Process Mining and Customer Journey

Use Process Mining to Supercharge Your Customer Journey Mapping

A good customer journey mapping will give you a leg up on your competition. But the mapping usually falls short because it’s hard to nail down your customers’ interactions. Process mining can save the day.

What is the customer journey?

Writer Audra Sorman gives a succinct definition in her surveymonkey.com article Process Mining and Customer Journey:

“The customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand. Instead of looking at just a part of a transaction or experience, the customer journey documents the full experience of being a customer.”

Why is mapping the customer journey important?

Gartner.com contributor Laura Starita states the importance of understanding the customer journey in her February 2020 article Process Mining and Customer Journey:

“Eighty-two percent of organizations have created a customer journey map, but only 47 percent are using those maps effectively. Despite putting hours or days into the plans, working with cross-functional partners, digging into the data and learning more about the customers, nearly half of those organizations are not seeing a return on their time investment.”

In examining why mapping fails, contributors agree on a number of things, one of them being lack of true customer input:

• Sometimes we fall into the trap of believing we know more about our customers than we actually do and we don’t do enough external research.
• Many Journey Maps are created from the wrong perspective. That is an ‘inside-out’ perspective, or ‘what do we do along the customer journey.’ But this will never unearth the information you need to know.
• Basing your (customer journey mapping) on imagination and assumption (rather than customer validation.
• Not including customers… we continually run across these maps that were done by talking to internal employees only.

Process Mining can take your customer journey mapping to the next level.

Process Mining uses your data to quickly identify what you’re looking for and get you to your desired business outcomes. Every day your customers generate a digital footprint when they interact with your company systems. These digital footprints get captured in these systems, such as ERPs, CRMs, application databases, log files, audit tables, Excel documents and many others.

Process Mining shows you how your customers’ data moves through your organization – visualizing and diagraming the actual flow, including variations, exceptions, gaps and siloes. Process Mining will let you know exactly what’s happening by using hard data – it’s true customer input generated by the customers themselves, not an opinion from an interview or survey.

You’ll generate fact-based customer journey maps, gaining greater insights and understanding of your customers’ digital interactions, thereby helping to create a better customer experience.

And, unlike other static parts of customer journey mapping, process mining goes forward to become process monitoring – analyzing the process for current performance against the new customer policies, procedures, standards or best practices you put in place.

Prolifics can help.

The “New Normal” is here. You have a vision – don’t let your customers down. Our Process Mining solutions and experience will get you there. Sit down with us – let’s talk about your challenges, review and reevaluate your customer journey plans and get you started where it makes the most sense.

Vision to Value. Faster. It’s not just our tagline, it’s what drives us. It’s how we deliver solutions and services. It’s our commitment to you – and it’s needed today more than ever. Visit www.prolifics.com or email solutions@prolifics.com.