Customer Journey Map

 

Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a company. It provides an understanding into the needs and concerns of potential customers which directly motivate or inhibit their actions. This information allows companies to boost customer experience leading to higher conversion rates and improved customer retention.

 

The customer journey is the process by which a customer interacts with a company in order to achieve a goal. From gaining awareness of a brand via social media to receiving an email after a successful transaction, there are usually many and varied steps in between. It is not something to assume or predict based on your internal perspective. A customer journey is very specific to the physical experiences your customers have.

 

Journey Map Important:

The customer journey seems simple. Companies offer a product or service, and customers buy it. The journey is actually more complex than that. Salesforce reported that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products. From the time a customer is introduced to a product to when they purchase it, they go through the buyer’s journey.

On this journey, customers might see ads, speak to a customer service representative, or attempt to check out. These are stops along the journey that affect their actions. Understanding the process and its consequences on customer interactions allows a business to plan and prepare to drive customers towards a sale.

However, simply understanding the customer journey isn't enough. It's best to visualize this complicated journey into a diagram that you and other employees can refer to as a resource. This is where designing a customer journey map comes into play.

 

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map — the visual representation of a company’s customer experience. It compiles a customer’s experience as they interact with a business and combines the information into a visual map.

                                            

What’s included in a customer Journey Map:

 1. The Buying Process

A customer journey map includes significant milestones in the customer journey. You’ll begin by drafting the path your business intends for a customer to take in order to reach a goal. Using the typical buying process stages, you’ll list each stage horizontally.

 

2. User Actions

This element of the customer journey map details what a customer does in each stage of the buying process. They might speak with friends and family about their needs and potential ways to fulfill those needs in the awareness stage. From there, they might take a demo on your website, and then finally, they’ll use cash or a debit card to make their purchase. This element explores the various ways your customers might achieve the goal.

 

3. Emotions

Whether the goal is big or small, it’s important to remember your customers are solving a problem. That means they’re probably feeling some emotion — whether that is relief, happiness, excitement, or worry. If your process is long or complicated, they might feel a range of emotions at every stage. Adding these emotions to the journey map can help you mitigate negative emotions about the journey so that they don’t become negative opinions about your brand.

 

4. Pain Points

Where there is a negative emotion, there’s a pain point that caused it. Adding pain points to your customer journey map can help you identify which stage your customer is experiencing negative emotions and deduce the reason why.

 

5. Solutions

As the final element in your customer journey map, solutions are where you and your team will brainstorm potential ways to improve your buying process so that customers encounter fewer pain points and have positive moods as they patronize your business.

 

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

You might be telling yourself, "This doesn't seem necessary for me or my company. We understand the needs and pain points of our customers, thank you very much." This may be true at surface level.

However, breaking down the customer journey phase by phase, aligning each step with a goal, and restructuring your touchpoints accordingly are essential steps towards maximizing customer success. After all, everything you do should be about solving customer problems and helping them achieve long-term success with your product or service.

 

1. You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective.

Rather than trying to discover your customers through outbound marketing, you can have your customers discover you with the help of inbound marketing. Outbound marketing involves tactics that are poorly targeted at generalized or uninterested audiences and that seek to interrupt customers from their daily lives.

Outbound marketing is costly and inefficient. It annoys and deters customers and prospects. Inbound marketing involves creating interesting content that is useful and that your customers are already searching for. It grabs their attention first and focuses on the sales later.

By mapping out the customer journey, you can understand what is interesting and helpful to your customers about your company and website, and what is turning them away. You can create the kind of content that will attract them to your company and keep them there.

 

2. You can create a new target customer base.

If you don't properly understand the customer journey, you probably don't completely know the demographics and psychographics of your customers. This is dangerous; it's a waste of time and money to repeatedly target too broad of an audience than who will actually be interested in your products, services, and content.

Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers and mapping out their journey will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone in your marketing to that specific audience.

 

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the customer's experience. It shows you moments where people will experience delight as well as situations where they might be faced with friction. Knowing this ahead of time allows you to plan your customer service strategy accordingly, and intervene at ideal times that maximize your brand's value to the buyer.

Proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more reliable to your customer base. For example, if it's around the holidays and you're anticipating a customer service surge, you can send a message to your customers letting them know about your team's adjusted holiday hours.

You can also let them know about additional support options if your team is unavailable and what to do if there's an urgent problem that needs immediate attention.

This way, customers won't feel surprised if they're waiting on hold a little longer than usual or call you outside your new working hours. They'll even have alternative options to choose from — like a chatbot or knowledge base — if they need to find a faster solution.

 

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it's easier to pick out areas where you can stand to improve it. When you do, customers experience fewer pain points which leads to fewer people leaving your brand for competitors. After all, 33% of customers will consider switching brands after just one poor experience.

Customer journey mapping can point out individuals who are on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors and actions that these customers have, you can start to spot them before they leave your business. While you might not save them all, it's worth the try since increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.

 

5. You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.

As your company gets larger, it can be hard to coordinate all the departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams. They can often have sales and marketing goals that aren't based on what real customers want.

A clear customer journey map can be shared with your entire organization. The great thing about these maps is that they map out every single step of the customer journey from initial attraction to post-purchase support. And, yes, this concerns marketing, sales, and service.

Based on this rationale, you can't deny the importance of a customer journey map. Thus, we've created the following steps for crafting the best map to help your company and customers prosper.

 

S.Avinash (21UCM004)

M.Nithish Kumar (21UCM033)

II B.Com ‘A’