You have likely heard of the customer journey map. A customer journey map is a representation of experiences that customers have with you. Customer journey maps enable you to tell stories from the customers’ perspective so that you can score high engagement and build long-term customer relationships.
It can also help you to see your business operations and products from the customers’ point of view. You can use the information you gain here to improve your products and services.
A good customer journey map-building strategy helps the business owners to see valuable insights so that they can enhance the experience for their consumers. The ultimate purpose of designing a customer journey map is to make more sales and stand out in customer relations.
Literal Definition of Customer Journey Map
Business owners and operators cannot enhance their operations unless they know what’s intuitive to their customers. For example, what is compelling, attractive, and exciting for you might not attract your customer. That is why customer feedback is important to stand out in the market.
It is not just a preference or a choice that we are talking about here. Lifestyle, behavior, concerns, limitations, decisions, and life experience influence customers’ decisions to buy from you. A customer journey maps enable you to think from a customer’s perspective.
Every business owner wishes to streamline the business processes from the initial to the final stage. Your operations influence the customers’ experience and ultimately, your sales. Questions and queries will arise across multiple channels and your customers won’t help but ask about your brand, services, and products.
A business must give reassurances so that they can commit to their decision to purchase.
A customer journey map will have you go through the customers’ experience step-by-step so that you can pick out the issues specific to your consumers. The insights we get from customer maps are not predictions but issues faced by real customers.
Benefits of Customer Journey Map
- To identify where customers want to interact with your business the most.
- Gives insights into the business to prioritize operations that matter the most.
- Revealing gaps between real customer experience and expected customer experience.
- Enables the design teams to focus on the funnel page’s various steps that customers go through.
- To determine if the customer journey is relevant enough to give useful insights.
How to Create a Customer Journey Map
Creating a customer journey map might be new to some but it isn’t something you should be worried about. By following the below step-by-step guide on creating a customer journey map, you would be able to catch the gap between expected and real experience.
-
Determine Your Objectives
Before mapping out, ask yourself about the map. Why do you need it? What will you gain out of it? Will it examine one experience or multiple ones? Which target market will it follow?
Clearing out the objectives will help you during the plotting process. So, make sure to be transparent about how what and why.
- How did you get to know about our brand?
- Did you ever purchase with us? if yes, then why?
- How can we further improve ourselves?
- Have you ever been on a call with our customer representative? If yes, was it helpful?
- Is our website easy to find and navigate?
- Name one thing that’s good about our brand?
Surveys like these will have you build accurate customer personas. However, your customer journey map won’t cover all the questions so be as specific as possible.
-
Identify All the Touchpoints
Touchpoints are platforms where online customers could interact with your brand. It can be anything, from the shopping cart to a Facebook post.
Businesses tend to find fewer touchpoints than they have expected. But does this reason contribute to low engagement on your website? is contacting your complicated for your customers?
-
Determine the Type of Customer Journey Map
There are three primary types of customer journey maps you can create:
- Current state maps
These maps give you real-time insights on customers’ buying behavior, actions, thoughts, and experience while interacting with your brand.
- Dayi-in-the-Life maps
These maps give info about your customer’s life whether brand-related or not.
- Future state maps
These maps visualize the future actions, thoughts, buying decisions, and behavior of the customers related to your brand.
-
Plotting the Customer Journey
Once you have created customer personas and know your target market, you know exactly what you need to know. At this stage, one needs to be focused on actions. For example, what are your customers going to do after this step?
-
Go on a Customer Journey
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and walk a mile or two. By that, we mean to take the customer journey map as a customer and count the times where you got confused with the provided information. Analyze your actions so that you can improve.
A customer journey map enables you to focus on areas where customers face issues. By having an effective map, you can:
- Promote brand trust.
- Solve your consumers’ issues.
- Provide a satisfactory customer experience.
- Feel personalized.
Crafting the right customer journey map can guide you in ensuring a good experience for your customers and to gain insights that can improve your products and services.
Looking to create customer journey maps for your customer base? Bython Media can help. Contact us today to develop a digital marketing strategy that works for you.
