At Topdown, we’re not in the business of mapping customer journeys. But as customer communications management (CCM) solution providers, we are in the business of improving customer experience (CX) throughout the customer life cycle – particularly on the service and retention side of the house. And since customer journey maps help focus customer experience improvement efforts, we are very familiar with them.

The only way you’ll ever be able to identify and address customer experience (CX) gaps is by mapping out critical customer journeys to see what works and what doesn’t from the customer’s point of view. To do this, you need to take a close look at very specific customer/company interactions, starting with the ones that most directly impact your business objectives and/or potentially contribute to customer experience gaps that lead to customer attrition.

We've discussed the customer life cycle quite a bit, referring to the entirety of a customer's relationship with your company, from discovering your brand to purchasing a product or service, to using the product or service, to sharing about the experience and beyond. You should always be aware of that overall life cycle, along with all the people, processes and technologies that service customers at each touchpoint along the way.

#ICYMI - Topdown sponsored a free webinar on June 9, 2015, “Managing Customer Communications across the Entire Customer Journey,” featuring Forrester analysts Craig Le Clair and Ted Schadler, along with Topdown’s Director of Marketing, John Zimmerer. Learn what marketing, IT and line-of-business leaders can do today to improve your most critical customer journeys and increase customer lifetime value.

Now that we’re collecting data on visitors and customers at every touchpoint and through every channel throughout the customer life cycle, and we know so much about them – their preferences, their behaviors, their purchasing patterns – personalization must be robust and effective from acquisition to service to retention, right? Wrong. Respondents to the study we commissioned through Forrester Consulting identified insufficient ability to achieve the same degree of personalization across all customer communications as one of the three largest gaps preventing companies from being satisfied with their current CCM solutions.

When we say “360-degree integration,” we mean integrating the people, processes and technology involved in customer communications all the way around the entire customer life cycle. Most customer journeys are going to cross multiple touchpoints, and therefore multiple departments and myriad technologies. There’s a certain amount of integration required to simply deliver content across all the different channels, particularly if you want your customer-facing communication to look, sound and feel like it’s all coming from a single entity (and you do).