Customer Journey Mapping
Successful businesses strive to comprehend better how their customers feel during each encounter in an effort to anticipate their needs better and stand apart from the competition. Understanding what consumers experience each time they interact with a brand, product, or service during the customer journey goes a long way towards strengthening relations and building a better customer experience. Customer journey mapping becomes crucial in this context.
What is customer journey mapping?
Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a visual representation of a customer’s interactions with a brand through every stage of the customer journey. Businesses use customer journey mapping to understand better and analyse customer experiences, perceptions, purchase habits, requirements, and pain points. The insights gained from this process are used to streamline the customer journey and refine the customer experience, which are excellent ways to boost conversion rates and build a loyal customer base.
Why is customer journey mapping important?
Customer journey mapping gives businesses, their various teams, and employees a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s perspective as they interact with the brand. This holistic view of every step in the customer journey highlights inefficiencies or pain points that could be responsible for lost business. Insights learnt from the customer journey mapping process can be used to streamline the customer journey, iron out pain points, and enhance customer satisfaction at every touchpoint. Customer journey mapping is a critical part of enhancing customer satisfaction by consistently meeting or even exceeding expectations, which is how businesses reduce customer churn and build a loyal following.
How do you start customer journey mapping?
Customer journey mapping needs to be approached systematically to yield the best results. The following steps are integral to incorporating an effective and efficient customer journey mapping strategy.
Define objectives
The first step in creating a customer journey map is having clearly defined objectives in place. These may include gaining a better understanding of what customers experience in the sales funnel, how they interact with a product or service, or issues that they may be facing during encounters with support teams. Each map should focus on specific aspects of the customer journey and address each interaction that is made along the way.
Establish goals for customer personas
Businesses can gain deeper insights into the requirements, habits, values, and self-perceptions of prospective customers by using customer personas with well-defined objectives in the customer journey mapping process. Comparing this persona data against the customer journey offers a better understanding of issues and pain points that customers may face along the way.
Identify all touchpoints
It is important to recognise all the potential channels that a prospective customer might use to initiate engagement with the brand. These may include social media content, online advertisements, marketing emails, or simply organic searches that direct them to the appropriate page on the company’s website. Each of these touchpoints should be assigned emotional cues designed to encourage users to engage with the brand or its offerings. This is also a good opportunity to identify impediments at these touchpoints that could be keeping prospective customers from taking the next step.
Determine the type of customer journey map to be created
Customer journey maps can be of four types.
- A current state map offers a closer look at how customers currently engage with the brand.
- A day in the life map takes things a step further by looking at a customer’s interaction with the brand in the context of all the other things they do during the day.
- A future state map envisions how customers may interact with the brand in the future.
- A customer journey blueprint may be a current state or future state map with the inclusion of elements such as roles and responsibilities. These may even feature timelines for proposed changes or improvements.
Customer journey mapping is an invaluable tool for businesses striving to optimise touchpoints, forge positive customer relationships, and offer exceptional customer service. It takes a customer-centric approach to enhance the customer experience and build a loyal following to ensure long-term growth and commercial success.
