Today’s empowered customers, choose their path and view the entirety of the experience with your brand across all touchpoints as one connected experience. Your customers interact with you on their own terms, shift preferences, flow across channels, and take unpredictable routes to a fluid destination. As a result, your sales, marketing, and customer experience organizations need to deal with broader issues: customer’s demand for transparency, shorter consumer attention spans, ubiquitous connectivity and access, and traditional channel fatigue. On the other hand, the back-stage functions need to know where the technology and systems issues lie, to understand where individuals customer’s “get stuck or lost,” and drop off the grid altogether.
http://customerthink.com/customer-journey-management-the-key-to-better-customer-engagement/
Research says that it costs 5 times as much to attract a new customer, than to keep an existing one while the chances of selling to an existing customer is 60%-70% and to a new prospect around 5% to 20%. To retain your existing customers its important to understand them. It is not about what you think your customer experience but how your customers feel about doing business with you. It is a pictorial representation of all the steps your customers take when they do business with you over a period of time and their thoughts and feelings at the different stages.
http://customerthink.com/how-to-map-your-customer-journey-to-delight-them-like-never-before/