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Having a defined customer journey map in your business is crucial to improve your customer experience and even dissolve some churn it might encounter. As your business evolves you should be able to adapt your customer journey to fit your customer’s needs and wants as well as being on top of the latest trends in the subject. This will allow you to take action on identified customer pain points when interacting with your business. The end goal – a better customer experience that leads to better business outcomes. Keep reading to discover some real customer journey map examples.
What is the customer journey?
The customer journey is the path that a customer takes from their initial engagement with a product or service to their ultimate purchase and post-purchase interactions. Understanding this path is essential for businesses, as it allows them to map out and optimize the process by which customers interact with their brand.
This path can be broken down into five stages: awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, and advocacy. Each stage comprises several steps that customers typically take in their quest to become familiar with and ultimately buy a product or service.
The customer journey map helps you visualize how customers interact with your brand and go through these five stages. This visual representation shows where customers start interacting with your brand, how they move through each stage of the buying cycle, and how they ultimately reach conversion. This concept can also be applied to digital marketing with conversion funnels.
Why do you need customer journey mapping?
Few aspects of business are as important as understanding the customer journey. After all, it’s the customer journey that determines how well your business is doing, not how well you think you’re doing. Many businesses make the mistake of thinking about the customer journey in terms of individual touchpoints – such as website visits or social media interactions. However, this misses the big picture. To understand the customer journey and to develop a strategy to improve it, you need to map it out.
Customer journey mapping is a visualization tool that allows businesses to understand their customers’ experience with them by documenting all the interactions that a customer has with a company across channels. Mapping the customer journey can help businesses identify pain points and areas for improvement in their customer experience. It can also help businesses better understand customer behavior and preferences, and identify opportunities for marketing and product innovation.
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When to use customer journey mapping?
There is no single answer to this question as the use of customer journey mapping will vary from business to business. However, a few scenarios in which customer journey mapping could be particularly useful include when:
- You want to gain a better understanding of your customers’ behavior and needs
- You want to improve customer engagement and loyalty
- You want to design or redesign your customer experience
- You want to track progress against your goals or objectives
How to create a customer journey map?
Many companies struggle with how to create a customer journey map. The process of creating one can be overwhelming and it’s difficult to know where to start. However, by following a few simple tips, you can create a customer journey map that accurately reflects your customers’ experiences.
- Understanding your customer
The first step is to determine who your customers are. This may seem like an obvious step, but it’s important to remember that not all customers are created equal. You need to focus on your key customer. After thinking about your customer’s pain points, imagine your buyer persona – your company’s ideal customer.
To build this persona start with an outline with demographic information like age, gender, occupation, education and so on. Then think about what your customer needs are and what they are searching for to resolve their pain points.
2. Identify customer touch points
Touchpoints are all the stages a customer has contact with your brand, whether this is on social media, website or physical environment.
When designing your customer journey map it is essential that you identify all possible touchpoints the customer might have with your brand. Things like how they first hear about your company, how they can buy from you or reach are all important aspects to consider.
3. Take the customer journey yourself
Once you design your customer path or customer journey make sure you go through it. Analyzing this journey yourself is crucial to determine if everything is running smoothly. This way you are able to secure a good customer experience once your customer interacts with your brand.
4. Obstacles and roadblocks
Once you have listed your customer’s touchpoints you are able to identify possible obstacles they might have found along the way. Since roadblocks affect customer experience, this ends up being crucial in customer journey mapping because with this tool you can better identify issues and resolve them.
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Types of customer journey maps
There are four types of customer journey maps that your can implement depending on your business goals:
Current state
This types of map is the most frequently used by companies. It covers customer’s thoughts, actions and emotions while interacting with your company.
Future state
Future state customer journey maps are useful when you want to set a clear business vision in the long term or thinking about making changes in customer experience. Just like current state maps these covers customer’s thoughts, actions and emotions while interacting with your company. However these are emotions and thought that will occur in the future, once you implement those planned changes.
Day in the life
These maps identify actions your customers might take during the day with the goal of identifying habits and lifestyle. these are useful when a company is thinking about developing new market strategies.
Service blueprint
When designing a service blueprint you can use a current or future map as an outline. Then you add the necessary procedures to deliver the service/experience to your customer. This might be a network of people, technology, logistics and so on.
Customer journey map examples
There are four types of customer journey maps that you can implement depending on your business goals:
