Mapping The Customer Journey

A customer journey map is an effective way of visualizing how a customer interacts with a business. It is a proven technique for understanding what motivated your customers and will help you identify their needs, concerns, desires, and hesitations.

Business owners understand that raw customer data alone isn’t enough to make educated inferences about your customers. Pure data doesn’t provide the full picture you’ll need in order to see the motivations that govern a current, or prospective, customer decision.

Along with quality data, you need storytelling tools to help you genuinely appreciate what they need – and the customer journey map helps you do just that.

The Need For Mapping The Customer Journey

To create customer journey maps means empowering businesses with the knowledge to find and resolve specific hurdles that keep customers from going down their intended journey paths.

You get to take a walk in the customers’ shoes to learn their pain points when experiencing your products or services. In other words, the journey map will cover everything in detail – from initial attraction to how that attraction converts (or doesn’t), to final sale, and everything else in between.

With this knowledge, you can tailor your services to be in line with customer expectations so you can successfully motivate more people to follow through with your CTA’s.

How to Create Your Customer Journey Map

For most businesses, customer journey mapping begins with an excel sheet where they outline important events, client motivations, and possible areas of friction that may compromise the user experience.

But, it takes a lot more than just filling out a sheet to understand what’s going on in the mind of your end-user to create a viable client journey map.

Here are the tried-and-tested steps to visualizing and mapping the way a customer interacts with your business:

• Define The Persona

First, know who your customers are and how they react to different stimuli. Do so by creating a buyer’s persona that narrates their behavioral pattern comprehensively.

Remember, one buyer persona isn’t enough because your clients might range from all ages and economic backgrounds – you can’t hope to survive on one strategy or customer map alone. So know who’s buying from you and build personas that exemplify all of them.

• Define Customer Stages

When a problem arises, customers want it fixed as soon as possible. In doing so, they pass through various stages, each with its intended goal – ultimately, the aim is to find products/services that can fulfill their needs quickly and conclusively.

The typical phases of a customer lifecycle include discovery, exploration, comparison, evaluation, purchase, retention, and referrals.

Their respective buyer personas define different stages and where they stand. A customer journey map example may include how they discovered your company, how they got to know about your products and from where, why they might select you over others, and what may keep them as loyal customers for years to follow.

• Define Touchpoints

When a customer interacts with a brand before, during, or post-purchase, it is known as a touchpoint.  It is essential to define all touchpoints, to ensure that all opportunities can be capitalized.

To understand touchpoints you can:

1. Walk in the customer shoes, and see what drives them
2. Ask customers directly
3. User all the available digital marketing tools like Google Analytics, etc.

• Find the Pain Points

Figure out what can force customers to walk away from you, for instance, do you have a slow-loading website, does your site lack information, or is it not responsive?

Once you become aware of all the roadblocks your customers encounter, mark them on the journey map, and actively work on mitigating their impact on customer experience.

• Fix The Roadblocks

Once you know all the pain points, get to fixing them. First, get rid of the ones that most matter to customers, then move towards the next. The end goal is to provide customers a seamless experience with your brand.

The Key Takeaway

All in all, whether you are formulating a customer journey map, ensure these strategies and implementations are scalable, meaning as you resolve the issues — update them.

Many real-world examples show us that they are suitable for:

• providing a holistic view of the customer’s buying cycle
•  encouraging teamwork
• increasing conversion rates
• retaining customers
• Identifying gaps between departments and channels

If you are not yet utilizing this brilliant storytelling tool, now is the right time to invest in journey mapping to ensure your success.