Customer journey mapping has become an important instrument to envision your customer’s experience. But what do these terms mean? Why should you even consider having a customer journey map? What are the best ways to go about building a complete customer journey map?
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience (CX) is the result of an exchange between a company and a customer over the duration of their relationship. It is a collection of conscious and subconscious attitudes, beliefs, feelings and motivations that the customer experiences during the said relationship. The goal is to understand the customer experience to improve the customer journey. Customer experience can be gauged on the overall experience or on particular touchpoints. The customer journey, on the other hand, is the representation of all the touchpoints the customer engages with of a brand.
The customer journey map is a visual representation of an individual’s relationship with the brand over time and across different media. The experience aspect is a deep dive into every touchpoint and on the overall feel of the customer. The deep dive analysis helps to review the subtlety and emotion involved in every touchpoint and the transitions between them. You need to understand the journey before you can pay attention to the experience. The journey is the path the customer takes to gain awareness of your brand, activate, engage and eventually conclude the transaction. The experience is the accomplishment of their needs and wants to keep them engaged in their path. The purpose of the customer journey is to surface new insights to improve the overall experiences.
What is customer journey mapping?
These journey maps are detailed visualisations of an end to end customer experience. They can take many different forms like diagrams, infographics, illustrations etc. They aim to depict all the places and the touchpoints when the customer interacts with your brand.
A customer journey map is a story designed to talk about a customer’s experience. They take time to construct, and it requires rigorous research and meticulous understanding of your customers. It is a representation of the near truth on a human level and may not always render the real-time scenario.
Why should you create customer journey maps?
The bottom line of having a customer journey map is to help build empathy for your customers. Helping your brand identify what your users want and how they feel. By doing so making your organisation customer-centric. Journey maps help your brands to look into your brand’s products, services and processes from a customer’s perspective and understand their pain points and needs at every step.
After you have prepared a customer journey map, you will find answers to questions like:
- What needs correction?
- Have you taken note of things you are currently doing right? Are there ways to improve it?
- Which stage if any, needs to be completely revamped?
- Are there any new things that need to be built from scratch?
- What is the impact of the changes on the customers and your brand?
A customer journey map is a powerful tool providing insights into the underlying complexity of the original journey. Marketers now understand that customers have infinite ways of interacting with their business both offline and online. So the focus has shifted more towards delivering an outstanding customer experience than just getting your people into the sales funnel.
Today’s customer wants their experience with their brands to be meaningfully connected and seamless at the same time. They want their companies to know who they are and what they are exactly looking for across multiple touchpoints.
Such maps can be useful to you at different levels in the business. If you are a designer, it helps you understand the context of the user. If you are a copywriter, it will help you figure out how the user is feeling and the kind of questions and doubts they have in mind. For an experience designer, a customer journey map helps in identifying the impediments and gaps in the customer experience. For managers, maps are an excellent overview to observe how their customers move through the sales funnel. Thus identifying opportunities to upgrade the experience.
How do you create a comprehensive customer journey map?
No two maps will be similar as they are dependent on the segment of the customers or any particular customer you are addressing to, your business, your product or your service. Factors like these vary the design of a customer journey map. This means that you have a great deal of freedom to be creative and explore. But the guidelines below will help you formulate your basic customer journey map. You can always elaborate on it to suit your specific business needs.
Right research to profile your personas
The first step in creating a customer journey map is to understand who your customers really are. Customer journey map is a mix of creativity and insights. It is based on data.
graphility helps your brand identify your best customers by building a buyer persona for your customers. The best way to go about it is to do analytical research using the information and data collected from your users. Research can be either quantitative or qualitative.
Quantitative information
Quantitative research involves aggregating information from a large number of users, through online forms, surveys etc. You put forth the essential questions to your customers to understand their motivations, goals, purchasing practices and pain points. Getting feedback from your customers on a regular basis while they interact with any of the touchpoints is also useful. Giving your customers the freedom to rate their experience during any interaction with your brand. Asking them if they expected anything more to further support them and make the process any smoother. Information such as these helps you identify your right customer.
Quantitative data is also available through analytics tools. Social media data, search data when read correctly can also help you construct your statistics. Advantages of quantitative data are that they are comparatively faster and easy to set-up. We have available tools for it as well. The disadvantages of having only quantitative data are that they never get to the minute and core details of why your user is doing what he/she is doing. At some point, you may find that the information deludes and you may end up losing the wealth of the information you could get.
Social listening is also an informative source of obtaining data about what your customer feels about your company/brand. Studying customer reviews, responses to customer support emails are also a way of recognising how well your brand is received by your customer.
Qualitative information
Qualitative information can be collected by a one to one conversation with your customer. Personal user interviews help you to get to the root cause of the customer needs. It helps you to understand your customer’s psychology. The number of interviews varies between five to six people and is enough to obtain candid and inspiring results. These interviews help us gain inspiration to design creative solutions and improve customer journey. We have dealt in depth about the impeccable advantages of user research in our previous article.
Another type of user research which can be conducted is ethnographic research. Ethnographic research is about interviewing your customer in his own native setting. Such kind of research can provide a particularly rich source of data helping you understand how a customer performs in his own environment. Another way to go about it is to find customers who are willing to journal their experiences of their interactions with your brand at any point over a period of maybe a month. This is as well useful in comprehending their mindset, the reasoning for their actions and their feelings at every step.
The difficulty of such kinds of research is that often clients are faced with time constraints. We also need to search for customers who are willing to invite you into their personal environments. It demands more logistics and preparation but is definitely doable.
All such details obtained from the above data will help you set clear objectives for your customer journey map. Therefore this, in turn, will help you build your buyer’s persona.
Understanding your buyer’s goals
Once you have built your buyer’s persona, it is now time to organise them in a map by addressing their needs and issues at every stage. It is crucial that you use your research data to build a map stepwise where the customer goal is reflected at every stage. Remember always, a map should be designed with your customer objective at the centre stage and not your company processes. Think about what your customer’s eventual goal is at each phase of his journey.
The map should aim to detail more specific and minute goals, considerations that the customer might have along the journey.
Touch upon every touchpoints
A touchpoint refers to any point a customer interacts with your brand in any channel, before, during or after they have experienced your service/product. Some touchpoints may have more impact than the other. Your map must consider all the potential touchpoints that exist between your customer and your organisation. This will help you to consistently stay in touch with your customers.
Touchpoint identification is an important step in a customer journey map and can often have the ability to improve conversion.
Identifying your customer’s pain points
Once you have registered all the possible touchpoints, it is now time to recognise and mark all the pain points at every touchpoint on the journey map. You will have to gather both your quantitative and qualitative data to mark out the implied roadblocks and concerns.
This will be a useful step when you are deciding upon the actions to take following the mapping process.
Identifying the changing customer emotions
After you have identified the customer pain points, you can now reflect upon the customer emotions through the different stages. Understand and define what are the factors that led to a customer behaving the way he did. What were the emotions conveyed by the customer at each stage, under which scenario and in which context?
Any additional detail that could help provide insights into the journey can be considered for inclusion. This can also mean retrospecting if a certain step can be avoided or improved. The more complete the map is, the better are the chances of it accurately representing a customer journey.
Time for action: Prioritising, fixing pain points and outlining improvements
The customer journey map should be designed with the intention of taking actions once it is complete. The end goal as we all understand is to get more conversions. An extensive and all-inclusive customer journey map will be an ideal step to get you towards your goal.
Some pitfalls of a customer journey map
A customer journey is not a one-off activity. A timed snapshot has its limits, so as the experience evolves, hopefully for the better, the map needs updating. These additional rounds of research take time.
While a map per customer segment or persona has value, the more maps you create, the more you risk to fragment your high-level view — and the more you’ll need to keep up with updates. Considering the effort and trade-off from the start will spare you some surprises later on.
Try the steps above to come up with your perfect customer journey map and share your feedback with us.