Every company requires a robust strategy to increase their product or service demand. During this cut-throat competition during this era where you can find millions of options just for a single product, nailing a robust strategy is a challenging nut to crack; therefore, you need a plan to achieve your target audience. Some may be way too strategic, which may make you dizzy. Consequently, knowledge should be such that it can be easy to pen down, flexible to adjust to changing trends, and easy to communicate. Therefore, we are here to give you a better way to perform this tedious task and guide you through the whole Customer Journey Map.
What Is a Customer Journey Map?
What comes to your mind when you first see your company’s customer? Have you ever given a thought to his perspective about your company? Or how have they, especially loyal customers, chosen to be at your side for this long?
You must ask these questions when devising a strategy to attract or retain more customers for your company.
Understanding the customer behavior towards a particular company. For this type of study, we use a visual representation called a “Customer Journey Map.” Corporate sectors use this map to analyze the behavior of their customers. You can use this tool to determine what their customers think and what they will like next.
Are we here talking about data collection used for analysis purposes? No, it is different than that, you can say a bit. Is it a more nerdy and complicated thing to do? Due to the tremendous number of online options, you must devise marketing strategies based on changing global trends.
Customers now interact with companies differently due to the number of options available in both online and offline markets. Therefore, a well-devised customer journey map is the best to understand customer behavior across their buying journey, which usually reflects their emotions, pain points, and actions.
Is it similar to data collection, which is a more complex way of doing so? The answer is No!
You can better grasp this by reading the following quote.
“Data often fails to communicate the frustrations and experiences of customers. A story can do that, and one of the best storytelling tools in business is the customer journey map.”
— Paul Boag, UX designer, service design consultant & digital transformation expert
Visual representation is a fine line that delineates the two. A customer journey map makes it much easier to grasp the information than any other graphical representation, let’s say, can do.
Why Customer Journey Maps Are Important?
We have touched upon getting an overview of a customer journey map. To have a deeper understanding of how to reap benefits to their fullest, let’s discuss the role one by one:
First up, the journey map has a multifaceted approach when it comes to marketing. It touches upon every online medium, such as email, social media, and site visits. A social media-specific approach helps you make a better SEO strategy by understanding customer behavior, for example, what platform the target audience uses the most or when they are often available to know when to get your brand to your audience.
Don’t you feel more connected when someone addresses your concern? Pf course, you do. Understanding your customer’s emotions are even more critical. Have you ever encountered an angry customer when he cannot contact customer service during grievance redressal? Or you might have faced such an issue while giving feedback or lodging any complaint.
Focusing on customer satisfaction helps attract more customers and retains the previous loyal customers even longer than usual.
Have you grasp all the knowledge so far? Now next up is having a clear journey map of how the customer behaves while making any purchase, such as their needs, how they hover over when making any decision, and more, these patterns can help you understand the abstract way of your customer behavior. Such understanding lets you devise a concrete plan that can be used and tuned as per changing behavior later in the future. To get the crux of it, it is better to put it this way:
“Experience maps look at a broader context of human behavior. They show how the organization fits into a person’s life.”
Jim Kalbach, author of Mapping Experiences
Those mentioned above are just a few benefits of understanding your customers’ buying and interaction patterns. This approach can attract and gain customers and make exact changes for the future.
What Can You Include In the Customer Journey Map?
There can be many elements to focus on to target if you want to make a robust customer journey map. Elements!? Yes. These are the basic aspects you need to look for but if you are a novice making the map for the first time, start with the basic template. The touch points may vary from company to company, but the following elements need to be incorporated in every map you plan to prepare. So, without further ado, let’s get to the point.
Buying process:
First up, we have a buying process. You will need to extract the data from all relevant resources, but keep one thing in mind while doing so: your target audience in terms of their approach as to where they engage from, whether they are solely store customers or prefer online shopping. For apparent reasons, it can vary if it is a ride-sharing or food-delivery app. Keeping all this in mind, you can get your hands on these resources to extract all the data and analyze it well using good analytic tools. Once done, you can move on to the next step, understanding their emotions.
Emotions:
Emotions swoops in again. Many shopping behaviors communicate some emotion, whether negative or positive. They might be trying to mitigate negative ones while buying their favorite food or showing euphoria or happiness when shopping at their favorite clothing stores. Carefully analyzing these emotions and incorporating this data into your map journey will help you achieve your target and customer satisfaction.
User Action:
This stage involves analyzing your current customer’s behavior or emotions with the actions performed at that time. Isn’t it better to get an example to understand this? Of course, yes!
During free time of the year, an introverted person may focus on buying video games rather than outdoor sports goods. All these details might be overwhelming, but working on them diligently will give you the most awaited results.
User Research:
It is more like an understating of the social media algorithm. His stage will help you understand buyers’ behavior and where they head towards when researching specific products. You must have filled out many surveys saying, “Where did you hear about us?” with a few options written down below.
It is the way to collect data that a company needs to collect to utilize that platform to gain momentum in customers and, as a result, sales.
Solutions:
Once done with your research, you can identify spare wheels in the whole equation and devise solutions to those issues whenever needed. This stage is critical, but for creative people, this is the most exciting step to make or break all your efforts.
Types Of Customer Journey Mapping:
Before you stumble upon creating your Just-perfect journey map, it is better to clearly understand certain types to find the best fit for your company. Let’s discuss a few of its types one by one:
Current state:
The most simple yet powerful way to connect your customer with your brand is by keeping track of current emotional experiences while purchasing or simply browsing. These maps are best suited for monitoring and thus improving customer behavior.
Future state:
These maps correlate with current state maps since they derive the thought patterns data from your company experience. They are the best fit for future interpretation of your journey.
Day In the Life:
There is a silver lining between the “current state type of map” and the “day in the life.” The difference is that one tends to focus more on currently happening behavior. In contrast, the latter is to peek into the daily personal life of the individual to understand their pain points regardless of their interaction specifically with the brand.
It is more beneficial to understand the pain points, especially when devising new marketing strategies to gain a new audience.
Service Blue Print: Service Blue Print gets down to bare, starting from scratch to better understand the root causes of customer behavioral patterns. It is then layered in later steps with other strategic points, such as policies, to help attain the target and implement respective strategies.
Each of the above types seems a bit overlapping but has its unique aspect, which can make a perfect strategy to ace the challenge and take your company to new heights.
How to Create Perfect Journey Maps?
You must consider a well-organized order to craft a spot on the customer journey map to create a perfect journey map. One that can yield the best outcome of your efforts not just in gathering the data of your potential customers but also in attracting new ones. So, let’s delve into these steps while simplifying the intricacies of your mapping journey.
Be clear with your objective:
Depending on what you want to achieve from your mapping journey, having a clear set of checkpoints of customer behavior right from start to finish will help you specifically target loopholes in your strategy or, if not loopholes, there are but will lead you to go specific even when trying to gain more customers on your way.
In addition, if you want to address customers’ concerns, you better carve out the map that evaluates the prior behavior to better highlight areas of customer concern.
Depending on the nature of the complaint, you can identify the key areas where the problem arises, such as the warehouse, delivery service, or customer service department.
Experimenting With Data:
Next, you must ask relevant questions beforehand, such as what your customers want. How do they engage with your brand, and if it is an online market, then at what time of the day or how often do you like to do it? What do his previous purchases look like?
Understanding the real motive behind customer behavior helps you better understand the pain points.
Moreover, it is also essential to get your grasp on research within your organization, especially interacting directly with people involved in departments like customer services. It helps to understand better what they have about their perception while interacting.
These are just a few of the tips and tricks to get a fundamental understanding of customer behavior and direct your strategy, respectively.
Identify our customer touchpoints:
It is necessary to identify specific areas to be precise for while planning to execute a customer journey map. Once you have gathered the information, the next step should be to look for customers’ approaches to resolve their issues or obtain specific information relevant to the product.
Consistency is the key to harnessing customer satisfaction. You must ensure that the data provided throughout various platforms is the same.
For example, if a social media account or website provides one piece of information, whereas the same information conflicts with what the customer representative offers, it may evoke negative customer sentiments, resulting in a plummeting sales graph.
But it is essential to focus on what you can control, your customer expectation, rather than something people discuss amidst the competition.
Outline Key Stages Of Your Customer Experience:
Is there any short-cut way to map out the platitude of information needed to make a customer journey map? First, you can handle the entire process discussed above. So now, you can finish this task relatively in straightforward manner, breaking it down into bits and then working on it step by step. But don’t worry! in this way, you will be more better off even if you have to be repeatedly check to fill in the missing links.
Creating an outline is a perfect way to carry out this task: carve a set of checkpoints, or you can call it an outline. Depending on your brand’s complexity, you can make it a more vigilant or simplified version. Sometimes, less is more, but at times, where services are delivered quite often, for instance, food delivery, the process may ask a more exhaustive outline.
Such as Discovery, research/ survey, purchase, delivery, after-sale support, and, in the end, review and sharing.
We can highlight the cog in a machine by further breaking it down. Still looking for more clarification? That is okay. We can provide you with an example. For instance, if we put delivery in the spotlight starting from the date and time of the order placed, followed by when it was delivered and whether the customer found the desired order intact in case of any fragile product and asking for the rating from 1 to 5 and feedback especially if the customer had an issue from scratch, can not only help you to be specific but also quicker in resolving the matter.
Mapping out this will help achieve customer satisfaction and resonate with your brand’s positive outlook among other competitors.
Now It’s Time For Final Touches To Your Plan:
Have you got enough grasp of how to create an effective customer journey map? If yes! Then let’s move to intricacies, you need to count in order to create visual representation of all your tedious work.
Depending on your preference, you can use a toolkit among many great options. One might use mind maps to put all the information in the side bubble, whereas others would like to do it in a more categorized way, such as traditional column and row methods. It can be an affinity diagram or a circular representation of the data. And for more visual appeal, it can also be a video or presentation depending on your company’s brand voice and your ease of understanding it quicker and better.
Are you still looking for an easier alternate? Many software and tools are available online to complete this task by tapping a few keys on your computer. But you will have to look for cost-effective and more efficient options than going all out with creativity skills.
Do you know what is the most important in this? Yes you guessed it right! to cross-check your final results. If you have completed the task but have yet to ask for your peer’s opinions, it might still have many flaws and loopholes, making your efforts go down the hole. Feedback on the customer forum is a great way to experiment with real-time information. You can also ask for your group team members’ ideas and input. Just pass it through various filters to make the best out of it.
