Identifying what the customer requires is essential for every business to align itself with the customer’s buying decision.
The customer journey map makes it easier to understand the customer behavior throughout the funnel. Long term strategies can be developed only by understanding the needs and requirements of the ever-evolving customer.
Capturing the customers’ intent and mapping the behavior leads to a better customer experience thus improving customer retention and satisfaction.
What is a Customer Journey Map
The visual representation of all the touchpoints and their impact on the customer objectives is customer journey mapping.
For example, some of the critical touchpoints for an E-commerce business are:
- Catalog Pages
- Product pages
- Shopping Cart
- Checkout Page
- Thank you Page
- Home Page
Implementing Customer Journey Maps can give insights into the scope of improving:
- 1. Customer Satisfaction
- Customer Loyalty
- Brand Engagement
- Customer Retention
- Revenue Growth
These insights are crucial for a sound customer experience program.
Before we dive deeper into customer journey mapping, we need to understand the customer journey.
Once the customer enters your funnel, most of the time, they would take sequential steps that are a reflection of their emotions and behavioral traits to attain their objectives.
There are four core divisions for a journey map.
- Customer Experience
- Processes
- Emotions
- Feedback Loop
Understanding your website visitors’ Emotions and Behavior is challenging. However, if you are an online business, you could get insights into browsing patterns and behavior with the right technology stack.
You can identify hurdles in the customer journey and make the journey seamless for them from touchpoint to touchpoint. Without a clear idea of the customer browsing and purchasing journey, it would be confusing for a business owner to make decisions that improve the customer experience.
Creating a customer journey map
To create an effective and actionable journey map, one should visually document the customers’ needs and processes in their perception during their interaction with the business.
Steps for creating a customer journey map.
1. Listing the core touchpoints of a customer
The objective of the mapping process should begin with analyzing the customer persona. The touchpoints will be based on the particular segments’ demographics and psychographic preferences. The more clarity you have on this data, the better will be the journey map creation process.
2. Identifying the customer perceptive at each touchpoint with objectives
As discussed before, understanding the customer mindset is more complicated than gathering data about their preferences. However, research using surveys and forms can provide valuable insights into the customer’s mind and their fears, pain, and expectations for which they are trying to use the service/product.
3. Mapping out each touchpoint and its value in the entire funnel for the customers as well as the business
Mapping out the touchpoints make it easier to identify the steps before the customer achieves his desired objectives. Some of the common touchpoints for online businesses are:
- Review Sites
- Website
- Landing Pages
- Blogs
- Pricing Pages
- Cart
- Checkout Pages
- Thank you
- Transactional Emails
- Customer Support
- Delivery ( In case of E-commerce)
- Chat support etc
Factors that stop your customers from taking the next action could be many, but you could optimize and improve customer engagement for each platform or touchpoint depending on the channel. Removing obstacles makes it seamless for the customer to transact and move from point to point in their buyer journey.
4. Review and improvise with a constant feedback loop.
The customer or prospects take multiple steps to achieve their desired goal once inside your sales funnel. Winning the customer’s confidence and improving their experience at each transaction is the ideal path to increasing customer satisfaction.
Customer feedback plays a huge role in crafting the customer journey map for each organization. Visualizing the complex data in a map form makes it easy to analyze and refer to.
Improve Customer Retention Rate with Customer Journey Maps
As you receive deeper insights from customer journey maps, you will be equipped with the data required to remove blocks and provide customers with a better experience leading to higher customer satisfaction. The higher the customer satisfaction (CSAT) is, the higher your customer retention rate would be, and the lower the customer churn rate as a result.
Most brands lose their customers due to poor customer experience, resulting from the brand failing to understand the customer.
