According to research conducted by CEB, 94% of customers who have a low-effort customer service experience will buy from that same company again. Customer experience journey mapping offers a powerful tool to understand and enhance that experience, and ultimately increase revenue.

A successful CX journey map demonstrates how the customer views the entire experience from start to finish, giving your SaaS company key information to better understand and improve how the customer interacts with your business.

When you begin this mapping process, there are a number of critical stages that your company should go through to realize maximize returns.

1. Conveying the Value of Customer Experience Journey Mapping

Employees may find the process of customer experience journey mapping tedious. Anything that takes away precious time for sales, promotion, or customer support will be met with some frustration. Therefore, SaaS companies must convey to employees the importance of this exercise and how it will increase revenue.

By breaking down the entire customer experience across different touchpoints, a company can identify specific ways to optimize conversion rates, increase upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and reduce churn. Make sure to convey this to staff using language that all employees understand to help make a connection between the map and the business. This will keep staff motivated during the exercise so that they take full advantage of the mapping process.

2. Seeing your Product through the Eyes of the Customer

As an insider, it becomes difficult to overcome biases and see through the eyes of the customer. Therefore, the process of customer experience journey mapping should include the input of multiple employees who have frequent contact with customers. This would include members of the marketing, sales, and customer support departments. Gather input from representatives of these departments. Get everyone around a whiteboard to collectively brainstorm the perspective of the customer through the many touchpoints. Utilizing actual customer feedback collected from customers themselves can also help with this process.

3. Identifying Customer Touchpoints

When creating a design for customer experience journey mapping, your company must identify the many ways customers interact with the company. With outlets such as social media becoming more important, businesses must consider a wider pathway to purchasing than ever before. To avoid overcomplicating the process, begin by breaking down basic elements of the customer journey. This starts with initial contact on to purchasing, sales support, and if all goes well, subscription renewal.

Using these basic elements throughout the customer journey, a company can further break down mapping according to the different ways a customer can reach the company. For example, through the website, social media, phone, face to face, word of mouth, email, etc. This creates a simplified yet useful way to view the entire journey with the view through different channels.

4. How to Use Your Map to Make Improvements

So you’ve drawn the journey map using input from multiple sources… now what? Remember the central purpose of mapping is to increase revenue. In order to do that, companies need to look at the journey map and identify areas to make improvements.

For example, can your company find a way to minimize human touch points causing bottlenecks? Can you introduce self-service in these areas such as an online resource center, tutorials, or videos? Introducing online guidance software such as WalkMe can further improve self-service by guiding users with contextual step-by-step instructions through purchasing process.

At the end of the day, CX journey mapping identifies bad patterns in customer experience. Resolving those issues will not only welcome new customers, but also retain valuable, loyal customers, reduce churn, and increase renewals, meaning more money in the hands the company staff.