In today’s digital world, it is essential to monitor your customers’ interaction with the brand. You need to regulate the path through which your customers find your business to purchase, also known as Customer Journey. To achieve that, you need to understand your customers and draft a map that clearly determines your customers’ journey.
This is because you can’t just have a beautiful website and hope that the customers will automatically find you. There’s a lot that goes into winning new customers and retaining the old ones. So, you need to have a customer journey map in place to help your brand get noticed by potential customers.
You can use a customer journey map template available online to organize and set up a compelling customer journey in 2021.
Why Do You Need A Customer Journey Map?
Deciding whether you need to draft a customer journey map is out of the question today – it is a necessity. This strategic approach will help you optimize the customer experience according to the needs of your customers.
Hence, it has nothing to do with the size of your business. Small and medium-sized companies can benefit from it as much as large companies. They can align their customer service, sales, and marketing with the changing expectations of their customers.
Following are a few benefits that mapping the customer journey can bring to you:
- Enables you to have a more optimized customer onboarding process
- Monitors the customer experience to align it with customer expectations
- Develops an understanding for different buyer personas as they move through the buying funnel from prospect to conversion
- Builds your buyer’s journey in a logical order
- Optimizes channels to increase customer engagement
- Moments of truth in CX are identified and optimized
- Removes unproductive touchpoints
- Helps you give preference to customer-focused perspective over company-focused perspective
- Reduces interdepartmental gaps with the breakdown of silos
- Use persona identification to drive more customers through compelling and relevant marketing campaigns
- Helps in understanding the current circumstances producing irregularities
- Increases employee accountability.
- Allows you to determine the ROI of future CX/UX investments.
What Does Customer Journey Map Include?
Every business needs to achieve some major milestones in a customer journey map. First, you will initiate the process of drafting your customer journey map with the intent for a customer to reach a goal in a particular order. Then, with the help of the typical buying process stages, you’ll jot down each phase horizontally. Incorporating digital onboarding ensures a seamless and efficient transition for customers as they engage with your business online.
At the awareness stage, your customer will get to know about their needs. Then, they might share their need with their acquaintances, friends, and family. Finally, they will start looking for solutions. In this search, the customer will take specific actions.
For instance, they might run a search query and end up visiting your website. Then finally, they’ll make their purchase using cash or credit card. There could be infinite ways your customer might try to reach the solution.
Regardless of the size of your customer’s goals, they will be looking for a solution. This will create certain emotions in them. These emotions could be relief, excitement, happiness, or worry. If the process to reach a solution is long or complex, your customers might feel a range of emotions at every stage.
While drafting a customer journey map, you must keep these emotions in your sight. There will always be negative emotions, but your approach to solving them will affect your brand. Acknowledging and addressing them can help mitigate the negative emotions of your customers regarding your brand.
If you thoroughly go through every stage, you will discover some pain points in the process. These pain points will help you identify where your customers sustain any negative emotions and the reason behind them. This will allow you to address them effectively.
Finally, you will collaborate with your team to find potential ways to enhance the customer experience in your buying process. Ensure that your customers come across as few pain points as possible. Turn all their negative moods into positive ones so your business isn’t patronized.
Steps To Create Customer Journey Map
- Evaluate and determine company goals
- Study your competitors’ approach to discover what is working for them and what isn’t
- Hold interviews with your audience to discover their persona
- Develop buyer’s personas for your brand based on research
- Define the touchpoints for your brand based on research
- Ensure that your brand story comes in alliance with your audience and develop an affinity plan
- Use a timeline to create a content plan
- Develop an empathy map
- Analyze the customer journey from various angles
- Outline the map considering the touchpoints
- Publish content
- Analyze and improve
Wrapping Up
If you are running a business, you must understand the importance of customer journey maps and start working on implementing them in your industry. They might sound like a lot of work, but they are totally worth it. So, try to understand your audience, identify the pain points and address them in the best way possible.
However, if you find the map drafting process difficult, you can take the assistance of customer map journey templates available online. These will allow you to create more organized and sorted maps.
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