With front-to-end customer experience emerging as the key driver of brand loyalty in the COVID age, new research from global marketing technology and services firm Ansira Partners offers a comprehensive look at how enterprise-level companies are implementing a customer journey-mapping strategy as a part of their marketing plans.
“At Ansira, we have seen first-hand the impact customer journey mapping can have as a tool for improving customer experience, and an interesting finding in this research is that that only 39 percent of the companies surveyed currently utilize a defined journey map, while 51 percent are currently building or plan to create journey maps in the future,” said Kelly Jo Sands, EVP of Ansira Digital, in a news release. “With the importance of customer experience at an all-time high, investing the resources to put a customer journey strategy in place is quickly becoming table stakes to compete within and beyond your industry.”
The new report, The Enterprise Perspective on Customer Journey Mapping, conducted in partnership with marketing research firm Ascend2 and based on survey data of more than 120 top marketers, discovered multiple key points, including:
- Customers have inherent needs when they engage with brands that are both functional and emotional.
- Without centralized first-party customer data, even the best marketing and data science technology cannot understand or act on customer journey pathing. Of those surveyed, 32 percent found that decentralized data and data silos were barriers to success.
- The most effective journey maps are those that encourage an enterprise view, bridging teams across the organization by reflecting the cross-department dependencies and inputs.
- Customer journey maps are not a “one size fits all” strategic enterprise. The survey showed that 55 percent utilize 3-5 journey maps, while 15 percent utilize 6-10.
“As customers become more savvy and their expectations continue to rise, we knew that gaining the perspective of top marketers at enterprise companies would both illuminate and validate the importance of customer journey mapping,” said Todd Lebo, CEO of Ascend2, in the release.
“We surveyed a panel of marketers at both the executive and practitioner levels, as well as B2B and B2C sales channels, to get a clear view of what’s working, where there are barriers, and what have emerged as best practices,” Lebo continued. “This report can serve as a playbook for companies already working with journey maps, and those who are just now starting to use them to better reach their customers.”
Download the full report here.
Sands and Lebo took a deep dive into the customer journey mapping research at the Edge of the CX virtual event on November 17.