Customer journey mapping is crucial for delivering a personalized experience and top-notch service for customers. Based on customer’s expectations, goals, and emotions, this technique helps identify barriers for consumers while using a specific product or service. As a result, companies will be better armed to engage the clients at any stage of their journey.
What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map represents a visualization of different stages a consumer goes through while interacting with a product or service. Customer journey mapping is a pivotal on-ramp process to success because it helps companies to see how their clients experience and perceive their brand versus how companies think they do. As a result, mapping ensures a better understanding of the customers and provides an opportunity to better deliver on their expectations.
What to start with when creating a customer journey map? It begins when clients initially become aware of the brand. After that, it runs through their decision-making process, includes every touchpoint, and lastly converts into the eventual purchase. Finally, it continues with brand advocacy, recurring purchases or stopping using the solution.
If you don’t have too much time to spend defining the stages and the content of CJMs, you may use various prefilled customer journey map templates. The templates provide compact visualization of insights and critical information about the customers from different domains.
Ready, aim, fire
Developing a successful product or service requires a thorough understanding of the target audience. Besides knowing the primary information of the ideal client, companies also need to be well-acquainted with their interests, needs, and decision-making process. However, if a company wants to make their product an instant hit, they will have to do one more essential thing – take a step backwards and see the big picture of the business. This will help figure out a few very important things:
# Major goals that your business pursues
# Current values that your company brings to consumers or identify the missing values to be created moving forward
# Challenges and issues that you’re trying to solve
# The actual place of the client in the business model
# What you expect to achieve by creating a CJM
The more solid this understanding becomes, the more efficient you’ll be at making key decisions that will lead to successful business outcomes and meaningful customer interactions.
Get to know your service or product
Increasing the overall knowledge of the product or service allows companies to concentrate on their benefits. Also, looking at the business from different angles right off the bat may help identify unique opportunities for future growth. To do that, you may:
# Utilize every source of information that can help you learn more about the product
# Review technical documentation and related manuals
# Use your own experiences using the product or service
# Talk to the team members who work and communicate with customers every day
# Talk to your clients
# Identify how all the stakeholders see your product or service and whether they are on the same page
Make sure you have answered all those questions before moving to the next stage.
Determine your goals
Business goals are crucial for establishing priorities and measuring a company’s success. Moreover, setting goals helps understand whether you are in the right direction and build an effective and insightful customer journey map. Here, we list a few all-important targets that will benefit any company.
Target 1: Enhance the quality of cross-functional processes. As a company gets larger, sometimes it can be hard to ensure all the departments are customer-focused and are on the same page. Customer journey mapping clarifies the business’s goals and helps cross-functional teams focus on the customers’ needs, resulting in more revenue and a better product.
Target 2: Discover what the end-user experience looks like. Customer experience is the core of any CJM. A CJM represents a fundamental piece of knowledge for companies, and all brands are advised to start with it. Creating journey maps allows moving beyond discussions about service or product features and diving into the realm of true understanding of users’ expectations and objectives.
Target 3: Retain your customers. Customer journey mapping can spot clients who are on the path to churn. If companies determine the most common actions and behaviors that these customers have, they can recognize them before the customers leave.
Target 4: Boost overall marketing efficiency. Mapping out the customer journey helps understand what is turning your customers away and what is helpful and interesting to them about the company. As a result, brands can create relevant content that will attract consumers and keep them for a long time.
Target 5: Spot and break down silos in your company. Silos can create chaos and cut off effective communication between business units. After all, clients shouldn’t suffer from a poor experience just because of your inefficient organizational structure. Customer journey mapping can aid here too. With a detailed CJM in front of you, it is much easier to see different pieces of a puzzle and identify the gaps between departments within a company.
Target 6: Develop a unified view of your clients. Several different steps can be taken by companies seeking to get a holistic view of their clients. It may be a long process, but eventually, it will be worth it. Having a single customer view implies you can better group them for targeting. Also, this makes internal processes speedier and helps solve customers’ problems faster too.
Conclusion
Customer journey maps should always serve a specific purpose and be actionable. Functional maps help identify negative and positive customer perceptions throughout the journey and successfully put this experience in the context concerning companies’ goals.
What is more, setting right goals is one of the most critical steps in developing customer journey maps. With such an effective tool as the CJM, you will not miss any of your targets, and vice versa, you will find great opportunities for improvement and accurately assess the impact of any current process.
