Creating a customer journey map is the most effective way to acquire the clearest understanding of your customer experience. A customer journey map is basically a compact visualization of the end-to-end journey of a customer that depicts all the touchpoints of your brand’s interaction with them.
Customer journey maps are a powerful tool employed in customer experience consulting. This essentially helps brands gauge themselves from the customer’s perspective, and analyze the buying process of each consumer.
Studies suggest that in 2021, almost 70 percent of online customers abandoned their shopping carts. Now, why do customers abandon their carts after spending hours adding products to the list? What drives them to turn away without buying anything at all? It can be pretty perplexing for brands to understand this common customer behavior. A customer journey map Customer engagement metrics can help find answers here.
Customer journey maps
Today, the customer purchase path is in no way linear; there are multitudes of ways how buyers can interact with your business. To nurture customer experience most impeccably, certain kinds of customer journey mappings exist, based on what aligns best with your purpose –
· Current state journey mapping
· Future state journey mapping
· Day in the life mapping
All of these mappings help businesses understand customers better and elucidate their pain points, boosting customer retention and marketing campaigns.
How to create customer journey mappings?
There is no fixed way to develop customer journey maps, but they should contain critical aspects like the following pinned in a visual representation –
· the purchase process
· customer actions
· customer pain points
· consumer emotions, and
· solutions
Below is how you can create a basic customer journey map through the following steps. Remember that you have the freedom to adapt your customer journey map to your specific objectives using a customer experience management platform.
· Develop your buyer personas
Customers behave and interact with brands differently at different stages of purchasing. To accurately gauge these different behaviors, you need to create different buyer personas. For instance, an existing customer will behave differently from one who has just begun researching for the most suitable option to suit their requirement. Building buyer personas is the primary step to getting to know your customers better.
· Understand customer objectives
Your aim is always to gain a better understanding of your customer’s purchase goals. And with your buyer personas, you can dig deeper and understand each customer’s objectives throughout their journey. For instance, one customer might want to ensure that your pricing is fair for a product of their choice, while another one might first research all the various product options available to them. Another customer might prefer to be reassured if they find every bit of product information they are looking for before buying it. Some of the best ways to ascertain customer goals include conducting surveys, examining customer support transcripts, and using customer analytics software. Once you can track all their activities minutely, the touchpoints will become clear to you along with the associated goals.
· Identify customer touchpoints
Touchpoints are all those instances when the buyer interacts with your brand anytime during the entire customer journey. The idea is to record every touchpoint, both the bad and good experiences so that you never miss a single opportunity to interact with them and improve customer experience. Behavior Flow Report and Goal Flow Report are available through Google Analytics that can be supremely useful in tracking your customer touchpoints.
· Spot the pain points and fix problems
At this step, you need to collate both qualitative and quantitative data to spot customer pain points which are potential hurdles in the customer journey. While the aspects where you excel show where you need to maintain consistency, the areas that need improvement are the ones you need to take note of and aim for betterment. Make sure you prioritize and fix the potential hurdles at the earliest to pave the way for an impeccable customer journey.
Finally – evaluate, upgrade and improve!
Customer experience consulting experts assert that creating a customer journey map is a continuous process. Unless you continuously evaluate and upgrade your customer journey mapping, it cannot help your business improve. Customer journey maps should be as dynamic as the ever-evolving customer expectations. You need to test and evaluate your customer journey models regularly and introduce changes whenever necessary, to maximize the benefits.
