Step into your customers’ shoes and find out how to improve your business services with a smart customer journey maps strategy.
Tapping Into Your Customer Needs With Customer Journey Mapping
Do you know how customers interact with your business? Which precise steps do they take to get from first glance to repeat purchase? And what keeps them coming back time and time? Journey mapping can help you answer these and lots of other questions, optimize your business, improve customer experience, and get tangible results in terms of retention and sales.
Journey mapping lets you step into your clients’ shoes and learn their needs, goals, challenges, pain points, and motivations at each step when they interact with your business. Equipped with this knowledge, you can respond promptly to the needs of your actual customers, not an imaginary target group.
What is the purpose of customer journey mapping?
When it comes to catering to customers’ needs, it pays to always be one step ahead of your buyers. For this, you should learn, analyze, and know your customers’ needs to provide excellent service and customer experience. It also helps to identify existing issues in a business and resolve them quickly, optimize processes, and design a strategy for future growth.
But it’s very likely that you haven’t developed psychic mind-reading powers yet to better understand customer demands and stay in tune with their expectations. That means you need to utilize a time-tested methodology—customer journey mapping. So, what is the purpose of customer journey mapping, and how can you use it for your business?
Customer journey mapping is a methodology that helps businesses understand how their users and customers interact with them. It allows to visualize:
- How customers engage with your product or service;
- What channels they use throughout their journey;
- Who else is involved and affect the journey;
- What problems are there, and how they can be fixed;
- And so on.
As a result, customer journey mapping gives you insights into the possible gaps in service and pain points your customers encounter and delivers you endless growth potential. From these insights, you’ll be able to better plan for the future, identify market gaps, and address your clients’ actual needs, not presumed ones. In addition, having a customer journey map helps you make internal decisions and present your case to C-level staff to gain project support and funding.
What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?
Now let’s take a look at what the benefits of customer journey mapping are and how you can use the methodology in your business to get results.
Learn more about your customers’ behaviors
With customer journey maps, you’ll learn more about who your customers are and how they behave before. During, and after purchasing. By understanding the behavior of your target audience. So, you can optimize your processes and deliver higher-quality service on all levels at every business-critical stage of their journey.
When you create customer personas that represent a specific customer group and track their journeys. You can better understand not only what your customers buy from you. But why they buy your products and how they do it.
By improving sales funnels for each persona. You can gain more customers, make their experience truly memorable—a must in modern business. And, as a result, improve your retention rates and boost the capacity of your marketing campaigns and sales.
Get an actionable and realistic view of your customers journey maps
Often businesses spend substantial sums on improving their marketing funnels. Customer experience, and purchasing processes—all of these require in-depth analysis, time, and funding.
With customer journey maps, you can break your customers’ experience. Into smaller steps and evaluate each from the buyers’ or users’ perspective. In doing so, you’ll better understand how your customer interacts with your business and what goals they try to achieve. In addition, having these insights and the data to back it up helps you justify spending to stakeholders. So, illustrate how to get results.
For example, if you have a small convenience store in the city. You can track customer experience from their learning about your shop to buying a bar of chocolate there. After gathering information (e.g., by interviewing your customers or talking to customer-facing colleagues). So, you can evaluate each step of the journey. Get a deeper understanding of how your customers act and think. This is using data that can be incorporated into your business planning, marketing strategies, and so on.
Improve the customer onboarding experience
Businesses grow as their customer base expands. Customer journey maps help businesses identify bottlenecks in customer onboarding. Increase the flow of customers by reducing blockers or pain points at this stage of their journey.
Determining how customers start their relationship with your company and which difficulties they encounter. From the beginning show areas where they may become stuck and drop off the purchase process. Or stop using your service before they even give your business a try. For example, e-сommerce shops lose $18 billion in revenues yearly due to shopping cart abandonment.
This may be due to confusion of how a product or service works. A problematic checkout process, a sign-up issue, or something else entirely. Customer journey mapping will help you identify it and neutralize it to boost sales and improve customer experience in general.
Adopt a more personalized approach with customers journey maps
One of the most effective ways to create a unique and enjoyable brand experience. So, for your customers is to treat them as the individuals that they are. Instead of simple demographics based on age, location, or similar factors. Of course, while it’s almost impossible to create an individualized approach for every single person, by defining your customer personas (they will be covered later in the article) and mapping their journey with your brand, you can get pretty close. So, how does this work in practice?
Creating personas helps you learn about your customers’ behavior, aims, goals. Industries they work in, and even vocabulary they use daily. This way, you can better understand your customers’ expectations and fulfill them. As well as create the content for your social media and marketing campaigns that would echo in their hearts.
Break down and prevent silos
The larger your business, the harder it gets to establish effective communication between its departments. This causes a workplace silo, and for businesses, it is a productivity blocker.
According to the latest State of the Connected Customer report by Salesforce. 76% of consumers expect their companies to establish strong interaction among departments. Meanwhile, 54% say that it seems like sales, service, and marketing departments don’t exchange the customer data. On the client-side, this leads to poor customer service and a nonuniform approach. Which can negatively impact your business reputation.
Customer journey mapping helps to join efforts across your organization and work together. So, to deliver customer satisfaction as everyone in your organization will be on the same page. About who your customers are, their journeys with you, their problems, expectations, and so on.
How to build a customer journey map that works
Step 1: Conduct research: Customers journey maps
First things first, before setting out on your customer journey mapping task, you’ll need to do a little research. At this stage, it’s vital to establish what precisely you want to get. By mapping your customer’s journey and how these insights will be valuable for your business. Failure to do so could leave you with a bunch of data that doesn’t have a direct impact on your business.
Step 2: Choose your tools carefully
Next, you’ll need to choose the tools you’ll use to create your customer journey map. There’s lots of tools out there—Word, Excel, Google Docs, PowerPoint, Paint, to name a few. However, to get the most from your customer journey mapping and ensure you’ve included everything you need to get results from A to Z, engaging specialized journey mapping tools, such as UXPressia platform where you can find lots of customer journey map templates, may be the way to go.
Step 3: Create personas: Customers journey maps
Persona is a character that represents a specific group of your audience with similar behavior traits. To create personas, use the data gathered at the research stage. And be sure to include in their profiles the information you will need for the journey map: expectations, goals, motivations, channels, brands that influence them, etc.
Step 4: Done? Time to build your map
Now you can create a customer journey map. Start by defining stages where your business comes into contact with the persona, then identify processes, goals, channels, touchpoints, problems, and other important stuff for each stage.
With a digital journey map, you’ll be able to process valuable data much quicker, timely share updates with your employees, and gain profound insights on how to provide the best customer experience to your clients.
Even when your map is done, don’t leave it to dust. Run ideation sessions, update the data with time, design what-if scenarios, and it will constantly provide useful insights.
Customer journey mapping—access valuable insights now
The value of customer journey mapping for a business is hard to overstate. It’s an effective methodology that can help your business establish successful communication and interaction with your customers. With all the detailed and precise customer data at hand, you’ll be able to quickly recognize and fully meet your customers’ expectations, plan successful marketing campaigns, and more.
Initially, it might seem like a lot of work to make an actionable customer journey map, but with the right tools, it can be a pain-free process for your business. All you need to get outstanding results is the desire to improve your customers’ experience and a handy tool at your disposal.
