What is a Customer Journey?

Increasing product knowledge and brand  awareness among your customers has become a top priority for today’s businesses. Tools such as search engine optimization (SEO) that focus on driving the customer most efficiently through digital inbound marketing tactics, have become an integral part of today’s business strategies of many successful companies. That said, a big chunk of those companies tends to forget about the most vital component of any business, the customer himself. There are various strategies of keeping your customer happy. One of them is creating a customer journey map.

Customer Journey Map

A customer journey, if put in simple terms, is a visual representation of the customer’s story, where the steps the customer takes to achieve his goal with a company are visualized on a simple customer journey map. Creating a map for the customer’s journey helps decision-makers analyze customer behavior and identify pain points throughout the entire service and sales processes, and make the necessary improvements and adjustments. The mapping can be a combination of outlines of key events, customer “call to action” triggers and thought processes of the customer during the entire process. There are six main steps that you need to take to get your customer journey map right.

1. Know your objective

Without knowing what you want to achieve from making a customer journey map, there is no reason to do it. First, you need to know what area you want to improve, whether you want more customers to use your website when buying your product or you are more interested in improving their experience when they physically arrive at your store. 

2. Create an “Ideal Customer Profile”

Before analyzing your customers’ steps, you need to identify who your customer is. It would be unlikely to have only one profile of customers in your business. It’s your job to understand how many types of buyers can be interested in your product. 

3. Identify Customer Touch-points

           Touchpoints can be anywhere the customer interacts with your brand. It can be either adding the product to cart through your own website, interacting with customers through customer support team, being at the physical store, and so on. Research shows that the likelihood of the customers choosing your product is more, when customers have more touchpoints to interact through. . However, an excessive number of touchpoints can result in a complicated  buying process and a confused customer.  

4. Choose your Map Type

There are three main types of maps you can choose from. The current state, which is the most common type, and is used to analyze the customer behavior and experience with your brand right now. Day-in-the-life focuses on the wide scope of the customer’s movements like the name suggests. In this case, the habits and movements are taken from morning till night and can include times when customers don’t interact with your brand. In the future state type, you are predicting the customer’s behavior, thoughts and emotions when interacting with your brand in the future.

5. Draw your Customer Journey

After you have narrowed down who your customer is and what type of map you want to use, it is time to draw your journey map, by focusing on the actions you want the customer to take, highlighting the sequence and timing.  

6. Take the Customer Journey 

The most crucial step is when you put yourself in the customer’s shoes and start taking the steps you have already drawn on your map. While taking the journey, take notes, analyze every moment, and draw conclusions.

After following these steps, you will have a clear picture of the things your customer is going through when interacting with your company. Take those thoughts,  emotions, and struggles you experienced while taking your own customer journey and use them to improve your journey for your customers. Customer journey has proven to be a valuable tool for improving customer experience, and is worth trying.