Customer journey mapping is an important exercise that helps companies understand their customer’s perspective so they can meet needs and expectations. It also drives companies to reach all the business goals for individual customers – such as long-term engagement, buying additional products or services, or becoming a reference. The customer journey map itself is a visual diagram of the way your customers engage with you throughout the buying cycle. From the time they learn your company’s name or find you on Google, all the way to the time they purchase their first product/service from you, and even beyond that.

In 2017, leading organizations will extend the value of customer journey mapping initiatives by doing two things:

1) Operationalize them

Customer journey mapping is a common exercise, but the real challenge is turning the customer journey map from a theoretical framework or tracking mechanism into a practical tool that proactively guides customers throughout their journeys. Many companies have tried to capture every aspect of their business with customer journey mapping, and as a result, created beautiful documents that did little more than sit on the shelf. Operationalized customer journey maps are used, not just by marketing to shape the entire customer experience, but also by every customer facing individual in every customer interaction. That means baking customer journey maps into the CRM tool used by sales and service. By doing this, those customer-facing individuals know exactly where their customer is in the journey; and are also given prescriptive guidance that tells them what they should do next. And, the resulting CRM data can them be mapped back to customer journey analytics and reporting.

At Troop.Works CRM, we now have a Customer Journey plug-in that shows an individual customer’s progress through the journey, and an advanced customer decision workflow panel, which quickly describes every task or action that a customer-facing professional like a seller must complete in order to help a customer advance to the next decision stage. This helps ope-rationalize the customer journey and bake it into the day-to-day work process of a sales or service person.

2) Add cognitive capabilities throughout the customer journey

Engagement throughout the customer journey, and across all parts of the organization delivering that journey – marketing, sales and service – can benefit from cognitive technologies. As one example, Troop.Works CRM is working with IBM Watson and other technologies to add cognitive insight and enrichment for CRM users. You’ll hear more about this shortly.