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Customer journey is the experience whether positive or negative that customers go through during the interaction with your company and brand. It may seem simple as you offer a product, and they buy it, but it’s completely changed nowadays as customers have many ways to communicate with businesses and that’s the reason it becomes difficult to understand the customer journey.
However, technology has fueled standardize of information, through websites, mobile apps, mobile phones, streaming services, and other advancements, the daily customers now have open access to more data and information.
Do you know that on average consumers now using 10 channels to communicate with businesses? these are all aspects that make the consumer journey so complex and also make it difficult to ensure a great customer experience. Let’s go through the definition of customer journey mapping and points to map the customer journey.
What is a Customer Journey Mapping?
Customer journey mapping is also called buyers journey mapping and that’s the process of creating a customer journey map, an experience, or a visual story of your customer’s interactions with your company and brand. This helps businesses to see their business from the customer’s perspective and also allows them to gain insights into common customer pain points and how to improve those.
Whether your customers interact with you through social media, email, live chat, or other channels. This process also helps B2B business owners gain insights into common customer touchpoints which allow them to better optimize and personalize the customer experience.
By understanding this relationship, you can understand how to structure your touchpoints to create the most effective and efficient process for your customers. However, before you move into creating your customer journey map, you need to collect information and data from your customers and prospect. Here are the points with which you can map the customer journey.
What are the Important Points to Map Customer Journey?
1. Nail down Buyer Persona:
The first step in creating a journey map is by understanding who your customers are because to understand that customer, companies need to develop personas. You need to know and understand how your customer behaves and why they do what they do. Although everyone is unique, these profiles give ideas and input for the journey mapping.
While doing this, make sure that it isn’t sufficient to have just one buyer persona. Means people at different buying stages will behave differently and interact with your business differently. Hence, by defining personas, you can better design your processes to meet the customer where and how they want.
2. Set your Targets:
After understanding and building buyer personas, the next step is to dig deep and understand what each of them hopes to achieve as they go through the customer journey.
It’s important to set targets and have a clear idea of what you want to achieve before you even begin. Doing this will help you narrow down the most efficient ways of hitting your targets and having goals in mind while going through with a task can also help you stay on track.
By performing this, you’ll be able to examine how well you are meeting those targets and answering customer’s questions.
Different ways to understand customers’ targets
- Interview different group of customers
- Get user testing feedback
- Review customer support emails
- Identify customer questions in each phase
- Use customer analytics tools to collect information
3. Identify Motivations & Pain Points:
Again, consider your buyer persona and understand what keeps them going and what’s stopping them from reaching their goals. Most importantly, how your brand can help matter a lot because they are crucial.
Another thing you need to keep in mind is touch points because touchpoints are all the places on your website that your customers can interact with you. This is an important step in creating a customer journey map because it gives your insight into what actions your customers are performing.
Whatever it is because understanding touchpoints is a tool that can help you understand the ease and objectives of customer journeys.
These are the ways may your customer across you online:
- Social channels
- Paid ads
- Email marketing
Indeed! Every action your customer takes is motivated by emotion and your customer’s emotion will change depending on which part of their journey they’re at.
These actions are usually caused by a pain point and knowing this will help you give the right content at the right time so that you smooth the customer’s emotional journey through your brand.
4. Map out the Buyer’s Journey:
As discussed, it’s important to note the different stages of the buyer’s journey to provide a better and more personalized experience for your customers down the line.
There are many stages with you can map out a buyer’s journey but a few important are awareness, consideration, and decision.
Buyers can identify the challenges that they are facing and those challenges are considerations such as how do the buyers view these challenges? Is dealing with these challenges a top priority for the buyer? Will there be any consequences if the buyer doesn’t deal with these challenges?
While in the consideration stage, buyers are looking for ways to deal with the challenges that they are facing. Consider these questions: what options are available for the buyer? How will they search for information on these options?
And in the final or decision stage, buyers have settled on a solution and are only searching for the most suitable product or service.
5. Earn Customer Loyalty & find a Moment of Truth:
As you have already reached the process of how to make a customer journey map, you’ll realize that every step so far has been equipping you to deal with one of the biggest hurdles that a brand face and that’s earning your customer’s loyalty.
Moment of truth is important in the customer journey and these are instances where customer’s opinions about your brand are formed based on their experiences.
6. Update & Improve:
Likewise, anything else, your customer journey map should update and improve rather than be left to gather dust on the shelf once it’s completed. Because your customers are changing and evolving, your customer journey map should be doing the same as well.
If possible, test, update and improve your customer journey map or it should also be tweaked accordingly whenever you introduce new changes to your product.
Why Create Customer Journey Maps?
Understanding customer’s needs start with taking their perspectives and stating the fact that brands nowadays will be competing mostly on the basis of good customer experience. It is essential for brands who want to grow and to design the customer journey to their needs. Here are benefits to the customer journey map:
- Optimized User Experience:
It’s a fact that companies using customer journey maps experience more revenue than customer referrals. Undoubtedly, customer journey mapping helps you see things from the customer’s point of view, which then allows you to empathize and draw deeper insights.
Doing this means that you can precisely understand and identify satisfaction levels and pain points, hence enabling you to solve problems. For example, if your customer has difficulty navigating your software or app, they will likely become frustrated. By analyzing data, you can find where, when, and why your customer gets the problem.
- Improved return on investment (ROI):
Yes, brands or businesses that invest time in really getting to know their customers can enjoy a greater return on investment. It’s not just money but journey mapping also reduces churn, which reduces the costs of availing and onboarding new customers.
Wrapping Up!
Now you have everything you need to start mapping your customer journey and also reasons why you should create customer journey maps. You should keep these points in mind and implement them wisely while the process so you can create an accurate and effective customer journey map.
Need help with your online business? M-connect Media is here to help you. Consult our eCommerce experts to get best-fit advice on how you can improve your customer journey map and benefits your online business more efficiently.
