One of the challenges for any business is to ensure that its customers’ experiences of purchasing its goods and services is the very best it could possibly be – to “optimise” that experience in the industry jargon. Ideally, this experience should be aligned with its proposition and promise, and clearly be favourable when compared to competitors.
A customer journey map is a great tool for marketers to do just that. It’s a visualisation of each of the steps needed to arrive at an end result, whatever that might be (commonly to a purchase).
The aim is not just to map that journey, but show how a customer’s experience could be influenced by the business along the way. It also highlights where you can gather valuable data – particularly in areas around customer preferences and problems – and flags up problems that might bring the customer’s journey to a juddering halt.
The reason why a visualisation is so powerful is that customer journeys will vary from business to business, product to product, person to person, location to location, and can be online, offline, or a combination of both. There are a multitude of different start and finish points, as well as a variety of channels that customers might use to engage with a business. But one crucial point – each step should be viewed from a customer’s perspective, rather than your own!
Many things can influence customer journeys and they require considerable co-ordination of the internal resources of a company to ensure every aspect is optimised and that potential pain points, once identified, are managed to ensure that the customer needs are met every step of the way.
The Process of Customer Journey Mapping
So, in summary the idea of customer journey mapping is literally to map out a variety of routes to buying a product or service. There are many examples on the internet to review and play with depending on your business, but here are some considerations.
1) Start by profiling your typical buyers, or who you are aiming your product at, and create a customer persona for each in order to build detailed pictures of their demographic, gender, age, job status, location, income, family situation, interests, why and how they would buy from you, their motivation and their needs.
2) Select each persona in turn and brainstorm their likely route in terms of key sequential encounters with your brand to purchase (I’ve scribbled on post-it notes before), and then place them in order. Examples include:
a) reading about you in the trade press
b) seeing your advert on Facebook
c) finding you in organic search results
d) landing on your website
e) downloading a voucher/whitepaper/video
f) reading customers’ reviews
g) checking prices
h) posting a query on live chat
i) receiving an email newsletter
j) signing up for short-term free subscription (e.g. for SaaS)
k) talking to customer sales representatives
l) the act of paying (online or physically going into store)
m) follow up support
n) submitting a product review
3) As indicated above, you’ll see that some of these encounters are online (e.g. via a website or an emailed newsletter), and some are in the physical universe (e.g. a phone call or a meeting).
4) As you map your journey, highlight where an individual at your company can have a direct, personal (and potentially positive) bearing on a customer’s experience at each step, through the quality of their service and support (e.g. live chat, meeting a customer service representative etc).
5) Identify and interrogate any nasty little potential pain points. Is your website slow to load? Do your customers have enough information to make a purchase decision? Are customers kept hanging on the phone when they call customer service? Is the online payment process lengthy and tedious? Is there any doubt about your ability to keep customer data secure?
6) Now, review every touchpoint (as listed in point 2) and see how you can enhance the customer’s experience. Cumulatively, what you want to do is make adjustments that improve how you meet their needs at that point, and influence their decision to take their journey to the next step, and on to the end goal. For example, if they are at the point of researching alternatives, can you provide them with useful information (a white paper for the website?) or is it a process (speeding up online checkout)
7) A vital element of the customer journey is capturing data. Digital channels give you unprecedented access to data about purchase behaviour. As you gather data feedback, you will learn more about your customers’ needs. This will refine and inform your customer capture and retention efforts in future.
Use everything available to you, from simple observation to analytics, to build up the most complete map possible. And remember, it’s a process, not an event. Keep it dynamic.
Don’t Create Organisational Silos
In the digital age, there is no single linear ‘path-to-transaction’ any more.
As I’ve indicated, the issue of optimising experience is not just one for marketing, but something that multiple departments and agents can influence, including IT, finance, customer services, HR etc.
A customer journey map gives you a clear visualisation of the end-to-end experience that everyone can understand and it can be applied to any scenario involving your brand and its customers. If you need any more help, have a look at this, and get started – it’s fun as well as enlightening!
