Customer journey mapping is essential for organizations of all sizes. Customer expectations vary across all business sizes, and an omnichannel strategy is the only way to address their pain points.
The customer journey map is one of the most powerful tools for understanding customer expectations and delivering on their needs.
It helps you understand your customer’s experience, a crucial factor in building an effective one.
After you understand your customers’ journey, you can better plan your product or service offerings to meet their expectations and deliver on their needs.
In this article, let’s look at what a client journey map is, its various elements, and how to create one and turn data into a winning customer experience.
What are some of the best ways to stay ahead of customer expectations and deliver a more effective customer experience? What are the best techniques available to turn data into a winning customer experience?
One of the foremost ways to deliver the best for your customers is through a customer journey map.
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The purpose of a customer journey map is to highlight your customers’ experience from the moment they arrive on your website/app through the point at which they contact you.
The map is the visual representation of the journey that a customer follows while interacting with your product or service. It can be used to understand, improve, and refine your current processes.
It can help you understand how customers find your product or service, why they find it useful, and ultimately, the reasons why they come back.
Creating a customer journey map is extremely useful for understanding what happens at every point in the customer’s journey through your website and other channels.
Every interaction with the customer is an opportunity to make an informed decision about whether to act.
This kind of mapping will help you identify how to improve your products and services and move your business forward.
Customer journey mapping is a process that large corporations have used for years, but now, thanks to rapid advances in technology, it has found its way into the hands of small businesses as well.
It provides a company with the opportunity to ensure it is not neglecting any important customer interaction.
To get the most out of a customer journey map, give it plenty of time and focus on it rather than moving from task to task. This will help you fully understand your audience’s needs and wants.
Customer Experience Journey Map Stages
This is a (minimum) four-stage process.
1. The customer is aware of your product or service, but not yet engaged. You can establish this stage by including several pages of questions that will require the customers to make decisions about your product or service.
At this stage, your customer is aware of your product or service and is researching it to determine whether they want to buy it and how much it will cost.
Example: What is this product, and what does it mean to you? What are the benefits of the product? Who is it for? What is it supposed to accomplish? What are the pros and cons? Why should I choose this product over other alternatives?
2. You now have an aware customer who knows about your product or service completely. In this 2nd stage, you want to encourage them to do additional research and comparison shopping.
Example: We offer same-day shipping and the best prices around.
3. The customer has purchased your product or service, i.e., the customer becomes engaged with your product or service. In this stage, your audience will begin using your product or service, and you will be able to track their purchase history, comments, and social networking activity.
Example: To ensure the customer is comfortable with your product or service, we have included several FAQs and user guides.
Example: Do you know that the product can be used for multiple applications?
4. After the customer is engaged, they become loyal to the product or service. In this stage, your audience has developed a positive relationship with your product or service, making them more comfortable using it.
Create A Customer Experience Strategy
A customer journey map is part of your overall customer experience strategy.
Recognize that customer experience is the single most crucial factor in whether a customer will buy from you.
Therefore, you should ensure your service offers an exciting, engaging customer experience so customers are willing to go out of their way to buy from you.
Here are some of the essential stages of your customer experience strategy:
Define the customer
- Pre-purchase: Collecting information from customers to understand their needs
Explore
- Identify the customer’s problem, and when to act
- Explore the customer’s background, history, beliefs, preferences, etc
Compare
- Compare your product or service with similar products and services
Purchase
- Make the customer feel as if he/she is going to get something valuable
- Create a sense of urgency: if you want to win customers, give them a reason to buy from you.
- Tell them why you’re doing so
- Be clear on what you need them to do and when you need it done
Advise
- Teach the customer what to do next so that they can handle the problem without your help
- Provide ‘a-ha’ moments where they understand how the product or service works
- Inform and instruct them so that he/she can learn to make a decision based on their own knowledge. This is especially useful for those who are new to your product or service
- Tell them why they need to do what you want them to do
Specifically, here are tips to boost your customer experience, the things that can improve the day-to-day experience of your customers and make their lives easier:
Make it easy to use your product. If there’s a way you can make it easier for your customers to find your product, whether by making it easier to find on your website or by posting tutorials on YouTube, do it.
Make sure they can easily find your products and use them as intended. Build a customer-centric culture in your company.
You want your team to think of customers as more than just someone who uses your product or service.
You want your team to consider them as people first, and then customers of the product you’re building.
If your team can get better at talking to customers, they can actually hear what they have to say, and in turn, it can help you improve your products.
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Different Types of Customer Journey Maps
There are at least three types of customer journey maps:
- Traditional Journey Maps
- Customer Experience Maps
- Voice of Customer (VOC) Maps
Traditional Journey Maps: A traditional customer journey map is simple and shows you the general path a customer takes from their first encounter with your product to purchase.
A traditional customer journey map shows what happens to a customer. It also shows the general path from the first encounter with your product to purchase.
This is now considered to be a largely outdated way of mapping.
Customer Experience Maps: A visual representation of the customer’s experience with a company.
Customer Experience Maps are becoming an increasingly important tool for companies to determine how their customers perceive them.
A Customer Experience Map is another type of customer journey map that shows the different steps along your customer’s path. It may show the steps a customer takes to get to a purchase.
This type of map does not show where a customer starts the journey. A customer experience map is an effective way of visualizing complex customer interactions in business.
Like all customer journey maps, a Customer Experience Map is not just for new customers. It is helpful for those with loyal customers as well. That is, this map does not show a traditional funnel.
Instead, it shows the different touchpoints and how customers interact with your product or service as they use it.
Because this map does not show where a customer starts the journey, it may show customers at different stages of their journey as they move through your product or service.
Voice of Customer (VOC) Maps: This is a customer journey map that shows the different steps along your customer’s path to finding a new product or service.
It may show the steps a customer takes as he is searching for a solution to his problem.
In this example, a customer starts by filling out a form on the company’s website. He may then watch a video and continue his journey by reading written information.
He may then take a test and continue his journey. This customer journey map illustrates the different steps along a customer’s path.
It does not show where a customer starts the journey. The end of the customer journey is when the customer decides to buy the product.
How to Create A Customer Journey Map
- Identify the significant activities in your business
- Set your business targets
- Define the touchpoints
- Understand the buyer persona, including the person’s interests
- Map the events that occur along your customer’s journey
- Identify areas that have a higher level of urgency
- Assess the current quality of service you offer
- Map pain points between stages and solutions
Your buyer persona should be an amalgamation of your customers’ needs and wants.
To create a successful buyer persona, you need to understand what the customer wants and needs before you sell them anything.
This can be achieved through customer surveys, focus groups, interviews, and market research.
How you set about creating your buyer persona will depend on your product or service and what you are selling.
For example, if you are selling luxury cars, you need to design a buyer persona who can afford them.
It means looking at affluent potential buyers who prefer expensive brands.
It is important to note that when designing your buyer persona, you should avoid restricting yourself to a single customer type.
Also, make sure that you include a wide variety of customer types in your buyer persona.
This will allow you to tap into market segments with similar needs.
The personality traits of buyers who will purchase your product or service should not be limited to gender, age, educational background, or occupation.
Customer journey maps should carry all the touchpoints. Customers want to communicate with companies through a variety of channels.
Customers follow different routes on these maps as well, and those routes must be reflected on the maps.
When making the map, start by looking at who your customers are and the various touchpoints they have with your company.
For example, to design a customer journey map for sales professionals, they should include the following touchpoints:
– Account managers and representatives
– Customer contact centres
– Information retrieval systems such as websites, mobile applications,
– Search engines
– Smartphones
– Interactive voice response (IVR) systems
It is also a good idea to include customer complaints, forums, blogs, and social media connections as touchpoints.
Once you have identified the touchpoints, use a mind map to organize your ideas. Then start sketching the map.
There are no laid-down protocols for this, but specific guidelines. Draw a map showing how your customers interact with your company.
Keep in mind that the look and feel of your maps should be consistent throughout the map-making process.
That is why the colors, fonts, and imagery used on customer journey maps should not be a one-time decision.
It must be dynamic so it can be adapted to each company's needs.
Customer Journey Analytics
Customer journey analytics is the process of analyzing where your customers are in their buying process and how you can influence them to move closer to purchasing your product.
In addition to increasing customer lifetime value (CLV), businesses use it to improve customer loyalty and grow revenue.
Analyzing the customer journey provides teams with insights into customer behavior to inform strategic decisions.
This form of analytics starts with a customer journey map, but you need to determine which customer journey you want to track.
Sequential: This is the most common type of customer journey map, representing a linear process from one point to another, with intermediate stages in between.
It’s the most appropriate choice for product and service design.
This helps understand customer behavior to drive revenue.
It works by iterating through each stage of the customer’s journey until you reach the last step before a sale.
This is useful for products and services that have multiple steps. Or for a service like management that involves interacting with various departments.
Circular: This is similar to sequential, but it does not always have an end.
With a circular process, it’s possible to return to the start of the customer’s journey.
For example, online software companies often use this method to understand the customer journey and determine customer acquisition.
Branch: This represents where you can pick up the customer as he/she progress through your brand, company, or product.
The first way to measure customer journey analytics is to use data to identify the current state of your customer’s journey and compare it to the desired state.
By identifying your customers’ pain points, you can eliminate them from the customer journey.
A critical component of identifying pain points is understanding the customer’s journey through the current state and its various touchpoints.
A second way to measure customer journey analytics is to compare your company’s desired state (or vision) with the actual customer experience along that journey.
It will make it easier to evaluate and prioritize opportunities to improve your customer experience.
The power of customer journey data is now more accessible than ever, thanks to integrated insights that enable more accurate journey analysis.
This form of analytics increases your ability to analyze customer journeys and score journey performance.
Best Practices for Mapping Your Customer’s Journey
Before designing an ideal customer journey map, you must consider the following points to create a useful document:
Customer journeys are not right every time:
Often, you will find that your customer journey does not accurately reflect the experiences of all customers. Your valuable client might jump back into the journey again during their process.
Not all customers have the same experience, even though they are listed in the same segment. It’s not a problem.
This can be done to simplify the visualization of the user journey.
Split departmental silos:
Breaking down silos will provide a clear understanding of the customer’s experience.
Keep the journey map actionable:
A customer success journey map should be actionable and realistic.
Your real focus should be on the customer’s painful experiences or pain points, so that you can take the necessary actions to improve them.
Hence, conducting thorough user research is essential for a detailed analysis. You can go through the whole process to experience all the painful hump at the touchpoint.
Use the customer journey as a tactical tool:
Keep the map in front and center. Soon after designing it, place it at the forefront of user experience decisions to provide a unified experience throughout the whole process.
To provide consistent customer support, one must understand the customer journey.
This is to avoid issues before your customers raise concerns.
You have to consider the following four areas for that:
When do your customers first interact with your brand? Discovering where your customers found you helps you predict their future needs.
You can use time-driven automation to provide valuable suggestions based on when they subscribed.
When do customers make purchases? Analyzing the time it takes the customer to complete the evaluation phase can help your support team identify what they want and when they want it.
What products attract them? Identifying what products or services grabbed their attention can help you answer various questions.
If a customer browses a product page multiple times, send them an email with additional information to help them make a decision.
When do they leave? Inspecting why and when a journey ends is equally essential.
Customer retention is part of customer experience mapping because approaching customers with the right message before they cancel can help eliminate such poor experiences.
Ask your customers what’s stopping them from making purchases, and document those experiences on customer onboarding journey maps so you can gradually improve them.
Customer Journey Mapping Tools
These include:
Web analytics tools to help you understand the return on investment of marketing and advertising efforts.
Website analytics tools are also necessary not only for measuring your website, but also for tracking the path that leads to it.
You should be able to accurately state, for example, what percentage of visitors to your website convert.
You can also use website analytics tools to measure what visitors are doing on your site as they’re navigating their way through it.
You should also track people as they reach a specific page on your site. Is this percentage higher than the average?
You might decide it is worth adding a menu of similar products to one of your pages, or you might add a pop-up to encourage them to sign up for your email list.
Customer satisfaction surveys provide a snapshot of customer satisfaction, including what they like about your products and services, what they dislike, and what is missing.
Customer feedback forms collect customer sentiment and intent, or serve as an early warning system for what customers like and don’t like about your products and services.
In-app journey mapping tools let you map what happens when a customer clicks a button in your app, and compare it with what happens when a user who has already decided to buy something searches for it.
5 Mistakes to Avoid When Conducting a Customer Journey Analysis
The customer digital journey map is a tool you must use effectively to achieve better results.
For a customer journey mapping project to succeed, it’s not enough to follow best practices.
It’s also important to consider the mistakes that can lead to a project's failure. Let’s highlight some in detail:
Not having clear goals
Immature journey mappers are excited to design a CJM without clear goals, aiming to discover all the defects in their journeys using a unique journey map.
No research or weak research
Sometimes, customer journey mapping consultants build a map based on assumptions or without proper research.
They contact only a few customers to study their journey, don’t speak with clients facing challenges, etc.
At this phase of CJM, unreliable data won’t produce good results.
So, collecting client feedback, conducting interviews, running polls or surveys, and collecting client reviews can make sense.
Wrong perspective
Building a journey map from a client’s point of view and selling your product to others are bad ideas.
Put yourself in your clients’ position; building a CJM around their thoughts, goals, platforms, and expectations can be the best way to provide better service.
Badly developed personas:
Demographics need to be considered when creating personas.
A customer persona describes a specific group of people and enables you to view other groups with related features.
Here, you must focus on behavioral traits—what they think of your brand, what scares or attracts them, etc.—as these can reveal a lot about your client's mindset.
Early stop or late start:
Some journey mappers decide to build a map from beginning to end, neglecting all the phases before a client browses a website and completes the purchase.
Think of all the stages in time when a client browses a product or service. Don’t forget to begin from the client’s angle.
For you, a user’s journey starts when they browse a website or take action, but their actual journey begins when they see your ads online.
The same applies to customers who don’t contact you directly but still give their feedback, whether offline or online, or engage with your product.
Single map for all personas:
You try to design a unique journey for all your clients. If you don’t have the resources to create separate maps for all personas, select only the most important ones and create them for those personas.
You can collect all personas into a single map, transforming it into a multi-person CJM.
Frequently Seen Challenges in Customer Journey Mapping
Let’s discuss a few important challenges and how to tackle them:
Insufficient data:
One of the significant challenges in CJM is collecting and examining sufficient data to create perfect maps.
Data can come from numerous sources, such as analytics, feedback, interviews, CRM, and social media.
Moreover, not all data is relevant, accurate, and easy to access. A few pieces of data may be outdated, inconsistent, or missing.
To tackle this challenge, marketing professionals need clear goals, diverse data sources, and data validation.
Complexity and diversity:
Managing complexity and diversity is another challenge. Clients may have numerous personas, behaviors, emotions, and segments.
They may use various devices, platforms, and channels to stay in touch with the brand.
Furthermore, client journeys are not static or linear but are evolving and dynamic.
To tackle this challenge, marketing professionals need to focus on common and significant client journeys, use scenarios or personas to represent various client situations and types, and regularly update and filter their maps based on feedback.
Actionability and effect
Converting the insights and discoveries from the journey maps into measurable actions and results.
However, only a few marketers face challenges in identifying and prioritizing significant and feasible actions, as well as in evaluating the impact of their campaigns on client loyalty and satisfaction.
To tackle this challenge, they must define realistic objectives and metrics for their CJM project and use maps to monitor and report on outcomes.
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Benefits of Customer Journey Maps
Here are some of the benefits of customer journey mapping:
Improves product road maps
This is vital for companies that do not know where they want to go but need to plan a successful path.
By looking at the customer journey from beginning to end, companies can see which product roadmap best fits and what the journey looks like.
Demonstrates value
The journey map helps to demonstrate value.
It shows where the customer is heading at each stage of the buying process and what they will receive upon reaching the end.
Helps to build trust
Building trust through the customer journey helps to increase loyalty.
Customer journey maps can help the business understand whether it is satisfying customers' needs throughout the journey.
Increases customer engagement
Customer engagement is important for a company to retain and improve customer relationships.
Putting the journey on a map helps engage customers at each stage.
It also helps show how much effort the customer will need to put in to complete the journey successfully.
Even better, customer journey maps can engage customers by showing them where their attention is drawn.
Increases sales
Customer journey maps can be used to present the product, thereby increasing sales.
Customer journey maps can help businesses reach more customers by showing customers' progress.
Overall, such journey maps help increase awareness and engagement across the business.
It increases market reach, as journey maps help reach more customers by displaying the product on a single page.
Conclusion
Customer journey maps are a powerful tool to create a better customer experience. The focus of such a map is on the customer’s needs, not your product or service.
The map itself is an interactive tool that helps customers understand their experience through each step of their buying journey. The map should not be regarded as a goal or even an objective in itself, but rather as a vehicle to help customers achieve their goals.