What is Customer Journey Mapping?
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In short, “A customer journey map is a story designed to provide insights into the customer’s journey. Not designed to represent a 100% real experience with all its nuances.”
In other words, completing a Customer journey map for your customers enables you to gain clarity on your business’s customer service offering — the good and the bad as well as understanding your audiences wants, needs and motivations for purchases and engagement.
It can seem a daunting task, but remember this is a representation of a customer typical experience even before they begin engagement with your business — there is no way you are going to cover every scenario.
According to Commando, the suggested first step in beginning to map your Customer’s Journey begins with the following ;
To identify the opportunities for growth along the customer lifecycle, it is first important to understand the customer’s experience engaging with the company and its product or service. A customer journey map is an illustration of exactly these experiences. The map can tell the full story covering the entire customer lifecycle from initial contact to activation, engagement, and beyond or focus on only a part of the story that lays out interactions or touchpoints critical to a subset of the customer’s experience.
There are actually several forms of journey maps, all defined by the scope of the investigation. The different types are:
- User Experience Journey Maps: to chart the digital experience
- Sales Journey Maps: to chart the path through the sales funnel (awareness to purchase)
- Customer Journey Maps: to holistically examine the full experience
Why should use customer mapping in my business?
There are many benefits of mapping your customer’s journey, to name a few:
- It allows you to streamline your customer journey by identifying any problem areas
- It can maximise customer sales and strengthen your sales funnel
- Improving your customer experience can only help to increase levels of satisfaction and loyalty and retention in your business
- Enhances communication
- Helps to minimise negative customer experiences
How do I do it?
The easiest way of completing this exercise is to draw it, or write it down! When you are starting this exercise, ensure you begin with the main touch-points your customer has with your business.
Lastly, you could summarise and consider the following areas in your customer journey:
Awareness — Discovery — Purchase — Use of Product or Service
According to Salesforce;
“A customer journey map is a visual representation of every experience your customers have with you. It helps to tell the story of a customer’s experience with your brand from original engagement and into hopefully a long-term relationship.”
Customer journey mapping helps businesses step into their customer’s shoes and see their business from the customer’s perspective. It helps businesses gain insights into common customer pain points, how they can improve the customer experience, and define what customers, and prospective customers, need in order to complete a purchase.
According to Salesforce “From a customer’s perspective, they want their experience with a brand to be connected and seamless. They expect companies to know and remember, across multiple touchpoints, who they are and what they’re looking for, so that the necessary information is available and without the necessity to repeat or clarify their needs. A map helps reveal issues with siloes in your business.”
The benefits of a customer journey map include:
- helping you see where customers interact with your business, focusing the business on particular customer needs at different stages in the buying funnel
- identifying whether the customer journey is in a logical order, givings an outside perspective on your sales process
- showing the gaps between the desired customer experience and the one actually received;
- highlighting development priorities
- allowing you to concentrate efforts and expenditure on what matters most to maximise effectiveness
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