What Is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience interacting with your brand at all touchpoints. Have you ever wondered whether your perception of your company is the same as your customers’? Sometimes we don’t really know, or we think that we know what impression we leave on customers, but the reality is not always on the same page. The channels your customers use to interact with you may contain faulty touchpoints that prevent a smooth customer experience. With the help of a customer journey map, these weak spots crop up and make it impossible to overlook.
There are a myriad of doors that a customer journey map allows you to open. Apart from obtaining a bird’s eye view of the entire customer journey, it also allows you to identify which channels customers prefer to keep in contact with your team. Once you figure that one out, you have a wonderful opportunity to focus your resources on that channel and guarantee an excellent customer experience. Customers value when their feedback is taken into account. As soon as you take measures to improve what’s bothering them, you will leave a good impression. You reap what you sow, they say, so it won’t be too long once you notice higher customer retention and customer conversion rates.
How to Create a Customer Journey Map
With the help of different software and charts it takes a certain amount of time and energy to sketch and orchestrate your customer journey map. Here is a quick overview of a couple of steps you need to take to map your customer journey.
- Defining your customers: understanding who are your target customers and your potential customers. Establishing a clear picture of your customers is crucial for realizing whose shoes you’ll be walking in along the way.
- Identifying the customer touchpoints. From the moment they come across your brand wherever it is to the final handshake, you need to set clear boundaries of where the journey starts and where it ends.
- Laying out and mapping current procedures. In this step, you put on your customers’ shoes and start walking the customer journey, leaving a trace behind you. A customer journey map may vary in size and volume from one company to another.
- Maintenance: probably the most significant step in creating your customer journey map. Its primary purpose is to boost customer satisfaction and enjoyment, and so it needs to be treated as any property that needs assessment and update.
Why Do We Need It?
No matter what industry you’re working in and what type of job you do, you need constant innovation to be at the top of your game. Just like individuals, businesses also need nonstop reinvention that focuses on tightening the relationship between them and their most valuable stakeholders – their customers. If your business is especially in the startup or growth phase, a customer journey map is a trick you can use to show off and establish strong customer relationships right from the start.
It may seem that the map only benefits the sales and marketing team. According to Forbes, a journey map gives hints to content creators and UX designers too. These creative individuals also need to identify the holes that need to be filled to eliminate the barriers in the customer journey. To go forward in your business, you need to collectively put the customer in the middle of everything as a team. A journey map needs to be something like a constitution, with everyone taking and giving back.
Earlyone can play a big role in creation and usage process.
