Your customers have embarked on a journey with your company – but where are they headed? If you’re not confident that your customers are following the path to a lasting and profitable relationship with you, then it’s time to evaluate how well your company is managing the journey. In this infographic, you’ll learn about the five critical milestones that will help ensure that your customer journey leads to the desired destination.

Missteps along the customer journey can have disastrous consequences for your company, so make sure you start off on solid footing. Your strategic focus will pay off in the form of longer lasting customer relationships, better retention and referral rates, and ultimately, more profitable growth for your company.

Knowledge Leads the Way

How well do you understand the journey your customers take with you? If you’re not starting out with a clear understanding of your customers’ journey you’ll have trouble charting the way to the rest of your milestones. Once you understand the journey, you need to know how to establish effective listening posts along the way in order to keeping learning about your customers. Linking your listening strategy to your customer journey will help you pinpoint when and how to listen to gain actionable insights along the way. To get you started down the right path, we’ve created this helpful infographic to provide you with:

• A basic framework for beginning to evaluate and understand the unique journey your customers take with your company
• Three key areas to consider as you monitor and improve your customer touch points
• Insights on how to correctly align the two main types of customer listening with your journey map
• What each type of listening post can tell you about how customers experience their journey with your company

Action Fuels the Journey

But knowledge alone can’t transform the customer journey, only action can.  As our infographic will show you, it’s critical to make sure your employees have the information they need to drive change. For maximum effectiveness, carefully define the process used by employees at all levels to follow up on customer feedback. You may have heard of the closed loop process, but did you know that you need not one, but three closed loops? Find out:

• Four key questions to ask yourself in order to make sure you’re getting information into the hands of your employees in a format that drives action
• The three types of information consumers to keep in mind as you set up reporting and analysis
• Three main goals your closed loop processes can address, and the focus that will help meet each of those goals
• Seven questions to ask as you design an effective closed loop process
• The three-part structure of the enterprise action framework your company should be following in order to promote customer-centricity and achieve success

Profit Is Your Reward

The journey your customers take with your company should lead them to a long, loyal relationship with you — and a willingness to recommend your company to friends, family and colleagues. When that happens, the journey will lead to profitable growth. Our infographic concludes its journey with an example of the greater value Promoters deliver in terms of higher revenues and lower cost to serve.

Make sure your customers’ journey is on the right track. Download the full infographic above.

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