Understanding a customer's step-by-step journey is vital to the success of your business. A customer journey map is a graphical illustration to demonstrate the entire product or service purchasing cycle of a customer. Focusing your team's attention to these touchpoints combined with customer personas can help you in predicting user's behavior in future. Let me take you through the process and importance of customer journey maps. But first, let's understand what is included in the customer journey and...
What is Customer Journey Map?
Customer journey maps (aka Experience maps) are used to map the relationship between a customer and an organization over time and across all channels on which they interact with the business. A good experience map helps you understand the customer's need that drive your business and allows you to create the best experience possible. It helps the organization to understand the best path to take to achieve their goals.
The customer journey map consists of:
A timeline – a defined journey period (e.g., 1 week) including selected areas from Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention and Advocacy.
Scenarios – the context and sequence of events in which a user/customer must achieve a goal (e.g., a user wants to buy a ticket on the phone), from first actions (recognition of a problem) to last actions (e.g., subscription renewal).
Touchpoints – what customers do while interacting and how they do it.
Channels – where they perform actions (e.g., Facebook).
Thoughts and feelings - what the customer thinks and feels at each touchpoint.
Using customer journey maps
The customer journey maps are increasingly popular strategic management tool praised by both academics and practitioners for its usefulness in understanding an organization’s customer experiences. It helps organization to reveal typical customer experiences over time and visualize the many dimensions and factors involved. These enable brands to learn more about the digital body language of target users. There are a few different ways you can use a customer journey map:
Understand the hiring, onboarding, and overall employee experience of your company
Plan a better marketing strategy for your new products and services
Understand how the service experience of every customer persona is different
Design a new experience without losing sight of the important moments
Map your competitors' journeys compared to yours and build better differentiators
Identify gaps in your present service offering and in your competitors'
Create more personalized customer interactions for every customer profile or segment
These maps should be detail-rich timelines that highlight the most important sub-tasks and events. Over this timeline framework, you add insights of what customers think and feel when proceeding along the timeline. Other than helping customers accomplish their goals, another crucial part of a customer journey map is to make the customer experience better.
Customer journey map also contributes to improving customer experience through:
Addressing technical pain points (website loads slow, tech jargon, difficulty contacting customer service, etc.)
Educating teams on customer motivation (personal, professional, social)
Acknowledging positive and negative emotions (curiosity, frustration, excitement)
Looking for educational gaps and misconceptions
How to create Customer Journey Maps?
An efficiently drawn journey map helps you assess the loopholes in the customer service and the amendments that your selling policies need to increase your brand's satisfaction level among the buyers. To create a customer journey map, you can follow these steps:
Define business goal of customer journey maps
Clarify who will use your map and what user experience, it will address. Are you creating a buyer journey map to improve customer experience, generate more sales, or eliminate customer complaints? Knowing this in advance will help you shape your research and data while reviewing the process accurately.
Dig deep
Use customer research to determine customer experiences at all touchpoints. Get analytical/statistical data and anecdotal evidence through, e.g., customer interviews, surveys, social media listening and competitive intelligence.
Review touchpoints and channels
Keep in mind that most prospects will go through multiple touchpoints in their user journey. The better you can identify the touchpoints your customer will go through, the better you can understand your customer’s journey. List customer touchpoints (e.g., pay a bill) and channels (e.g., online). Look for additional touchpoints or channels to include. It could be as broad-reaching as a billboard, a targeted social media post, a clink on a website from a Google search results page.
Make an empathy map
It helps visualize on paper what an audience wants and needs, how they feel about the situation, and what will inspire them to take action. Then, determine his/her needs and how he/she feels throughout the experience. Focus on barriers, motivations as well as sources of annoyance.
Sketch the journey
Have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your customer journey map before you start drawing any lines or circles on a piece of paper or with a digital tool. Piece together everything (touchpoints, timescale, empathy map output, new ideas, etc.) however you like(e.g., a map). You want to show a customer’s course of motion through touchpoints and channels across the timescale, including his/her feelings at every touchpoint. Revise and transform your sketch into the best-looking version of the ideal customer journey.
Share with stakeholders
Once finished with sketching and refining the customer journey map, summarize the information and share it with your team. Gather feedback from stakeholders and understand how the customer journey map has changed their perspectives or if it produced new insights.
Once the map is ready, you should measure the enhanced journey’s results. For instance, check key performance indicators (KPIs). The more touchpoints there are, the more complex the map will be. In any case, your entire organization should soon notice its value as a revisable, “living” document because members from all sections will have a common reference point for a wider, sharper customer focus.
Conclusion
For the businesses, it can be difficult to see the way customers view or interact with the business from the outside. We’re often too close to the operation to see it as it really is. For e.g. - you probably know exactly how to navigate your website because you see it daily, and perhaps you even built it yourself. This makes it difficult for you to see where any confusion may lie. By mapping out the customer journey, you can put yourself in your customer’s shoes.
Building a customer journey map helps you better empathize with your customer at each step of the journey. While not all customer experiences are the same, having a customer journey map helps you provide the best possible customer experience with consistency. It can empower everyone on your team to look at the entire experience from the user’s standpoint.
Your customers’ emotions should be at the forefront of your mind when designing anything that consumers interact with. With the market being so customer-focused, you need to maximize positive emotions and minimize negative emotions to set yourself apart.
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