Most companies spend most of their customer-focused dollars on acquisition (aka, the top of the marketing funnel). Businesses constantly seek fresh blood because of the churn among their customer base. Yet it’s almost always costlier to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. When you lose a customer, it’s usually because something went bad on the customer journey.

This is the latest installment in a series of posts exploring a new model of employee communication, designed to deliver measurable results that demonstrate the impact on the organization in ways that matter to leaders.

The four overlapping circles at the center of the model represent the best opportunities for employee communication to affect an organization on a day-to-day basis. This post looks at the customer journey map, the first of three elements of the third circle, the Customer Experience (CX).

The customer journey is the cumulative sum of all of a customer’s experiences with your organization. These experiences tend to be linear: first experience with the company, first purchase, customer support interactions, and so on. The way to cultivate the customer experience is to understand every step of the journey and ensure each step meets or exceeds expectations. There are three kinds of touchpoints on the customer journey:

• Interaction with your people, products, and services
• Digital engagement
• Your outreach efforts

Interaction with your people, products, and services—Every time your customer intersects with the organization, the people they interact with have an opportunity to better understand and/or improve their experience. People give up on companies when they have to deal with unknowledgeable or rude company representatives, out-of-stock items, a product or service experience that doesn’t match the promise, a dingy and disorganized retail space, frustrating policies—you can undoubtedly recall an experience that caused you to stop doing business somebody.

Digital engagement—The journey potentially also includes interaction with your brand online. When they visit your website, does it provide the information or transactions they’re looking for? Is it easy to find? When they ask a question on Twitter or Facebook, do they get timely and useful answers? Do well enough and they could end up following your social media accounts, learning about special offers and new products while feeling like something of an insider. Are you paying attention to what customers say about you in public forums and review sites, then responding? (Where I work, we’re adopting a policy of replying with substantive answers to every employee review left on Glassdoor.) How you react to a customer’s online interactions with your brand will not only influence their loyalty but paint a picture of what others can expect if they did business with you.

Your outreach efforts—How do you follow up with a customer to make sure they’ve had the best experience possible? Do you survey them about their most recent interaction? Do you invite them to subscribe to an email mailing list that delivers useful content?

The Customer Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map has become a standard sales/marketing activity. The map simply notes every possible contact touchpoint a customer might have with your company or brand. Underlying each touchpoint is an understanding of the actions the customer might take during the interaction, what it will take to move them to the next stage, the emotions at play during each interaction, where they could be confused or frustrated, and the obstacles they might face (such as price, shipping costs, onerous policies, a slow-loading website, or a long hold time waiting for customer support).

Few companies will have just one customer journey map, just as few would have only one customer profile. My first corporate job was with ARCO, which sold its products to airlines who locked into fuel contracts for years in advance and to drivers who filled their tanks at ARCO gas stations. The journey of the B2B customer bears little resemblance to the individual gassing up, who could be a high school student with her first car, a long-distance trucker, a commuter heading to work, an Amazon delivery guy, or a police officer with a department squad car.

Customer journey maps usually appear in infographic form, displayed in timeline fashion. It’s a visual reminder that tells a story. Think of the customer journey the same way you would think about Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. (The 12 stages of the Hero’s Journey is at the heart of most works of fiction, from Star Wars to The Wizard of Oz. It begins with the hero living an ordinary life in the ordinary world when suddenly he is called on a quest or adventure. He initially refuses, then meets with a mentor who gets him to cross the threshold into the adventure, where he encounters tests, allies, and enemies, and so on until he prevails.)

“Customer Journey Map - CJM. Organization teambuilding” by Nastia Diadenchuk is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Just as screenwriters and novelists plumb the Hero’s Journey, companies that understand the customer’s tale can anticipate and every twist and turn, surprising and delighting the customer along the way. Put another way, with the Customer Journey map in front of you, you can direct the movie so every scene is one of satisfaction and happiness.

The Employee Communications Role

So far, all of this sounds like a job for sales and marketing. Internal communicators have outsized roles to play, though.

First, consider the number of employees in your organization who never, ever actually interact with a customer. In nearly every industry, most employees never see a customer. Product designers, engineers, accountants, HR and IT staffs, factory workers, logistics planners, and other behind-the-scenes staff are well isolated from customers.

It’s up to internal communications to bring the customer to life, both generally and specifically. Generally, internal communicators can help employees understand customers and get familiar with their expectations and the market forces that affect their relationship with the organization. Specifically, each employee needs to know their role in the customer journey: Where do I have an impact on a customer touchpoint? Engineers create products that are easy or hard to use. Loading dock workers determine whether a customer gets the right package at the right time. An IT staffer’s efforts can make ensure a customer’s privacy or put it at risk.

The former is easier than the latter. Over the course of my career, I’ve undertaken a number of approaches to getting employees close to the customer. At one company, we ran a customer profile in every issue of the monthly employee magazine; in each profile, we listed what the customer liked about doing business with us and what they liked about working with our competitors. At another company, I arranged lunch-and-learns where employees could come have lunch and talk with a customer. Once at Mattel I published a dozen letters that kids had mailed to the company.

Back in September 2016, I shared a post with nine ideas for connecting employees with customers, including customer jams, sharing customer posts on social media, talking to employees who are also customers, and making sure leaders talk about customers at town halls and in other forums.

Communication that connects employees to customers is important on a number of levels. Knowing what dissatisfies customers can lead to any employee innovating a solution, not just those whose work is directly linked to a specific touchpoint. I once worked with a leader who asked employees, “If you don’t work directly with a customer, help somebody who does.” Most employees wouldn’t know who that might be, a problem that can be solved by connecting employees and customers. And getting to know the customer will make employees care more about how they can improve the touchpoints over which they have some control.

Helping each employee understand how their actions can make or break a given touchpoint is a more complicated matter. Fortunately, every employee has a manager: Every manager presumably knows how the work of their direct reports connects with any given touchpoint. It is through your manager-focused communication that you can help employees direct their energies at delivering on the customer’s behalf. We discussed how to communicate with managers in part 16 of this series. At the most basic level, your manager communication can remind managers to help their reports with the line of sight from their job to the customer journey. Other activities can include spotlighting managers who do it well (since recognition has a big impact on behavior), providing tools and resources to help managers do this part of their job, and including it in any manager communication training you develop.

I’ll focus on touchpoints in the next installment in this series.

The graphics for this series were created by Brian O’Mara-Croft.