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Hackathons are a great opportunity to get developers and other creative minds together to make ideas into workable solutions, and Zendesk’s recent event did just that. The company’s annual Zendevian Cup was the reason the Pathfinder app, a solution to better understand the customer journey, was born.

Understanding how and where customers get their help is an integral part of marketing, mostly because customers today use many digital touch points to interact with customer service. Mapping the customer journey helps to give a better grasp on what motivates your customers – what their needs, wants, and concerns are. By aligning those needs with a resolution, businesses can see if the customer has not only achieved their goals, but if they’re doing a good job of meeting the customer needs.

Zendesk’s Pathfinder app “…helps businesses know where they can improve their self-service if customers open tickets frequently after viewing certain forums and articles,” according to the company’s recent blog post.

Even one of the biggest names in community action saw great results with Pathfinder.

According to Change.org’s James Baldwin, “Pathfinder gives us invaluable context and insights into the customer journey, allowing us to personalize interactions, solve issues more efficiently, and optimize the full experience for our users. With Pathfinder, we’re able to spend less time going back and forth with our customers and more time forging meaningful relationships with the people driving change in their communities and the world.”

This app is a tool to better map the customer journey, an effective process in understanding the customer’s experience within an organization.

The most foundational step in customer journey mapping is identifying the touch points where your customer interacts with your organization. For instance, in the car buying process, major touch points might be taking a test drive or sitting down at the salesperson’s desk to negotiate price.

While mapping the customer’s journey has value, the ultimate goal is to improve the customer’s experience by understanding what they go through at each touch point and improving the quality of that experience.

Pathfinder provides more personalized support, improves self-service, and reduces customer frustration, all of which are important components to the customer mapping process.