Crafting AI Customer Journey Maps

Creating a customer journey map with AI can help throughout the stages of the exercise in multiple ways. We have already discussed in a previous blog about how Artificial Intelligence can support the creation and development of Personas, which is an important initial step to take before mapping your journeys.

As part of the Customer Experience framework, mapping a customer journey requires gathering various stakeholders and brainstorming around the relationship cycle between the customer and the brand.

The technique brings valuable gains in sharing experiences across teams, uncovering customer pain points and detecting opportunities, but the creation and maintenance of the map over time requires effort and persistent resource.

No matter your business’ level of CX maturity or team size, AI is a relevant technology to use to alleviate common challenges of time, data and resources.

How to get started with AI and customer journey mapping

Much like the persona step, a CX team has multiple considerations when selecting a structure for their map and its elements.

Cemantica platform users are familiar with useful start points such as templates and sample data, but AI (our assistant Alex) goes further and suggests (and can even create) a complete journey map with swimlanes, stages and content based on your own organizational data, using a natural language prompt that the CX team describe.

Simple steps to use AI for journey maps in Cemantica

1. Choose “Generate with Alex AI” when creating a new journey map
2. Enter a prompt in natural language to brief Alex, the better and more contextual your description, the better the outcome. Follow AI prompt best practices but an example would be "Create a journey map for a multi-national retailer (digital and physical stores) of cookware, operating in 10 countries in Western Europe who manufacturers its own products of high-end pots and pans."
3. Select the Persona from your library, if you don´t choose your own, AI will pick the most frequently used persona or if your library is empty Alex will create one for you.
4. Select the elements you want to see in your map, touchpoints, pains, gains, opportunities and solutions can be clicked.
5. Generate the map with a simple click.

What does a journey map created by AI look like?

Artificial intelligence has automatically extracted transactional, sentimental and operational data to provide the detailed journey map:

• Map title and summary
• Persona profile
• Multiple journey stages (with descriptions and images)
• Touchpoints with persona interactions
• Insights derived from interactions
• Opportunities detected (multiple per stage of journey)
• Solutions suggested (multiple per opportunity)

The more data you start to add or make available, the richer your journey map becomes automatically – artificial intelligence can constantly suggest new insights and initiatives based on what´s changed.

Take for example if you are running a VoC program. Not only can it generate new insights, but AI can automatically draw the main and alternative routes customers take when interacting with the brand based on data analysis of customer feedback that is being ingested. This visualization can help you understand better where to put the focus on fixing frictions.

How can AI-powered customer journey mapping support your CX goals?

Customer journey mapping with AI is a powerful way to enhance Customer Experience. Artificial intelligence and Customer Experience management are the perfect match, here´s how…

1. Deeper insights at scale: Because AI can analyze vast amounts of data to uncover patterns in customer behavior, preferences and pain points across every touchpoint. This helps businesses understand their customers better, quicker and keep adapting their strategies.
2. Efficient use of resources and data: Not only does AI automate the data analysis process, making it faster and more accurate, but it can work quickly from best practice approaches and frameworks to spin up journey map elements and content. This reduces the time and effort required to create and update customer journey maps.
3. Real-time adjustments: AI can provide real-time insights and recommendations from new information such as customer feedback from your VoC data, allowing businesses to adjust the CX program and tasks on the fly. This ensures that customer experiences are always optimized and the right priorities are kept.
4. Personalization at scale: AI supports a targeted approach from the beginning of your journey mapping process, from creating and enriching Personas through to uncovering Pain points and Gains of the customers in the journey and then automatically suggesting Solutions and Opportunities to make the fixes and do more of what they want.
5. Predictive analytics: AI can predict future customer behaviors and needs by analyzing past interactions and data patterns. Artificial intelligence also helps with scenario-building to support decision-making and setting priorities, freeing up the CX team to act on the insights proactively rather than get lost in vast amounts of unstructured data.
6. Faster and targeted CX task execution: Once your journey mapping creates outcomes of tasks, AI can help all teams to get there faster whether its marketing campaigns, customer service Knowledge Base or Chatbots or supporting sales with deeper customer insights in their CRM.

Remember, artificial intelligence is another tool for a CX team of humans to support and enhance your work, not replace it.

Try AI journey mapping in Cemantica

In Cemantica, our AI Assistant Alex is ready and waiting to help you create and enrich your data-infused journey maps, so you can work smarter more easily. Why not ask us to show you Alex in action in a demonstration online and request a free trial?