Customer Journey Map | 6 Steps to Build It Successfully
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A customer journey map helps businesses see their products and processes from a customer’s point of view. Plotting a customer journey map gives business owners and marketing and design teams valuable insight into common points of friction so they can improve customer experience and ultimately make more sales.
In this article, we’ll explore what customer journey mapping is, followed by a complete step-by-step guide to plotting your own map.
“Your customers are human… You should understand their challenges and their vernacular, from both a macro and micro level, and then connect the dots back to your product or service.” –Forbes
You are not your customer. What’s intuitive to you may not be intuitive to them. What’s attractive, alluring, and inspiring to you may turn off your target market. It’s not just preference, either. Your behaviors and habits, your limitations and concerns, and your life experience all shape your purchasing decisions. And, chances are, yours do not align with your ideal customers.
Customer journey mapping allows you tobecomeyour customer, to walk in their shoes.
You want your customer’s experience to be seamless from start to finish and across multiple channels and touchpoints. Questions will inevitably arise, and you want your customers to find the answers and reassurances they need to commit to a purchase. By tracing the experience step-by-step, your map will help reveal issues with siloes in your business, issues that arespecific to your customers, that are notassumedorpredictedbut grounded in your customer’s unique reality.
Why are you making a customer journey map? What goals are you directing this map towards? What experience will it examine? Which type of customer will it follow?
These objectives will guide the remainder of the plotting process, so be sure to think long and hard about thewho,what,andwhy.
“If your brand is like many others, you might not be able to map out that customer journey. And the reason may stem from a deeper problem: You can’t identify the customer.” – AdAge
You cannot track a customer’s movements if you don’t know who they are, what they like, their pain points, and their aspirations. One of the best ways to flesh out your customer personas is to survey and test real-life people that have engaged with your brand.
Some valuable questions could be:
Research and questionaries will likely leave you with several customer personas, different distinct groups that interact with your brand. Your customer journey map can’t effectively cover them all, so select one or two to focus on.
Touchpoints are the places on your website and online that your customers can interact with. For example, adding a product to cart, engaging with a social media post, opening an email newsletter, and so on.
You might find that there are fewer touchpoints than you expected – could this mean customers don’t hang around your site long enough to make a decision? Or, there could be more touchpoints than expected – could this mean your site is too complicated and there are too many steps to get to an end goal?
The type of customer journey map you decide on will depend on your objectives. The main types of maps include:
You know who your customer is, and you have narrowed your focus. Now, it’s time to plot the customer journey step-by-step. At this stage, just focus on actions. What actions are your customers taking, and at what time?
This is the crucial step – put on your customer’s shoes and work your way through the customer journey you plotted in step five. Take note of pain points, moments when you don’t get the information you need or the experience you expected. Analyze actions that feel natural and identify why.
This step allows you to focus on the areas where your customers’ needs are unmet. From there, you can fine-tune your offering to ensure that brand engagements:
Follow these steps to create your own customer journey map. Do it well and you’ll find that it not only serves your customers but also delivers value to your business.
