While NPS is the sum of all experiences with your brand, early life, mid-life and endpoint touchpoints along the journey will have varying degrees of impact on Likelihood to Recommend, and therefore on the Net Promoter Score. Journeys are not always sequential, and sometimes go backwards and forwards, reflecting the various paths which a customer may take while moving along the journey. Yet it is still convenient to think in terms of a series of events.

The experiences with the greatest impact are called “moments of truth.” From the customer’s perspective, moments of truth are the key interactions that make or break their relationship with you, ultimately impacting their decision to stay or leave. If they go well a customer likely stays with you, if they go poorly a customer will be looking at competitive options. A common mistake we often see is that organizations think of moments of truth from the sales point of view, e.g. chose us as a vendor or renewed contract, rather than from your customer’s point of view.

Your data collection design should be reflective of your client’s journey from both the end to end experience perspective and the touchpoint perspective. Solicited customer feedback, along with operational KPIs and financials, can then be layered over the journey to provide an even more powerful view of your client’s experience and contribute to predictive models.

A journey map is a living tool to be revisited and updated with a regular cadence involving customers and internal departments such as sales and operations. Your journey maps allow you to:

• Visualize the end-to-end experience from the customer’s point of view
• Understand how both touchpoint factors (such as processes) and cross-touchpoint factors (such as omni-channel or disparate systems) influence the experience
• Understand what the truly impactful experiences are
• Select the most effective mechanisms to capture data for specific touchpoints
• Determine the timing and frequency of gathering data
• Align functional area accountability
• Establish employee connections to the customer experience
• Underlay multiple data types and metrics to the journey

Journey Mapping Tips

• Use customer language, not internal language, e.g. use “select” or “purchase” rather than sales
• Think sequentially. What does the customer do right before each stage and right after each stage?
• Consider what the customer is trying to accomplish at each stage
• Consider the customer’s expectation at each stage based on your brand promise
• Identify the points of pain a customer might experience at each journey stage
• Identify the moments of truth along the journey – interactions that have high impact
• Document people, processes and systems that align with an individual touchpoint as well as across touchpoints
• Validate your journey maps with actual customers

These foundational NPS practices are critical for understanding and improving the customer experience. Your insights will be limited by your data. Taking your customer strategy to the next level means you’ll need to radically expand the data you routinely analyze and include, going far beyond attitudinal data to operational metrics and data culled from customers’ daily experiences and interactions. To get there, download our guide, take our comprehensive training course, or read about the future of NPS.