Understanding Customer Journey

According to Steve Jobs- ‘You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.’ This is exactly why focusing on a customer journey map is extremely important. But what is a customer journey map? Well, it is nothing but a visual representation of your customer’s experience with the brand. This map speaks volumes regarding each phase of experiences and interactions. The customer journey map of a company must include the following things:

• Moments of truth
• Touchpoints
• Confusion or frustration of your customer
• Potential feelings of these buyers

You need to consider a timeline of events before designing your map. Some of the vital factors include:

• The very first visit of your customer to your website
• The first in-product experience of your buyers
• Purchasing experience
• Onboarding emails
• Cancellations

While your product and business can help you to refine various phases, getting in touch with these customers and speaking to them will generate the desired results. By gaining extensive knowledge about their needs, you can now take a step toward achieving success. With a well-researched and constructed customer journey map, you will get the opportunity of improving your customer experience drastically.

For more information, all you need to do is take a quick look at this article. Stay tuned till the end, and you will be able to learn about these maps accompanied by the need to create them. Without any further ado, let’s get started!

Customer Journey Map: How Are You Supposed to Create a Customer Journey Map?

Check out these steps stated below; creating a customer journey map has never been easier before:

Step 1: Set Objectives for the Customer Journey Map

Before creating your customer journey map, consider asking these few questions to yourself:

• Why are you willing to design a customer journey map?
• What are your goals behind constructing this map?
• For whom are you designing this customer journey map?
• What experience is your customer journey map based upon?

Solving the following answers will enable you to build a buyer persona. You need to imagine a fictitious character who tends to represent an average client. Now, let’s hop into the next step.

Step 2: Conduct Persona Research and Learn About their Goals

In this step, you will have to focus on performing the basic and necessary research. You can prepare questionnaires in order to gain valuable feedback from your buyers. However, make sure to contact those customers who are actually interested in investing in your products or services. Take a look at some of the questions to ask:

• How did they come to know about your company?
• What kinds of goals do they want to achieve with your organization?
• Did they ever make a purchase with you? If yes, what was their deciding factor?
• How much time do they spend on your website?
• Are they able to navigate your website with ease?
• How can you improve your customer support?
• How helpful was your customer support for them?

These kinds of details will help you to learn about their experience without leaving any room for mistakes.

Step 3: Narrow Down Your Target Customer Personas

After you are done learning about your customer personas, you will have to narrow them down and pay attention to one or two of them. Too many personas will not help you to get access to the desired results. In order to determine the perfect suit for your customer journey map, all you need to do is use a marketing dashboard.

Step 4: Consider All the Touchpoints

This is one of the most crucial steps that can’t be overlooked in any given situation. What do you mean by touchpoints? Well, these are certain places on your official website that are highly used by your customers. You need to solve the following questions here:

• Are they using fewer touchpoints on your official website than expected?
• Are they leaving your site or getting turned away?
• Are they using touchpoints that are quite more than your expectations?
• Is your website a little bit complicated? Are your customers going through a lot of steps in order to reach the end goal?

In this stage, you will be able to develop an understanding of their objectives in the best possible manner. Apart from your website, there are certain other things that you need to take care of:

• Paid ads
• Social channels
• Third-party mentions or review sites
• Email marketing

Take a quick look at some of the touchpoints that you might consider while creating your customer journey map:

• Customer actions
• Customer motivations and emotions
• Customer pain points and obstacles

Learning about the roadblocks, emotions and actions of these customers will allow you to reach a perfect conclusion in no time.

Step 5: Determine the Available and Non-Available Resources

In this step, you will have to learn about two main things:

• Inventory of your resources that are already available
• Resources that you require to boost your customer’s overall journey

The customer journey map will enable your team to make certain arrangements for customer service tools. As a result, you will be able to drive outsized value seamlessly.

Step 6: Be a Part of the Customer Journey

Designing the customer journey map is not the end of the procedure. By taking the entire journey yourself, you will have to focus on analyzing the results in this step. Some of the questions that you might consider asking yourself are:

• How many buyers are actually visiting your website?
• How many of them are buying your goods and products?
• How can you improve your customer support?

Until and unless you are trying out the entire journey, it tends to remain highly hypothetical.

Step 7: Implement the Changes

It’s time to pull up your socks and implement the much-needed changes. It will allow you to achieve your goals in an effortless manner. Also, this customer journey map will definitely improve your customer experiences.

Customer Journey Map: Why Do You Need to Create Them?

A customer journey map works as a strategic approach; it allows you to learn about your customer’s expectations. It is an excellent tool that paves the way toward optimizing their experience seamlessly. Knowing your customers is possible with these maps; there are absolutely no doubts. Are you looking forward to creating a logical order for your customer journey? All you need to do is prepare a customer journey map, and that’s it.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully, you are now quite aware of these customer journey maps. Do you want to seek professional assistance in this specific area? If yes, getting in touch with Emeritus India will indeed be your best bet.

FAQs

Name a common consideration while preparing a customer journey map.

One of the common considerations includes learning about your customer’s pain points.

What are the reasons behind designing a map?

Some of the reasons include the following:

• Identifying gaps in communications or services
• Drive sales
• Reduce costs
• Employee and customer satisfaction

How much time do you need to create a customer journey map?

The overall process might take 3 to 12 weeks at a stretch.

What is one of the most crucial steps of this process?

One of the most crucial steps includes identifying, listing and outlining the branded touchpoints.

Who is responsible for creating these maps?

The CEOs and CMOs are solely responsible for preparing these customer journey maps.