What comes to your mind when you imagine your customers?
Do you know their age group? What is their income level? What are their pain points?
Above all, why did they choose you over your competitors?
Defining the problems, requirements, and interactions with your company might seem stressful and at times, pointless.
But understanding the experience of your customer at each stage of the customer journey is important for creating long-term strategies.
Having a customer journey map can help visualize how your customer experiences at all stages so you can deal with the potential issues ahead of time, improve customer retention, and grab key information. It helps you get into the minds of your customers.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map refers to the visual stages of every engagement your customers have with your product or service. It helps you understand the buyer’s mindset so that you can figure out if things are going right.
Simply put, it is a practice to determine the experience and expectations of your customer at each stage of the lifecycle.
Here is a simple example of a customer journey map:
| Phases | Motivation | Website Search | Clicks on the First Results | Checks the Website | Product Evaluation | Payment |
| Activities | Looking to purchase an item | Searches products on various websites | Clicks on the first ad | Clicks the proper website | Opens a page to check product details | Make Payment |
| Emotions | Excited | Happy with Numerous Options | Disappointed as the first ad shows no result | Happy as he finds leading websites | Happy. clicks the websites | Happy as the website offer all payment option |
| Customer Expectations | Easy availability and discounts | Easy search process | No ad in the first SERPs | User-friendly website | Higher quality products | Several payment options. |
How to Map Your Customer Journey?
Here are some ways to create your customer journey map.
Identify Your Objectives for the Map:
First of all, ask yourself why you are creating the map in the first place. What are your goals?
This information will help you create your buyer persona. This is an imaginary customer with all of their demographics and psychographics who represents your customer.
Get to Know Your Customers:
Next, you should perform research. You can do this by conducting surveys. Here you can send a questionnaire to people who have bought from you or who have interacted with your company before.
Some examples to be included in this questionnaire are…
- How did you hear about the company?
- What attracted you to the website?
- What are the concerns (aim) you are looking to resolve with the company?
- How much time do you generally spend on the website?
- Have you ever bought anything from us?
- Have you ever visited our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what made you to withdraw?
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you rate our website?
- Did you ever need customer support?
Narrow Your Focus:
Once you have identified the different customer personas that interact with your company, choose one or two of them. Keep in mind that a customer journey map tracks the experience of one customer who is taking a certain path with your business. Listing too many personas won’t precisely reflect the experience of your customers.
Here you can pick the most common customer persona and choose the route they would typically take when interacting with your company for the very first time.
Don’t worry about the ones you skipped, as you can go back and create a new map tailored to these customer types.
Consider All the Touchpoints:
Touchpoints refer to the places on the website where your customers are likely to interact with you. Here you need to consider all those points of interactions used by your customers and potential customers as well.
However, don’t just limit yourself to your website. Instead, go beyond to cover all the areas such as social channels, paid ads, email marketing, and third-party sites and mentions.
Narrow the list down to those points of interaction that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action related to them.
Here are things to keep in mind while going through this step:
- Consider all the actions your customers perform throughout their interaction with your brand.
- Identify the emotions and motivations.
- Identify the obstacles and pain points of your customers.
Identify the Resources You Have and the Ones Required By You:
Your customer journey map is going to touch on every part of your company. This will help you find out the resources to be required into creating the customer experience.
For instance, maybe your map shows some shortcomings in the customer service offer and you learn that your team lacks the tools to follow up with customers. Using a map, you can tell management to invest in customer service tools that help your team manage customer demand.
Get Into the Shoes of a Customer:
Just because you have created a journey map doesn’t mean you are done with the job. This is the crucial part of the process: assessing the results. How many people are closing out before making a purchase? How can you improve customer support?
Assessing the results can help you spot the areas where your customers’ requirements are not met.
Make the Required Changes:
Your data analysis should be able to help you figure out what you want your website to be. Once you identify those points, you can make the changes to your websites to achieve those aims. Maybe this incorporates CTA links at more places. Or, perhaps, it is creating longer descriptions for each product.
Whether they are small or big changes, they will be important as they are directly related t with what customers listed as their concerns
Keep in mind that mapping a customer journey is an ongoing process. So review your buyer journey map once a month.
What do you think? Let me know by commenting below!