How To Create An Effective Customer Journey Map

How To Create An Effective Customer Journey Map

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How To Create An Effective Customer Journey Map

Importance of Tracking Customer Journey

Understanding the minds of your customers can be challenging. With the changing technology and preferences of customers, their wants and needs are also changing. 

According to Baymard Institute, approximately 70% of online shoppers abandoned the cart of various online companies in the year 2021. 

Likely, you might not have a clear knowledge of your customer’s journey in purchasing products and services. In this blog post, you will learn everything about the customer journey map.

What do you mean by customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the experience of the customers of your company. It helps to understand the needs and concerns of your potential customers which directly motivates their actions. This also helps in improving customer journey tracking, conversion rates, and customer retention.

Importance of customer journey map

The customer journey map seems simple as it is not just about customers buying your products but it is more complex than that. When a customer is introduced to your product to the point when they purchase it, they go through a buyer’s journey. 

On this journey, customers might see your ads, speak with your customer service operator or purchase your product. These are some of the major stops where a customer might need your help. 
Thus, understanding the process of customer journey map and its consequences on customers allows a business to improve customer experience and drive them towards sales and this is how a customer journey map comes into play.

5 Elements of customer journey map

1. The buying process

You’ll begin by drafting a path that your business intends for a customer to complete the sales process and reach a final goal. For this, you can list each stage horizontally.

2. Actions

Before buying your products, customers might speak up with their family and friends about their needs and potential ways by which they can fulfill those needs. From there, they might look at your website and then finally make a purchase. Here, customers will take different actions to purchase your product.

3. Emotions

Customers might have different emotions in their buying processes such as relief, excitement, happiness, and worry. If you have a long or complicated buying process, then your customers will go through different emotions at every stage. 

Adding emotions in each stage of your customer journey map will help you identify negative emotions about your brand. 

4. Pain Points

If there is a negative emotion, then there is a pain point that caused it. Through negative emotions, you can easily identify pain points at each stage.

5. Solutions

This is the final element of the customer journey map as your team will find potential solutions to reduce the pain points of customers and improve the buying process.

What do you mean by customer journey mapping process?

Customer journey mapping is a process of creating a customer journey map which is a visual representation of the customer experience of your company. The customer interacts with your business and that information is represented in the form of a visual map. 

Process of customer journey map

1. Set your objectives clearly for the map

Before you create a map, you need to first ask yourself a few questions. What goals do you want to achieve with this map? What is the goal specifically about? What experience is it based upon? 

Based on these questions, you will create a buyer persona that includes every aspect of the customer’s journey and also helps in customer journey tracking.

2. Conduct a research and define your goals

Examples of questions to ask are:

How did you hear about our company?

What goals do you want to achieve with your company?

What is the first thing that attracted you to our website?

How much time did you spend on our website?

Have you ever purchased our product or are planning on it?

On a scale of 1 to 10, how easy is it to navigate our website?

Did you ever need our customer support?

Is there anything we can do to make the buying process easier?
You can also use the buyer persona tool to fill in the details that you have procured from the feedback.

3. Highlight your targeted customer personas

Once you have all the information from your customer’s feedback you need to focus on only one or two of them, as if your group has different personas in one journey, you won’t be able to accurately define your customer;’s experience. 

If you are creating a customer journey map for the first time, then you should always choose your most common customer persona and consider the route they typically take to engage with your business.

4. List down all the touchpoints

Touchpoints are the places on your website where users interact. This helps to give you an insight into information about the actions of your customer’s journey. 

Based on your search, you should note down all the touchpoints that your prospect customers are using and look at all the ways by which customers came across your business through different online platforms such as paid ads, social channels, third-party reviews, or email marketing.

Some of the important touch points you should consider in your customer journey mapping process are.

Customer Actions

List all the actions taken by your customer throughout their interaction with your brand. It might be typing your keywords in a Google search or clicking an email. Reducing the number of steps in the customer journey might sound risky but pays off with higher conversion rates.

Customer’s Motivations and Emotions

Every action that a customer takes is motivated by emotion and it changes according to the buying journey. Knowing this will help to provide them with the right content at the right time. 

Customer Pain Points and Obstacles

Get to know what roadblocks are stopping your customers to take the desired action. For example – one of our customers wants to purchase your product but abandons the cart rate discovering your high shipping charges. 

5. Determine the need for resources

It will highlight all the resources that you will need to improve the customer experience. So, it is important to calculate your current inventory and what more quantity you will need. 

For example – Maybe your map shows some flaws in your customer service offer and your team does not have the appropriate tools to follow with those customers after a certain level of interaction. Here, you can advise your management to use customer service tools or take help from a customer support outsourcing company to manage your customer’s demand. 

6. Take the customer journey by yourself

Designing your map does not mean your work is done. The most important part of the process is to analyze the results. How do you support your customers? How many people are clicking your website but closing it before making any purchase? 

These should be some of the questions you should be able to answer after completing your customer journey map. Analyzing the results helps to get an idea of where customers’ needs aren’t met properly. You can also ensure that you provide a valuable experience and solutions to the problems of your customers. 

The whole process of customer journey mapping remains hypothetical until you try it on yourself. 

7. Make necessary changes

You need to make necessary changes to your website to achieve your goals. 

For example – Change in call-to-action button or change the description of each product making it more clear. With the help of your map, you can ensure that the needs and pain points of customers are always being addressed. 

5 customer journey mapping best practices

1. Set a clear goal for your map

Determine if you are aiming to improve the customer experience or launching a new product and then set your goals accordingly.

2. Conduct a survey

Ask your customers if they are happy using your products or can achieve their goals or what changes they want from your company. 

3. Ask your customer service representatives about the questions they receive most frequently 

Customer representatives help to fill the gap between your customers and your business by translating all your customer’s pain points so that your team can understand and act on them. 

4. Create a customer journey map for every buyer persona

Psychographics, demographics, and the amount of period a customer involves with your business help to determine how a person interacts and makes purchase decisions.

5. Make customer journey map accessible to all cross-functional teams

Make a copy of it so that each team member can put customers on top of the chart.

Conclusion

Once you understand how to improve customer experience through a customer journey map, you can delight them at each stage in the buying journey. Several factors that affect the customer journey include emotions, pain points, touchpoints, and processes. 

To serve your customer’s unrecognized needs, customer journey tracking with a map is the most effective way to visualize any information and to look for more opportunities to serve your customer’s needs.