We give you the details on how to establish the perfect customer journey map to better your customers' experience.
Do you know how a typical customer learns about your brand and gets in touch with it? If you cannot answer this question precisely, it is time to create a customer journey map for your business.
Regardless of your area of work, you need to identify every consumer touchpoint and understand how and why clients interact with your business. This is exactly why brands tend to create a customer journey map and make efforts to figure out how to design better user experiences.
Seems interesting, right? Keep reading because we are going to show you how to develop a perfect customer journey map. Let’s take a look!
The Basics of Journey Mapping
What is customer journey mapping? To put it simply, it is a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through when engaging with your company.
Jake Gardner, a business analyst at the assignment writing service, says customer journey mapping is extremely important: “Although it seems pretty simple and perhaps even irrelevant, this process actually enables different departments to work in close cooperation while helping them to understand the behavior of the average client.“
A study reveals that a well-designed map leads to 18 times faster average sales cycle. The benefits of customer journey mapping are evident, but let’s see how to complete this process and design a customer journey map of your own.
Practical Steps to Visualize a Customer’s Experience
You can approach customer journey mapping in many different ways, but we selected five tips that most companies find to be very helpful and practical. Here’s what you should do:
- Set your objectives
Let’s assume that your business is not so simple and lopsided, because most businesses generally are not. In such circumstances, the first thing you need to do is to set your objectives since there could be many buyer personas and customer experiences related to your company. You should set clear goals based on the following:
- Specific type of customer that you are trying to reach
- Specific portfolio of products or services
- Unique experience you are trying to establish
- Business practices that you wish to improve
- Identify buyer personas
The second step is critical because the entire customer journey map depends on the characteristics of given consumers. For instance, agencies in charge of college paper reviews will definitely focus on students searching for help in academic writing. You should do the same thing; analyze the traits of the target audience according to, at least, these specifications:
- Demographic data: Gender, age, and location
- Educational level
- Average income
- Job title
- Personal interests, hobbies, and leisure activities
- Marital or relationship status
- Personal beliefs, ideas, goals, and values
- Social circles
Of course, every business has multiple types of clients and they normally have different needs. You must reflect that when creating your buyer personas. This means that you should create several buyer personas that mirror each one of your distinct costumers.
- Discover every interaction point
Another crucial task is to discover every point of interaction with the customer from start to finish —from brand discovery to the eventual purchase—. A good way to approach this is to compile a list of all actions a consumer has to take until they have finally bought one of your products or services . Most businesses can settle for the following list of touchpoints:
- Keyword search in Google
- The first website visit
- Content consumption: About Us page, products, and blogs
- Opt-in for your newsletter
- Watching product reviews and demonstrations
- Adding a product to the shopping cart
- Completing the purchase
- Writing a product review
- Visualize the customer journey
Now that you know the traits of a typical buyer as well as the touchpoints, you can finally visualize the entire customer journey and make a map of it. The best customer journey maps are one-page files containing the most relevant information exclusively.
You should combine data with visual elements that simplify the map, with each section relying naturally on the previous one. Of course, it is also important to emphasize the fundamental metrics and key performance indicators.
- Ensure frictionless customer experiences
The last thing you want is to create a useless document that nobody really cares about, so we strongly encourage you to utilize the map and create frictionless customer experiences. You can do it by coordinating the work of each department and making sure that clients receive flawless experiences across all touchpoints.
The entire organization must speak the same language and coordinate activities on multiple platforms —this is what we call interoperability— if you want to impress the audience and take customer retention to a higher level.
The Bottom Line
Creating a customer journey map is vital if you want to keep the clients satisfied and ensure the long-term sustainability of the business. In this article, we discussed five easy ways to develop an effective customer journey map. Do your best to follow our recommendations, but don’t hesitate to contact us if you need additional instructions – we would be glad to reply!
Exclusively written for bismart.com. Prepared by Michael Gorman | Michael Gorman is a member of the best essay writing service and the person you should call if you need an essay writer online. He is also writing for the Australia Assignment Help and blogging about eCommerce, business, finance, and digital marketing. He is a passionate traveler and a long-distance runner.
