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.

#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.

In the just-published Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management Systems, Q1 2015 report, analyst Ted Schadler discusses the role of web content management (WCM) systems in a customer journey. He lists the many tools and channels involved in managing customers' digital experiences in this graphic:

For immediate release North Pole – Claus Global Enterprises, the beloved worldwide seasonal package delivery service headed by founder and CEO Kris Kringle, has announced its plan to adopt CLIENT LETTER document output for customer communications management (DOCCM) software from Topdown to enhance its customer engagement capabilities. According to Jingle Belle, Director of Elf Operations, “Every year, our volume of correspondence increases seemingly exponentially. As an organization that serves literally the entire planet, we’ve never been able to keep up with our correspondence the way we’d like. But now the children of the world are able to contact us through so many different channels, and they expect personalized responses and a great customer experience from us. We realized we need a customer communications management solution.”