A customer journey map or customer experience map is a visual representation of the process a customer or prospect goes through to achieve a goal with a company. With the help of the map of that route, you will be able to have an idea of the motivations of your clients, their needs, and critical points.
As a customer experience management tool, it allows you to capture on a map each of the stages, interactions, channels, and elements that a customer goes through throughout the purchase cycle. All customer steps on their journey to the product must be analyzed in order to recognize and amplify the positive moments in the user experience (UX) on the one hand and identify and eliminate the negative moments on the other.
Undoubtedly, the best way to visualize how a customer interacts with a company is by making a map. Most customer journey maps start out as sheets that describe key events, customer motivations, and problem areas within the user experience. This information is then integrated into a picture that describes an average experience with a business.
By understanding this relationship, you identify how to structure touch points to create a more effective and efficient process for your customers. A customer journey map traces the current process, from the first touch point to the end, to see if your customers are achieving their goals and if not, how they can get there.
The Customer Journey Map is the fundamental method used when it comes to understanding the buying cycle from the customer's perspective and not from what is believed from the other side, something that seems obvious, but that many companies do not carry out or do. at least correctly.
Because the customer journey can no longer be represented in a linear journey from A to B (shoppers often take a multi-channel cyclical journey), mapping can be difficult to visualize.
The customer journey map is designed to help the commercial actors of a company to put themselves in the shoes of the customer and thus improve their experience. It's not just about thinking like the customer, but also about understanding their feelings, motivations, and other influences on the buying process. The insights gained should be taken into account when designing all products and services. A customer journey map can be applied as follows depending on whether it describes the current or future customer experience:
Current customer journey map:
Customer journey map of the future:
In a customer journey map, the customer journey, or customer journey, is generally represented as a linear progression. Each step taken by the client is analyzed according to specific criteria. This results in a matrix as one of the most common ways to represent the phases the customer goes through.
On the horizontal plane, the different stages that the customer goes through in his journey are shown: Starting with the recognition of the customer that he has a buying need, then going through the buying decision to satisfy the need, up to the actual buying process. In the best of cases the customer journey ends here. However, it may happen that after the purchase a claim or a change arises, which is also part of the customer journey map.
The more the journey is broken down into individual steps, the more detailed the subsequent analysis can be. For this reason, customer journeys are often referred to as steps or stages rather than touchpoints. A contact point represents the customer's direct contact with the company and, therefore, excludes some moments, such as the transport of the product home, which are part of the customer journey map.
The vertical plane allows us to visualize an analysis of the stages of the customer journey. Depending on the company, the types of analysis include:
Desires and goals of the client
Each customer journey map is unique
It is highly unlikely that the stages of one customer journey map can be applied to another. This is because each customer journey map is created for a specific type of customer. For this, so-called “personas” are used, which represent an average customer of the respective target group.
Furthermore, a customer journey map always represents a certain type of customer journey, such as the initial purchase of a product, its renewal or cancellation. This means that a company cannot use one universal customer journey map, but rather needs several for different people and types of customer journeys.
Breaking down the customer journey phase by phase, aligning each step with a goal, and restructuring your touch points accordingly are essential tasks to maximize customer success. After all, what you need to do is solve customer problems and help them achieve long-term success with your product or service. If you don't have problems now with your customers, think that using a route map will improve the experience and with it your sales. Keep reading and learn more about the advantages that this tool offers you.
1. Apply an inbound perspective in your company
Instead of trying to reach your customers with outbound marketing, you can attract your customers with the help of inbound marketing. Outbound marketing involves tactics that are aimed at a general or disinterested audience and end up disrupting customers in their daily lives. It can even annoy and discourage current and potential customers. Inbound marketing, on the other hand, offers content that is interesting, that is useful, and that customers are already looking for. Get their attention first, then focus on sales.
By charting the customer journey, you can understand what is interesting and useful to your customers about your company and website, and what they are rejecting. This will help you create the kind of content that will attract them to your business and keep them there.
2. It allows you to create a new target customer base
If you don't fully understand the customer journey, you probably don't fully understand your customer demographics and psychographics either. This is dangerous because it will be a waste of time and money to repeatedly target too broad an audience instead of targeting a specific audience that is genuinely interested in your products, services, and content.
Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers and charting their journey will give you a good picture of the type of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. If you know and define them, you can perfect your marketing for that specific audience and increase your reach and sales.
3. Proactive customer service facilitates the implementation
A customer journey map is like a road map to the customer experience. So you show moments where people will experience satisfaction or situations where they might face misunderstandings. Knowing this in advance allows you to plan each customer service strategy and intervene at the ideal moments that enhance the value of your brand for the buyer.
Proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more trustworthy in the eyes of your customer base. For example, if you anticipate a sudden increase in customer service around the holidays, you can send them a message to let them know about your team's holiday hours.
You can also let them know about additional support options if your team isn't available and what to do if there's an urgent issue that needs immediate attention.
This way, customers won't be surprised if they have to wait a little longer than usual or call outside of new business hours. You can even give them alternatives to choose from, such as a chatbot or a knowledge base, in case they require a faster solution.
4. Improve your customer retention rate
If you have a complete view of the customer journey, it's easier to select areas where you can improve. When you do, customers experience fewer inconveniences, which leads to fewer people abandoning your brand for the competition. After all, 33% of customers consider switching brands after a bad experience.
The customer journey map can point out people who are on the path of defection. By recording the common behaviors and actions these customers have, you can start spotting them and providing care before they leave your business. While you may not keep everyone, it's worth a try as getting a new customer is 5-25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
5. You develop a total customer focus throughout the company
As your company grows, it can be difficult to coordinate all the departments so that they are focused on the customer. Often, there can be cases where sales and marketing objectives are not based on what customers really want.
Then you can share a clear customer journey map with your entire organization. The best thing about these maps is that they map out every step of the customer journey, from initial attraction to post-purchase support. And yes, this refers to marketing, sales, and service.
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Before starting to work on the customer journey map, some questions must be clarified:
Once these points have been clarified, the development of the customer journey map can begin.
Step 1: Composing the customer journey map creation team
Even if not all employees have customer contact, all departments should be represented on this team. Even employees without customer contact can bring fresh ideas and perspectives.
They are also sensitized to take the customer and their needs into account at every step of the process. In either case, the following functions must be present:
Step 2: Create the first version of the customer journey map
To create the first version of the customer journey map, all participants can meet for a brainstorming session to put themselves in the customer's shoes. What steps do you have to take to complete the desired process? Participants can evaluate the process themselves with their own online offer.
However, it should not be forgotten that the customer journey does not only take place online, but the customer also deals with the product or company offline. You should not spend too much time on a first draft, as the details are not yet important, but a rough roadmap should be drawn up. Therefore, the form of presentation must also be flexible; post-its, for example, are suitable for this.
Step 3: Data collection: verify assumptions with facts
It is very dangerous to create a customer journey map based only on assumptions made by the company's internal staff. The more steps in the map that can be verified with real data, the more likely it is to reflect the experiences of real customers. This is the only way to gain truly useful insights from the customer journey map and thus optimize the customer experience in the long run. For this, the following data sources can be used:
Internal:
External:
Step 4: Identify and optimize the important stages
The more data that enters the map, the more obvious it will be which steps represent key moments in the customer journey. These have a significant influence on the customer experience and key figures in the company.
There is often a single point of failure in the customer journey that matters more than any other: it causes the most problems, affects the most customers, or has the biggest impact on bottom-line metrics. If that moment were 100 percent perfect, it would have the greatest possible positive impact on the overall customer experience. The customer journey map helps to identify these moments.
Once the key moments of the customer journey have been identified, it is important to optimize them to improve the overall customer experience in a lasting way.
Customer journey maps are also an important tool for customer experience management in the B2B sector. Probably the biggest difference from the B2C industry is that the customer journey of a B2B organization is often characterized by the presence of several people: the accounting department must approve the costs of the planned software purchase, while the IT administrator handles the application; the software was previously selected by the human resources department. These responsibilities must be considered in the corresponding customer journey map, which is why they tend to be more complex in the B2B area.
In summary, a customer journey map, or customer journey map, is a visual representation of how your customer experiences your product or service. Customers are the lifeblood of your business, so it's crucial that you understand their issues, wants and needs in order to design a customer experience with them in mind. Whether you're in sales, marketing, product, or engineering, use a map to capture each customer's experience, resolve issues arising from your products and services, and fill potential gaps.
Customer journey maps represent the journey that a customer experiences. You need to show the thought processes and emotions that customers are facing from the first interaction (how they first interacted with the brand) to the end (the goal of your map). This, in turn, will help companies understand whether or not they are achieving their goals, which, in turn, can help them find solutions to improve the travel experience, resulting in higher conversion rates.
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