Customer Journey Mapping Across Every Touchpoint to Maximize CX Impact
Executive Summary: By strategically mapping the entire customer journey and analyzing each touchpoint with direct feedback, surveys, and qualitative insights like ride-alongs, utilities can uncover hidden pain points, friction, and unmet customer needs. Kat Wyatt, Research Consultant at Bellomy, explores how mapping the entire customer journey across every touchpoint enables utilities to reduce customer effort, increase satisfaction, and build advocacy lasting loyalty.
Customer journey mapping helps utilities connect strategic initiatives directly to measurable business outcomes. This method goes beyond traditional process maps or service blueprints, delving into the subtle details that give color and depth to each customer’s perception of their utility experience.
This strategic approach allows utilities to optimize every stage of the customer journey, from onboarding and everyday interactions to critical moments like outage resolution, ensuring that investments in technology, processes, and staff training deliver measurable improvements. The result is stronger engagement, higher trust, and tangible business outcomes, turning each interaction into an opportunity to enhance satisfaction, advocacy loyalty, and long-term customer value.
Customer Journey Mapping Across Every Touchpoint to Maximize CX Impact
From the moment a new customer moves in, every interaction and touchpoint is an area that affects perceptions. Customer satisfaction is not just about having competitive pricing or reliable service; it’s about addressing those small, hidden moments that have a large impact.
Strategic customer journey mapping, analyzing and visualizing the full range of customer experiences from service activation through outage resolution, has become instrumental for organizations seeking to understand and improve the real moments that influence how customers view their service provider.
This type of customer experience tracking helps utilities connect strategic initiatives directly to measurable business outcomes. This method goes beyond traditional process maps or service blueprints, delving into the subtle details that give color and depth to each customer’s perception of their utility experience.
The Power of Strategic Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping is about placing the customer (not the company) at the heart of operational improvement. For utility providers, this means viewing the entire journey: from the moment a customer signs up for service, through their everyday interactions, to those high-stakes situations like outages or billing disputes.
Strategic journey mapping is not just a documentation exercise but a way to achieve actionable insights. Done well, it uncovers the big moments that have a large impact on customer satisfaction and brand perception. These insights are goldmines, guiding targeted experience (CX) improvements and ensuring every investment in technology, artificial intelligence, training, or process change is honed in on measurable results.
Knowing the Ins and Outs: Exposing the Customer’s Interactions & True Path
Utility companies often struggle with knowing the hidden blind spots along customer journeys. These unseen gaps between internal assumptions and the actual experiences of customers can undermine even the most well-intentioned efforts.
Mapping customer interactions and comparing them against internal processes highlights these disconnects. They often occur in handoffs between departments and digital pathways that seem logical to employees but confuse customers. Without thorough exploration, these pain points remain hidden and can eat away at satisfaction in significant ways.
Identifying these blind spots is critical to effective journey mapping, exposing unseen hurdles and missed opportunities that can change a simple interaction into a moment of friction or unexpected delight. This means questioning every assumption about the journey, seeking out the disconnects that customers may never vocalize but nonetheless feel acutely.
For Example: The Journey of Reporting a Streetlight Outage
This journey map of the beginning processes of reporting a streetlight outage makes it abundantly clear where blind spots are in the customer journey and potential key areas where satisfaction can be won or lost.
This example shows the importance of measuring customer experience metrics at every step of the journey.
To build a truly strategic customer journey map, utilities must go beyond their own assumptions of how customers interact with them. This means delving into the real, lived experiences of customers.
- What do they actually do (not just what you think they do) when onboarding, paying a bill, checking usage, or reporting an issue?
- Where are the pain points or areas that increase satisfaction?
- How do their journeys differ across segments: residential, commercial, low-income, or tech-savvy?
Working with a strategic research partner is essential to ensuring utilities are able to go beyond assumptions to embrace a true understanding of the customer journey.
This level of understanding requires a dual approach:
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Quantitative insight: Data from internal systems, call logs, website analytics, and surveys provide an overall view of patterns and pain points.
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Qualitative immersion: Deep-dive interviews, focus groups, and, most especially, customer ride-alongs, where staff shadow or observe real customers moving through their journeys.
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Turn qualitative feedback and ride-along observations into actionable strategies for measurable CX improvements. Download Bellomy’s Voice of Customer insights to uncover hidden pain points, understand real customer behaviors, and identify opportunities to improve satisfaction and loyalty.
In this guide, you’ll discover techniques and real-world applications to make your utility more customer-centric, leading to measurable improvements in areas that matter most:
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Enhance customer satisfaction
- Boost brand advocacy
- Drive product and services innovation
For over 30 years, Bellomy has been providing strategic insights consulting, advanced analytics, and insights technology to help organizations like yours collect, analyze, and drive action through data, ensuring smart decisions and effective outcomes. Don't miss out on these valuable methods to drive success. Download your complimentary VoC guide today!
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The Value of Customer Ride-Alongs
Customer ride-alongs are an often underutilized yet transformative tool in the utility CX toolset. They involve directly observing customers as they engage with your service, capturing not only what they do, but how they feel as they navigate their journey.
Ride-alongs uncover preferred paths and workarounds that are impossible to capture through traditional surveys or data analysis alone.
One Bellomy study that included ride-alongs uncovered certain areas of a utility’s outage map that were not intuitive to users, particularly where customers should go to report an outage that was not showing on the map.
By observing customers and listening to their feedback during these sessions, it was determined that a prominent “Report” button would address this need directly, which the utility subsequently implemented.
This straightforward solution has the potential to lower call volume and reduce customer frustration that would have otherwise been unknown.
Mapping the Full Utility Customer Journey
Let’s take a closer look at the stages involved in mapping the utility customer journey and how intentional focus at each stage can drive satisfaction and measurable business results.
1. Starting Service: Making the First Impression Count
The onboarding stage sets the tone for the entire relationship. New customers form their expectations based on how easy or difficult it is to sign up and start service.
Key moments include:
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Account creation: Is the process straightforward, or does it require excessive documentation and steps?
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Service activation: How quickly is the service connected? Are customers kept informed of timelines?
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Welcome communication: Are customers proactively provided with information on billing, outage alerts, or conservation programs?
A journey mapping exercise here might reveal, for example, that customers are confused by the lack of clear instructions for setting up online accounts, leading to calls into the contact center. Armed with this insight, utilities can streamline digital flows, enhance welcome communications, and reduce costly calls into customer support.
2. Everyday Use: Keeping the Experience Effortless
Once onboarded, customers interact with their utility in many different ways (e.g., checking balances, understanding usage, updating account details, asking questions).
Mapping at this stage uncovers:
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Preferred channels: Do certain segments favor mobile apps, while others prefer phone or in-person service?
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Self-service efficacy: Are self-service tools intuitive, or do they lead to inquiries into customer support?
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Proactive engagement: Are customers surprised by bills, or are they alerted to unusual usage patterns early on?
Here, ride-alongs might highlight that certain groups find online forms confusing, suggesting a need for simplified interfaces or additional support. Furthermore, monitoring experiences using a CX platform (like Bellomy’s Research Cloud) can assist in identifying early indicators of pain points encountered in these regular touchpoints.
3. Outage Resolution: Navigating Critical Moments
Outage resolution is perhaps the most emotionally charged utility customer journey. Utility service is viewed as essential by nearly all customers, and any delay or miscommunication here can have a disproportionate impact on satisfaction and trust.
Mapping this journey involves:
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Outage reporting: How easy is it for customers to notify the utility of a problem? Are multiple channels available?
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Communication: Are customers kept up to date about estimated restoration times and progress?
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Resolution and feedback: After service is restored, are customers given the opportunity to provide feedback or ask follow-up questions?
By following real customers through this process, either via direct observation or by reviewing their full journey data, utilities often discover unexpected hurdles: lengthy IVR menus, unclear web forms, or gaps in follow-up communication.
Monitoring customer satisfaction scores here helps quantify the impact of these friction points.
Bellomy is far more than a customer insights vendor to us here at Entergy.
Bellomy is our trusted thought partner that stands beside us in meeting our overall business challenges. We sincerely appreciate our relationship and association with Bellomy.
—Tracie Boutte | Vice President, Customer Experience at Entergy (now retired)
Turning Insight into Action with Measurable CX Improvements
The value of customer journey mapping, however, is only fully realized when insights drive action and measurable improvement. Utilities that excel in CX use journey maps as essential and fluid documents, continuously updating as customer expectations shift or operations change. Many employ an online customer panel to obtain iterative input directly from customers to inform continuous updates and improvements.
Key steps for translating mapping insight into results include:
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Prioritizing moments that matter: Not all touchpoints are equal. Focus on those that have the greatest impact on satisfaction and trust, particularly during critical events like outages or billing disputes.
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Designing targeted interventions: Use journey insights to inform investments in digital self-service tools, proactive communication systems, or staff training for empathy and efficiency.
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Measuring impact: Track key customer experience metrics (Overall Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, Experience Satisfaction, call volume, digital adoption rates) before and after interventions, ensuring every dollar spent generates measurable CX gains across satisfaction, advocacy loyalty, and customer lifetime value.
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Closing the loop: Regularly seek feedback post-intervention, using surveys and customer interviews (including follow-up ride-alongs) to confirm improvements hit the mark.
Journey Mapping as a CX Game-Changer Beyond Customer Experience Metrics
Strategic customer journey mapping is more than a trend in utilities; it’s a way to truly understand all aspects of customer interactions and how customers perceive the entire experience. By uncovering blind spots and deeply understanding the ins and outs of customer experiences beyond just metrics, utilities can pinpoint the moments that truly matter.
This is where Bellomy can be an invaluable strategic research partner. By leveraging Bellomy's expertise in customer journey mapping, utilities can uncover hidden pain points, identify key moments that drive satisfaction, and implement targeted improvements that yield measurable results.
In today’s competitive landscape, the utilities that excel will be those who view every interaction as an opportunity to build trust and take the next steps toward extraordinary customer service.
Partner with Bellomy to map your customer journey, reveal friction points, and transform insights into measurable CX improvements.
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