How to Create SMART Goals for Your Customer Journey Map

Noor blog author
Noor AI Abid Jun 22, 2017 • 4 min read
Courier Services

Does your company offer an outstanding customer experience, consistently?

The customer of the Internet age wants a seamless, feel-good experience every time they interact with your company, and if they do not get it, they will move on.

In fact, New Voice Media discovered that American companies lose 62 billion dollars a year because of poor customer service. 

The customer journey map is a proven way to improve CX (customer experience). Your first move should be to create SMART goals for this project: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely.

How do you create SMART goals for a customer journey map project?

Let’s get alphabetical:

S is for Specific 

A goal should be specific so that you know how to achieve it, and when you have. An example is below:

  • A general goal: We will involve as many people as possible in the review of our first draft of our customer journey map.
  • A specific goal: We will involve four members from each of our five divisions in the review of our first draft of our customer journey map. All 20 members will be outside of the working team attached to the project.

As you can see, the specific goal allows you to easily measure whether you achieved it, while the general goal allows for various interpretations.

M is for Measurable

Let’s take our example of a specific goal above; this goal is measurable in that you have set a number of divisions and team members to involve in the draft review, though you could add some measurable elements, like this one:   

The review team must reach consensus on these points: The customer journey map is accurate, easy-to-understand, as detailed as possible and useful.

A is for Attainable

A SMART goal is always attainable. Your employees know when a goal is not realistic and will either ignore it, pretending to attempt to achieve it or will feel despondent as they have no concrete goal to work toward.

If you were to burst out of your office, demanding that your marketing team conjure up a customer journey map in one week, you might receive a visual of a basic customer journey, but not one that is the result of true collaboration among the different teams in your company.

R is for Relevant  

Your working team must focus, and goals that do not contribute to the project are distracting and a waste of time.  

Say, you set a goal that the working team create 10 potential design templates for the customer journey map at the beginning of the project. Is this goal relevant to the project’s success? No.

As the necessary data for the project is pulled together, a viable template will begin to suggest itself.

T is for Timely

You need to consider the work that goes into each phase of your customer journey map, including the inclusion of external, and therefore more unpredictable elements, like customers who will be interviewed.

You will need to review the workload of the chosen team and ensure that the time goals that you set are reasonable. You need to consider schedules, predicting overall times by attaching times to smaller tasks, and building a picture from the ground up.

SMART. You’ve got this.

Since launching in 2005, eShipper has been tried, tested and proven by thousands of satisfied customers. We take great pride in our constant innovation on eShipper platform by adding new features, functionalities and services to allow our customers to enjoy a seamless and most user friendly shipping platform. Contact us today to learn more about how to improve your customer service strategy and create the expectional experience your customer's deserve.

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