The marketing landscape today has evolved out of the linear format. There are multiple channels used by a customer to interact with a brand. These channels then interact within themselves as well. Thus, it becomes a challenge to trace a customer’s journey through this vast network of channels.
Mapping out a customer’s journey is thus a key activity that can help businesses understand their consumer base. However, there are several elements to a customer journey map that need to be incorporated. Continue reading to learn about the process of creating a customer journey map to improve your customer’s experience.
Table of Contents
- What is a Customer Journey Map?
- Benefits of a Customer Journey Map
- Identification of customer pain points
- Improvement in customer retention
- Improvement in marketing strategies:
- Elements of a Customer Journey Map
- Customer persona
- Phases of the Journey
- Touchpoints
- Customer Thoughts and Actions
- Customers’ Emotional Journey
- How to put the pieces together?
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map, as the term explains, is a map of a customer’s journey while interacting with your brand.
It is a comprehensive diagram that illustrates all the steps taken by a customer in his journey along with his experience at each step. More channels of interaction would mean more complex journey maps.
It is a crucial exercise that helps businesses step into their customer’s shoes and see from the customer’s perspective. It allows you to gain insights into common customer pain points and how to improve those.
Benefits of a customer journey map
- Identification of customer pain points
With a customer journey map, you can identify how customers feel, what they need, what kind of actions they take, and what kind of questions they have, at each step of the journey. Knowing what kind of questions your customers have can help you find the areas that you should address. Ultimately, it helps you to improve the overall customer experience.
- Improvement in customer retention:
A well-designed customer journey map considers the post-purchase experiences. This knowledge helps you understand why customers leave. Knowing this helps you enhance your strengths and improve your weaknesses.
- Improvement in marketing strategies:
Upon understanding your customers’ decision-making process and the platforms they lean towards the most, you can create campaigns tailored to address their specific wants and needs on such platforms.
Elements of a Customer Journey Map
1. Customer persona
A customer persona, also known as a buyer persona, is a semi-fictional representation of the key traits of a large segment of your consumers. It is based on the data you collect from your existing customers. It gives you insight into what your prospective customers are thinking and doing.
2. Phases of the Journey
The customer goes through several phases while engaging with a business. Thus, a general process followed by a customer can be derived. These phases or steps are different for every business and product but a general progression is- Awareness- Research- Consideration- Purchase- Review.
3. Touchpoints
A touchpoint refers to any point of contact between the customer and your business, during the customer’s journey.
Your social media page, website, advertisements are all touchpoints. Product reviews and comments are also ways of interaction between you and the consumer. Thus, they too count as touchpoints.
4. Customer Thoughts and Actions
Customers’ thought process is a clear pathway to understanding their goals and demands. Thus, it forms an important part of the customer journey map.
Make sure you conduct surveys and interviews with customer groups and receive feedback on your products. You also need to study support emails and queries to identify the questions that your customers have regarding your business.
Similar to thoughts, a customer’s actions are also an important part of the story. Make sure you track their actions at each touchpoint. Actions could be anything from searching for reviews for your products or comparing prices.
5. Customer Pain Points
The challenges faced by a customer in his journey are termed as pain points. These points need to be identified and eliminated to design a smooth customer experience.
A customer journey map helps in identifying and highlighting such pain points that may cause a customer or potential customer to opt out.
6. Customers’ Emotional Journey
Besides what customers think and do, you also need to look at what customers feel through their journey. Tracking down a customer’s emotions during different phases can help you focus your energies in the right direction. Focusing on the areas where a customer feels low helps you revive their interest in the business.
How to put the pieces together?
After preparing all of the above-mentioned elements, all that’s left to do is plot them together. You can choose from the several templates available online or create one as per your needs.
The basic process in most of the templates is to plot the phase-wise progression of the customer and add the necessary details in every phase. For example, the various possible touchpoints in a particular phase should be added under it. Similarly, customers’ thoughts, actions and feelings in every phase must be plotted accordingly under each phase.
Conclusion
A customer journey map is essential to modern-day marketing. You need to understand the entire experience from the customers’ point of view as they look forward to a smooth and hassle-free journey more than anything.
Thus, you need to research your consumer base to gather all the mentioned elements and then decide upon a template that works for your business.
