What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a diagram (or several diagrams) that depict the stages customers go through when interacting with a company, from buying products online to accessing customer service to purchase a product. It is a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination.
What are the Benefits of using a Customer Journey Map?
Journey maps because journey maps align with their organizational needs:
Journey maps illuminate customer experience in a way that makes it clear for organizations to see what needs to be fixed. When conducting journey mapping working sessions, participants frequently walk out of the session with a clear idea of what needs to be fixed to improve the customer experience. It provides tangible actions derived through the process, and journey maps put CX leaders in a great position to quantify the impact of customer experience improvements.
Journey maps help with innovation and engage employees. Assembling a journey map is a highly collaborative process and requires employees to come together and put themselves in the customer’s shoes. What a great way to build empathy for the customer experience!
It shows you pain points and points out areas of frustration
You can see exactly where customers get frustrated, either between touchpoints or at individual touchpoints, and from there gives you the ability to optimize them. If a specific touchpoint is leading to churn, or is clearly a problematic step in a journey, then it’ll show up in the data and allow you to take action from there. Or if there’s a gap along the customer’s journey that shouldn’t be there, a map gives you a clear sense for what and how to fill those gaps.
You understand your customer better: When you know all the touchpoints of your customers you get an understanding of how your buyer personas navigate through your conversion funnel. This helps you personalize your marketing strategies.
Here are 4 Steps to Creating a Customer Journey Map
Step 1: Nail down your buyer persona
Start by defining your buyer’s persona.
Whilst doing this, keep in mind that it isn’t sufficient to have just one buyer persona. People at different buying stages will behave differently and interact with your business differently, so it’s worth distinguishing between someone who has been doing market research for a few months and is ready to make their purchase, and someone who has only recently begun thinking about solving his/her particular need (by trying your product/service).
Step 2: Understand your buyer’s goals
Once you have your buyer personas built, the next step is to dig deep and understand what each of them hopes to achieve as they go through the customer journey.
Think about what your customers’ ultimate goals are in each phase (and remember that these may change as the process unfolds).
Some examples might be:
- Researching the different options that are available
- Ensuring that s/he is paying a fair price
- Seeking reassurance that s/he has all the necessary information about the product
A great way to go about doing this is to first identify the paths that your visitor may take on your site. If your visitor is a member or pre-existing customer, the first thing that they might do is to login. Other activities include browsing, searching for products, comparing products, and more – once you’ve nailed down a full list of these activities, you’ll be able to identify all your touchpoints and the goals associated with each touchpoint.
Step 3: Map out buyer touchpoints
A “touchpoint” refers to any time a customer comes into contact with your brand – before, during, or after they purchase something from you. This also includes moments that happen offline/online, through marketing, in person, or over the phone.
Some touchpoints may have more impact than others. For example, a bad check-in experience at a hotel can taint the entire stay.
You’ll want to take all potential touchpoints that occur between your customers and your organization into account. That way, you won’t miss out on any opportunities to listen to your customers and make improvements that will keep them happy.
Step 4: Identify customer pain points and Prioritize/ Fix Roadblocks
At this point, it’s time to bring together all your data (both quantitative and qualitative) and look at the big picture to identify potential roadblocks or pain points in the customer journey. You may also want to note down areas where you’re currently doing things right, and figure out ways to improve.
To do this, ask yourself questions, and interview customers and customer-facing staff.
Some potential questions might include:
- Are my customers achieving their goals on my website?
- Where are the main areas of friction and frustration?
- Where are people abandoning purchases (and why)?
Once you know where the roadblocks and pain points are, mark them down on your customer journey map.
If you look at it from a micro perspective, here are some questions you can ask yourself: What needs to be corrected or built? Is there a need to break everything down and start from scratch? Or are a few simple changes all that’s necessary for a big impact?
For instance, if customers frequently complain about how complicated your sign up process is, it’s probably time to revamp it and make things easier.
After you’ve identified these roadblocks, take a step back and look at the big picture from a macro perspective. Recognize that the end goal is not to optimize each step or touchpoint just for the sake of optimizing it, but so that you can push your customers down the funnel, and bring them one step closer to converting.
At the end of the day, you want to be getting more conversions. So everything you tweak in each customer touchpoint should all be contributing to that one goal.
Always update the customer journey map often as this is a fluid document.
Here are a couple of books that you can read up on if you are interested in learning more.
