Welcome to Funel. We understand how important it is to hear what customers have to say, but what are you doing to create a customer journey map that is effective? Today’s hyper-competitive landscape is about learning from our customers’ interactions before, during, and after the sale. The problem is that we often make incorrect assumptions that don’t match the reality of our clients. Plus, it’s easy to fall behind in meeting the expectations of our growing number of customers and providing them with an exceptional and ever-changing customer experience.
The customer journey map depicts the customer journey from when your brand first gets noticed through in-store experience, purchase, and after-sales. An overview of all touchpoints between the brand and the customer can be obtained by creating a customer journey map. Customer journey maps increasingly appear in omnichannel initiatives to ensure the customer experience is consistent across all channels. Mapping these journeys is invaluable for marketing and customer experience efforts.
But too often, brands and retailers try to understand customers and fail to learn the real and valuable frustrations. It’s easy to make assumptions that don’t match the reality of our customers. On the contrary, we have a lot of data about our customers’ experiences, but we have no way to put the information into practice.
How to Create a Customer Journey Map in 7 Steps?
It’s time to learn how to create a customer journey map now that you understand the benefits of creating one. Creating a roadmap isn’t difficult if you follow a systematic process. Your map will become more accurate the more time, effort, and research you put into it. Below are seven steps to creating a customer journey map for your business.
Set a clear goal for your customer journey map.
Prior to creating a customer journey map, it is important that you and your team have a clear picture of what you and your team hope to accomplish. What type of information are you hoping to collect, and how will you use it? What information are you hoping to get? Setting these goals in advance can help ensure that your efforts are not wasted and that you are accurately describing the customer journey.
Create customer profiles.
You can’t sketch the customer journey if you don’t know who your customer is. Building buyer profiles are an essential part of the research phase you enter. A customer profile is a document – often visual – that captures the most common characteristics of your ideal customer. For example, you might find that your most profitable customers are small business owners, men in their 30s and 40s.
By doing more in-depth research, you can get more information about this type of customers, such as their position, motivations, habits, lifestyle characteristics, income level, frustrations, and job skills. Then you will gather all this data and create a profile of your target customers. You can also give this “person” a fictitious picture and name. This document is known as the customer persona.
Define the steps and identify the goals for each.
The buyer’s journey (or customer journey map, as it’s sometimes called) can have many different stages. The stages you set for your map largely depend on what goal you’re trying to achieve and what you want. However, a typical customer journey has four distinct stages: awareness stage, consideration stage, purchase (or decision) stage, and retention.
List all points of touchpoints.
Touchpoints are all the points on your website where your customers can interact with you. Based on your research, you should list all of the touchpoints that your customers and prospects are currently using, and those that you think should be used if there is no overlap. This is an essential step in creating a customer journey map because it gives you insight into the actions taken by your customers.
If they’re using fewer touchpoints than expected, they’ll quickly turn away and leave your site sooner? If they use more than expected, does that mean the website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal? Either way, understanding touchpoints is a tool that can help you understand the ease and purpose of customer journeys.
Collect customer data and feedback.
In creating your map, you should have a pretty good idea of how your customers are moving through your brand. The next step is to gauge what your customers think and feel as they move from touchpoint to touchpoint and step to step. It’s essential to collect feedback from real customers to include in your map. There are many ways to map your customers’ emotions, thoughts, and motivations when they interact with your brand.
There can be sections for quotes from in-person interviews and online reviews, or you can list the results of surveys and questionnaires. You can also use emojis or images to link user feedback to tests or even use rating systems and color codes that represent customer emotions at each stage.
Follow the customer journey yourself.
Just because you’ve designed your map doesn’t mean your job is done. This is the most important part of the process: analyzing the results. How many people click on your website but close it before making a purchase? How can you better help customers? Here are some of the questions you should be able to answer with the final map. Analyzing the results can show where customers’ needs lie. By getting closer to this, you can ensure that you are providing valuable experience and clearly show that people can find solutions to their problems with the help of your business.
Make the necessary changes.
The analytics should give you an idea of your website’s purpose. You can then make the appropriate changes to your website to achieve those goals. Maybe that means creating more specific call-to-action links. Or, maybe, he writes longer descriptions under each product to clarify his purpose. No matter the size of the changes, they will be effective because they relate directly to what customers have identified as their pain points. Rather than blindly making changes hoping to improve the customer experience, you can be assured that they will. And, with the help of the displayed customer journey map, you can ensure that these needs and pain points are always taken into account.
