and check out our blog for additional articles. If you’re ready to implement omnichannel customer journey mapping, reach out to IPC Tech today. Our experts can examine your goals against your communications tech stack to determine what you need for robust omnichannel customer journey mapping capabilities that make the most of each and every channel.