What is Customer Journey Map?

Customer Journey Map is a powerful technique for understanding your customer’s needs, their hesitations and concerns, their tangible actions and assumptions and what motivates them the most. Data alone fall short to communicate the customer’s frustrations and experiences, but a story can do that. The best storytelling tools in business are the customer journey map. In short the customer journey mapping visualizes the user experience journey that helps you tell the story of your customer’s experiences with your brand across all of their interactions.

Importance of Customer Journey Map

Since customer journey mapping is all about understanding your customer’s intentions and user experience while interacting with your brand, it is vital to attract new customers and maintain the loyalty of your existing customers.

Thus, creating a unique, personalized, and effective customer journey map is important to create a better understanding of why they are using your product/service.

CJM allows you to optimize the user experience to target your potential customer base with different strategies to best turn users into conversions.

Customer journey mapping is a vital step in determining how to effectively target your customers.

The purpose of customer journey map is to understand what customers go through and improve the quality of your customer experience by ensuring consistency at all the customer journey touchpoints and across all channels.

Provides a bird’s eye view of the entire customer journey framework.

Build faster and higher customer conversion rates.

Improved customer retention by ensuring the correct information is available and accessible at each stage of a procurement cycle.

Allows businesses to prioritize actions in their online customer journey experience strategy.

Identifies and helps to reduce the gaps between various channels and departments.

Creating Customer Journey Map

Customer journey or user journey is a journey of a potential customer about different points of contact with a product, a brand or (touchpoints) of a company via all available channels that can extend over several hours or days. However, the end goal of Customer Journey map is always to find and resolve the pain points of your customers.

Step 1. Define your customer persona

The first step is to decide is whose journey you are going to map i.e. a specific customer type (persona), a potential (target) customer, or a section of customers, depending on the purpose of your journey mapping plan. After you’ve created distinct personas, now create customer journey maps that describe each persona’s experience at various customer journey touchpoints during their lifecycle with your company.

Step 2. Define your customer journey phases

Identify the customer journey phases that your customer experiences with you over time. Define how, when and where they discovered your company, researched your products or services, choose you over your competitors, made purchase from you.

Step 3. Describe the customer journey touchpoints

Identifying the touchpoints your customer uses to interact with your organization and make sure your customers are satisfied every step of the way.

Step 4. Conduct research

At every stage of the customer’s journey, conduct research to identify the customer’s goals, what he expects the process would be like, the steps and the customer journey touchpoints they used at various platforms.

Step 5. Determine points of friction

Once you have known your persona’s goals and identified their touchpoints, it’s time to look at the totality of their experience with your company. Each stage of the customer journey mapping will help you identify any points of friction within the customer experience.