What is Customer Journey Mapping? Everything You Need To Know
What Is A Customer Journey?
Customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or company as they learn about a problem and want to buy.
A buyer’s journey is defined as the process employed for determining and purchasing something. In contrast, the customer journey is termed as the buying experience a buyer undergoes with a specific company or service.
Difference Between Customer Journey And Buyer Journey
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A customer journey map is the process of forming a visual representation of customers’ processes, needs, and perceptions throughout their interactions and relationships with an organization.
This can help you understand the steps customers take-both those you see, and don’t interact with your business.
It enables you to evaluate:
- Insights-from your existing customer journey, how to understand it better
- Impact – How to mold budgets and efforts for changes that we want to make for the customer experiences
- Issues/opportunities – Diagnosis of existing customer journey
- Innovation – Where you may well want to change the existing customer experience totally
A customer journey map enables you to realize deeper insight into the customer, hence helping you go beyond what you think you already know. Many brands view the customer journey as something that is seen or observed – where the customer interacts with the brand.
But in reality, that’s not so and forms only a part of the entire customer journey. Creating a customer journey map gets you thinking about the aspects of the journey you don’t see, but which have equal weight and importance to the whole experience.
While mapping the customer journey, you are looking for moments that matter – where there is the highest emotional load.
And if you buy a car, the moment at which it is heaviest in terms of emotional burden is the moment at which you go pick up the car because it’s yours after having picked the color, then selected the model, and waited for it to be prepared.
This is going to happen only when product, brand, and service teams help you ensure that these moments are aligned with customers’ expectations. And it can only be done by understanding how your customers journey there, what they’re thinking, and what they need from you in their moment.
This makes it so that the creation of a customer journey map puts you in their shoes so that you’d be able to understand them far better than ever before.
This knowledge then enables the business to fine-tune the customer experience, maximize the process of conversion, and increase retention. The customer journey map often confuses people with UX journey mapping. To make it clearer, here is the definition of UX journey mapping.
What Is UX Journey Mapping?
A UX journey map is a visual representation of the customer’s experience on their journey toward achieving a specific goal or completing a particular action.
As an example, if the goal being tracked is the journey of the user toward purchasing a product or service, then the term UX journey mapping could be used interchangeably with the term customer journey mapping.
On the other hand, however, UX journey mapping could be used to map the journey (actions taken) toward other types of goals, such as achieving a defined product feature.
Importance Of Customer Journey Mapping
- Complex customer journey: Involves awareness, consideration, and the act of making a decision-making process, which is influenced by some externalities as well as different touch points.
- 80/20 rule: 80 percent of income comes from only 20 percent of your customers. It is a way to illustrate that 80 percent of the revenue for a given company comes typically from 20 percent of the customers.
- Enhanced knowledge: The mapping process enables teams to visualize and understand every stage.You will realize that mapping this journey makes your marketing, sales, and service teams understand, visualize, and gain insight into every stage of the process.
- Increased reduced friction: Helps identify the pain points, and hence streamline the process and enhance the customer experience.
- Customer-centric insights: Understanding motivations as well as pain points is bound to lead towards better solutions and higher customer loyalty.
- Better customer experience: It enables the business to improve on customer satisfaction, conversion, and retention.
- UX Journey Map vs. Customer Journey Map: The two differ since a customer journey map is more extensive as it covers the entire buying process as such; whereas, the UX journey map only deals with interactions using a particular product or service.
What Data Is Essential For Customer Journey Mapping?
Your customer journey map isn’t a guess of how you perceive customers interacting with your brand. It is a data-driven, research-based process that interprets past customer behavior. So, what data should you be looking at?
Customer Surveys And Interviews
What better way to understand how customers think than to ask them? Customers are the best, for they can, at first hand, describe where they are in the journey, what hurts them, and how they use our products to get rid of that pain.
Surveys and interviews are called Solicited Data because you need to solicit customers explicitly to fill out a questionnaire and provide data. You can send a NPS Survey to your customers or ask for feedback through social media to get the solicited data needed for your customer journey map.
But surveys and interviews won’t tell the whole story, hence there’s unsolicited data for gathering more detailed data insights.
Unsolicited Data
All the data that you collect from customers without asking them for it is termed unsolicited data.
Data points that include: Purchase history Time spent on page Email clicks Page views Your support team’s feedback on your product Call/Chat transcripts And many more will fill in the gaps in your customer journey mapping strategy. Unsolicited data: It is instrumental and much more plentiful compared to solicited data.
Even though a few customers are likely to respond to your surveys and questionnaires, every customer who touches your brand will let you generate important data for making your customer journey stronger and more accurate.
5 Advantages Of Customer Journey Mapping
You need to break your customer journey, which encompasses each phase, aligning it with a goal, and restructuring your contact points accordingly to maximize customer success.
Some more advantages to derive out of customer journey mapping include:
1. You Could Reorient Your Company With An Inbound Approach
Instead of finding customers through outward marketing, you could have your customers find you by the intelligent approach of inbound marketing.
It is a set of tactics that targets generalized or disinterested audiences. It focuses on interrupting prospects’ daily lives. Outbound marketing is costly and inefficient. It annoys and deters customers and prospects.
Inbound marketing means you create helpful content that customers are looking for anyway. You catch their attention and then focus on the sales afterward.
In mapping out the customer journey, you’re going to get to know what’s interesting to your customers, what’s helpful, and what’s turning them away. That’s where the data we’ve been discussing today becomes a lot more important.
You should outline your customer’s journey with real proof of their behavior and interest. Once more, surveying your customers and using marketing analytics software to gather unsolicited data would gather all the information you need to craft the most realistic customer journey map.
2. You Might Establish A New Target Customer Base
You must understand the customer journey to know their demographic and psychographics about your customers.
It is a waste of time and money to beat over again and again too broad of an audience rather than people who are interested in your offering.
Researching to understand the needs and pain points of your typical customers will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.
3. You Can Open Doors To Proactive Customer Service
A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the experience of customers.
It lays out moments when people feel happiness and situations that might cause friction. Knowing beforehand allows you to organize your strategy for customer service and intervene at the best possible times.
Proactive customer service makes the brand look more reliable. For example, when I used to work in customer support, we used to anticipate that tickets would rise by a certain number during holidays.
We will communicate to our customers beforehand through an office holiday schedule notice and remind them that in case we are unavailable, we can also be reached through other means, so they know what to do, in case the urgency requires immediate attention.
Provided expectations, customers will not be surprised when they are placed on hold for a few extra minutes. Instead, even other options are there for their review, such as maybe a chatbot or knowledge base whereby they might rapidly seek the answer to their query.
The number of choices a customer has to contact you should be balanced with the desire to provide choices. The customer will be satisfied if he can reach the agents directly by live chat.
It does not matter which of these is true. You have to be ready for a huge amount of customer inquiries, anyway. This is where customer service software can be your savior. You can empower agents to work more productively with the use of omnichannel messaging and AI-enhanced responses, for example.
4. Boost Your Customer Retention Rate.
When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it’s easier to know where to intervene. When you do that, customers face fewer pain points, and therefore, fewer people leave your brand for your competitors.
More than 1 in 3 consumers (35%) often try new brands and also do not find it hard to switch from a brand they have used before to another.
Customer journey mapping can identify people who are moving along the path to churn.
Log common behaviors of such customers, you can begin to recognize them even before they leave your organization.
You are not going to save everyone, but it is worth a try. You can increase profits by 25%-95% by improving customer retention rates by just 5%.
Hence, customer retention rate is an absolute potent tool in the process of customer journey mapping.
5. You Can Foster A Customer-Focused Mentality Within The Company
That will become complicated, trying to coordinate all your departments in that manner as your company grows in size. It’s because every department has a different goal; so, they may just ignore all customer needs whatsoever and focus on website traffic, leads, product signups, etc.
Now, one way to move out of this data silo is if you make your entire organization aware of the clear customer journey map.
What makes these maps beautiful is the fact that they outline any moment in the customer journey, starting with attention and attraction, all the way to post-purchase support. And, indeed, it does involve marketing, sales, and service.
Having walked you through the customer journey and the value of mapping it, let’s now consider the more particular phases of what constitutes that journey.
5 Stages Of Customer Journey
1. Awareness Stage
During the awareness stage, customers come to find out that they have a problem. They won’t know it yet perhaps, but they will at least start looking into a product or service either way.
What brands should provide to customers at this point in the customer journey is information, such as diagnoses and possible solutions, that will help them diagnose problems and maybe even suggest solutions. Your aim is to assist your customer in reducing their pain points, not necessarily to induce a purchase.
During the awareness stage, you will depend on page view and click data to discover which web pages and blog posts on your site customers flock to as they come into awareness of the need to solve a problem.
Once you have a general sense of what your customer’s pain points are, you can then use those details within an AI-powered blog topic generator to help brainstorm educational content ideas relevant to the needs and pain points of your audience.
Some of the educational content which are relevant are:
- How-to articles and guides.
- General whitepapers
- General ebooks
- Free courses
Educational content may also come to your customers through various customer touch points including but not limited to:
- Your blog.
- Social media
- Search engines.
2. Consideration Stage
At the consideration stage, consumers have done enough research to determine that they need a product or service. Here, they begin to compare brands and offerings.
At the consideration stage, brands need to present product marketing content so that customers can compare other options and finally settle on your product or service.
The idea is to help consumers navigate a confusing marketplace and move toward a buying decision.
Some examples of product marketing content might be:
- Product listicles.
- Product comparison guides and charts
- Product-based white papers
- Customer success stories or case studies.
Marketing content for products is also received through customer touchpoints that include:
- Your blog.
- Your website.
- Search engines.
- Social media.
- Conferences.
3. Decision Stage
Customers have already made their choice of a solution, and they are getting ready to acquire it.
At this stage, your brand needs to give an easy purchasing process so the buying of products will be as easy as possible.
There would be no more educational or product content here; all that you want to do is get the customer to make a purchase.
So here, you can be straightforward in asking for the sale from them.
Examples of decision-stage content include:
- Free demos
- Free consultations
- Product sign-up pages
- Pricing pages
- Product promotions such as “Sign up now and receive 20% off”
Decision-stage content can be served through your customer touchpoints which include:
- Your website
- Search engines
4. Retention Stage
In the retention stage, customers have bought a solution and are likely to stick with the company they bought it from rather than switching to another provider.
At this stage, brands give a fantastic onboarding experience and continuing customer service to ensure that customers don’t churn.
At the retention stage, you can rely on solicited data gathered from customer surveys and questionnaires to continually fine-tune and improve the customer experience and your customer journey map. Retention-stage strategies may include:
Engaging a dedicated customer success manager.Making your customer service team easily accessible to customers.
Engaging a knowledge base in the case that customers might have to hit a roadblock at some point.
Retention-stage strategies can be delivered through customer touchpoints such as Your website.
- Live chat.
- Email.
- Social media.
5. Loyalty Stage
In the loyalty stage, customers not only remain with a company but actively promote the brand to family, friends, and colleagues.
This can also be referred to as the advocacy stage.
At this phase, brands should focus on providing a fantastic end-to-end customer experience.
This should cut across from your website content to your sales representatives, to your social media teams, and to the UX of your product.
Mostly, however, customers become loyal when they’ve succeeded with your product—if it works for them, then they’re more likely to recommend your brand to others. Loyal customers will also likely give feedback and other solicited data to enrich your customer journey mapping strategy.
Loyalty-stage strategies may include: Having an easy-to-navigate website.
Invest in your product team to ensure that your product exceeds customer expectations. Making it easy to share your brand with others through a loyalty or referrals program. Providing incentives to continued customers in the form of discounts, for example.
To find out whether your customers have reached the loyalty stage, try a Net Promoter Score survey. This simple question asks: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?”
The Customer Journey Mapping Process
Customer journey mapping is the process used to create a customer journey map visual illustration of a company’s customer experience. It combines all the information compiled from a customer’s experience while interacting with a business into a visual map.
The process will help you understand how your customers experience their journeys and highpoint the bottlenecks in those journeys.
Customer journeys are not always linear. Most buyers follow a backward and forward, cyclical multi-channel journey.
Let’s take a closer look at the steps you should include in any customer journey.
What Is In A Customer Journey Map?
- Analyze the customer buying process.
- Emotional touchpoints
- User behavior
- Customer research
- Brainstorm solutions
1. Analyze The Customer Buying Process
To be able to understand the buying process of your customers, you will pull data from all relevant sources-available prospecting tools, a CMS, behavior analytics tools, etc. so that you can plot out the customer’s path from first to last contact accurately.
Here are some data points to consider while coming up with the buying process-
- Web visits.
- Engagement in social media.
- Customer service interactions.
- Transaction history.
- Survey feedback.
But again, you can simplify it by collapsing broad categories into common process stages: awareness, consideration, and decision, which you can then map horizontally.
2. Emotional Touchpoints
For every case in which the objective is big or small, keep in mind that your customers are trying to solve a problem. That means they’re probably feeling some emotion- albeit perhaps relief, happiness, excitement, or worry.
In this journey map, you will integrate those emotions and then outline which of them are not so pleasant and should be eliminated with their corresponding pain points.
It sounds like science fiction that you can figure out the customer’s emotions through data analysis, but it is a pretty normal practice. Customer emotion can be estimated with data from:
- NPS surveys.
- Online reviews.
- Social media monitoring.
- Customer interviews and focus groups.
- Customer support data.
3. User Behavior
This chapter details how customers behave at each stage of the buying process. For example, at the problem-awareness stage, customers would download ebooks or attend educational webinars.
The data to track these behaviors is not that hard to collect either. Data points you might wish to collect to map the customer journey include:
- Page views.
- CTA clicks.
- Email opens.
- Email list signups.
- Ebook downloads.
You’re finding out how your customers behave and navigate at every step through the buying process.
4. Customer Research
Like the previous chapter, this element describes what, or where the buyer researches before acting.
At the awareness stage, the customer will likely use search engines such as Google to find solutions. Observe what they are investigating so that you can better solve their problems and answer their questions.
5. Brainstorm Solutions
As the final element in your customer journey map, solutions are where you and your team brainstorm possible ways to make improvements on your buying process so that customers encounter fewer pain points as they travel.
Steps For Creating A Customer Journey Map
- Set clear goals
- Research your customer persona
- Who are your target customer personas?
- List out all touchpoints.
- What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?
- Identify which assets you have and which assets you will need.
- Take the customer journey yourself.
- Analyze your results.
- Update your map regularly.
1. Set Clear Goals
Before you even start on your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you are creating one in the first place.
What goals are you directing this map toward? Who is it for? What experience is it based on?
If you don’t have one, I would create a buyer persona. This persona is your fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics of your average customer.
This persona is what reminds you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward the right audience.
2. Research Your Customer Persona
Next, you should research. Which is really where it’s useful to have customer journey analytics waiting in the wings.
Don’t have them? No problem. Use the Locobuzz Customer Journey Analytics tool instead for getting started.
Questionnaires and user testing are all fantastic ways of getting valuable customer feedback. Just remember to only ring actual customers or prospects.
You want information back from interested buyers of your goods and services who have either contacted your company or about to.
Some examples of good questions include:
- How did you hear about our company?
- What was it that initially made you interested in visiting our site?
- What do you want to achieve with our company? What is it that you’re trying to solve?
- How much time, on average, do you spend per visit on our website?
- Have you ever bought from us? What influenced you to buy?
- How many of you have visited our website, intending to make a purchase but did not? What halted you from completing the purchase?
- On a scale from 1 to 10, how easy is it to find what you are looking for on our website?
- Have you ever needed assistance from our customer support? If yes, how would you rate the helpfulness as per your requirement, on a scale 1 to 10?
- Is there anything else we can do for you to make the process easier?
3. Who Are Your Target Customer Personas?
Once you learn of the various customer personas who interact with your business, I would advise you to drill down to two or fewer.
A customer journey map measures the experience of a customer taking a given path with your company. If you have too many personas together in one journey, your map will not accurately reflect that experience.
For the first map, attempt to pick the most common customer profile and consider what might normally constitute their way when they first encounter your business.
You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don’t concern yourself with the ones you are not including-there is always a return visit to create a new map specific to those customer types.
4. List Out All Touchpoints
Start by listing the touchpoints on your website.
5. What Is A Touchpoint In A Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map touchpoint, for example, represents such an instance in which your customer forms an opinion regarding your business. Touchpoints can be found at points where your business comes into contact with either a potential customer or an existing customer directly.
For example, if I click on a display ad, communicate with an employee, get a 404 error, or write a Google review then all those would be customer touchpoints.
Your brand is way more than your website and marketing. So there are various types of touchpoints you should look at when making the customer journey map, and these can reveal a point where improvement is needed in the buying journey.
You should have a list based on your research of all the touchpoints customers are currently using and those that you feel they should be using if there’s no overlap.
This is what will be important while creating a customer journey map as it gives an insight into your customers’ actions.
For example, use fewer touchpoints than expected. Does this imply that your customers are getting turned away quickly and exiting your website early?
If they are taking more steps than you expected, does that mean your website is complicated and will take a few clicks to reach some sort of end goal?
However it’s happening, an understanding of touchpoints helps you understand the ease or difficulty of the customer journey.
But it’s not just your website you’ve got to think about how your customers might find you online.
These could be:
- Social channels.
- Paid ads.
- Email marketing.
- Third-party review sites or mentions.
Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.
The following touchpoints to keep in mind when mapping out a customer journey map:
Customer Activities
Identify the specific activities your customers perform every step of the way they interact with your brand. That could be search terms when he searches on Google, or log-in activity when he opens an email. You will find yourself with a pretty long list of activities, which is alright-you can sort all the meaning out later.
It would also be helpful if it could identify moments when the customer needs to do too much to get what he or she wants. Helping the customer minimize the number of steps required at any point can feel a little counterintuitive but does tend to pay off in terms of conversion rates.
Emotions Of The Customer
All marketing is a cause and an effect. So, too, every action that your customers take is affected by emotion. And what your customers’ emotions will differ by which stage of their journey they’re in.
Normally, it’s a pain point or a problem that drives the actions of your customers emotionally. Knowing this will help you provide the right content at the right time to smooth each customer’s emotional journey through your brand.
Roadblocks And Pain- Points
Get to know what roadblocks stop your customer from taking their desired action.
Probably the most obvious one is price. Well, I may love your product, but you bet that I would be leaving my cart if I ever discovered that you have very unexpected and unusually high shipping rates.Then all the other factors aren’t so easy to see.
Once you zoom in on the details, you will be able to see where most of your customers drop off as they move through your sales cycle. Dedicated sales software is a good idea here. It lets you examine your sales pipelines and pinpoint what might cause prospects to turn away.
Highlighting these potential obstacles in your customer journey can help you mitigate them.
6. Identify Which Assets You Have And Which Assets You Will Need
Your customer journey map will touch almost every facet of your company and shine a light on all the assets used in creating the customer experience.
For example, maybe your map shows that your team does not have support in the follow-up on customers. With the help of your map, you can also advise management to put in place customer service tools that would support your team with handling the customers’ demand.
Or perhaps, as you compiled the list, you identified more customer touchpoints that you have not been taking advantage of yet, like in our case above. You may then want to consider selecting one marketing software package to track, manage, and exploit all touchpoints to the fullest.
By including these new tools on your map, you can predict accurately how they will impact your business and drive outsized value. This easily convinces gatekeepers and decision-makers to invest in your proposals.
7. Take The Customer Journey By Yourself
The whole exercise of mapping the customer journey remains hypothetical until you try it out for yourself. In this way, you will observe firsthand where customers may be falling off or hitting roadblocks in your customer journey.
Take each of your personas on a journey through their social media activity, reading their emails, and searching online.
8. Analyze Your Results
Just because you’ve designed your map doesn’t mean you’re done. The most important part of this process is analysis of the results.
How many visitors to your website leave before making a purchase? How can you better serve customers? Some of these questions you should use your finished map to answer.
The analysis of the results will highlight to you the areas of untapped customer needs. This allows you to deliver value by ensuring that you meet people’s needs and letting them know that with your organization’s support, they will be able to solve their problems.
9. Update Your Map Regularly.
Your data analysis should give you a sense of what you want your website to be.
You can then get something done on your website in regards to these aims. This may include the addition of more specific call-to-action links or writing descriptions longer than a sentence or two under each product to clarify what they are for.
Changes large and small will prove effective as they align directly with the pain points of your customers, thus right on their needs. Thanks to the customer journey map visualized that you have, you will be sure that every need or pain point is being attended to at all times.
Why Is A Customer Journey Map Updated ?
Your map should always be updated on a regular basis.
Its review at regular intervals, monthly or quarterly, will let you identify gaps and opportunities where further streamlining of your customer journey is required. Utilize your data analytics as well as the feedback from customers, feeding it back into this process to check roadblocks.
To involve all the stakeholders in this process, one can also visualize one’s maps using collaborative tools such as Google Sheets.
Another recommendation would be regular meetings required to understand how a new product or offering has caused changes in customer journey.
Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples
Current State
These customer journey maps are the most widely used type.
They visualise the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience while interacting with your company. They’re best used for continually improving the customer journey. Here is an example.
Day In The Life
These customer journey maps visualize actions, thoughts, and emotions that your customers are currently experiencing in their daily lives, or not, depending on whether that includes your company.
This kind of map gives a broader lens into your customers’ lives, including what real pain points are.
Day-in-the-life maps are most useful at solving customer needs before the customer even realizes they have a need. Use a future state of this type of customer journey map when planning future new market development activities.Here is an example.
Future State
Service Blueprint
These customer journey maps start by using a simplified version of one of the above map types. Then they layer on factors that deliver that experience including people, policies, technologies, and processes.
Service blueprints are most appropriate when it is necessary to identify causes of the current customer journey or when steps to be taken for achieving desired future customer journeys need to be identified.Here is an example.
Experience Maps
Experience maps are the simplest of customer journey maps. These capture customer behavior across different stages until you reach the desired outcome.
It helps businesses connect with the customer’s needs and wants and the corresponding action that it may elicit.
As a result, it offers high-level visibility into the customer experience. You can also reverse engineer these experience maps from various friction or drop-off points and narrow down what caused it in the first place.Here is an example.
Empathy Maps
Persona-Based Maps
As the name suggests, persona-based maps revolve around user personas. Businesses may service an array of individuals fitting varying profiles. By creating persona-based maps, they can understand the typical pain points of every cohort.
It can also enlighten you on the varying preferences of the different customer segments so that you can individualize their journey without putting in too much effort or resources. Hence, it is perfect for small-scale businesses that are just getting started.Here is an example.
Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices
Target setting for the journey map. Customers can be interviewed so that insight into understanding their journey in buying can be gained.
Customer service staff can be questioned as to their frequently asked questions.
UX journey mapping about every buyer persona needs to be explored.
Review and update for every major product release.
Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.
1. Set An Objective For The Journey Map
Determine if you want to enhance the buying experience or come up with a new product. Knowing what you want the journey map to reveal for you can save you from scope creep on a project like this one.
2. Conduct Surveys
That which you understand about the customer experience and what they truly experience can be light years apart. Let your customers be introduced directly to yourself to get a picture of their journey.
3. Educate The Customers
Sometimes, the customer needs to be educated on his specific pain points, and this is where your customer service representatives come in.
They can help fill in gaps and translate customer pain points into business terms you and your team can understand and act on.
4. Create Buyer Personas
It’s easy to assume each customer operates the same way, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
From demographics, psychographics, down to how long the person has been a customer; it determines how the person will be interacting with your business and making purchasing decisions.
Across-the-board theme groups create buyer personas and map the customer journey per persona created
5. Review Each Map
The customer buying process changes with every change in your product or service. Even minor adjustments, such as adding an extra field to a form, can become a significant roadblock.
Hence, it becomes important to review the customer journey map both before and after the process of change.
6. Share The Copy Of The Maps To All Teams
There is not much value in a journey map when in silo. But to get feedback from cross-functional teams, creating the journey map is easy.
Following that, share a copy of the map with each team so that they always keep the customer in their mind.
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Designing Your Customer Journey Map
Now that you get a sense of what goes into making a customer journey, take a bit of time to dive into some design. The layout with which you display your journey map-from spacing to the colors used-begins to make all of the difference.
Here are some best practices to check out below.
Logical Structure And Hierarchy
Naturally, your customer journey map should have a logical structure. Let a sequence that makes sense be followed. Plus, ensure there is a clear visual hierarchy.
Headings need to make the sections pop. That way you can easily distinguish stages of your customer’s journey. Bullets make the text easier to read and keep the information on your map clear.
Your goal is to design an easily understood journey map. A simple design de-clutters it.
Make Use Of Icons And Symbols
We want our team members to read, and we want every word to count.
Well, the thing is, everyone scans. A lengthy document typically translates to lost information.
Icons, symbols and designs make it pleasing to read.
This will create a means for you to express different touch points, actions, and outcomes that are part of your customer journey. More than that, symbols can express emotion without any words.
Apply Color Coding
Color can be such a good design element: you can group ideas. You can differentiate between stages in the customer journey or focus on particular points within your map.
It lets you have a visual attempt at organizing large amounts of information while drawing focus on key areas within your map.
Keep Adequate Space For Balance
In a nutshell, everyone tends to skim. And while you would not want much text, you would not want to have an eye-sore page of color, icons, words, and the rest of it.
Adequate white space will help your document keep its organization.
Consistency Is The Key
Your customer journey map should be all consistent. Choose a font family, color palette, and font sizes, then apply them throughout your journey map.
Bonus marks if your widgets match the brand of your company.
Locobuzz: Your Friend In Simplifying CX Data Analytics
The Locobuzz CX Suite analyzes CX data through full functionalities meant to enhance better interpretation and more powerful decision-making.
Customisable Dashboards
The system offers customisable dashboards through which a business can track its support performance in real time.
Having different types of widgets that can be used to customise the dashboards for the particular needs of the users, will enable them to focus on what is most important to the operation.
Digital Command Center
It will enable facilities from one place to see all company presence digitally. The Digital Command Centre acts as a Central Nervous System for a monitoring and management control center of customer interactions.
This accelerates decision-making and teamwork through the tools of real-time insights and communication.
Advanced Analytics
It is very strong in analytics, with analytics tools including audience intelligence, competitive intelligence, sentiment analysis, and automated reporting.
These tools help the business at every moment know what the customers are doing and what is going on in the markets, thus judging the effectiveness of one’s PR exercise.
AI-Powered Insights:
With locobuzz, one finds actionable insights by using AI and machine learning on multi-source data.
This helps businesses respond effectively in line with the needs of their customers, thereby optimising engagement strategies.
Brands can then easily make CX data analysis simple by integrating these features, hence more informed business decisions and better customer engagement.
In A Nutshell
A customer journey map is essentially a graphic illustration of the customer’s journey.
It delineates all the different stages a customer passes through when interacting with a brand, from the initiation awareness stage to post-purchase satisfaction.
As the business delineates these stages, they get meaningful insights into customer behavior and identify which pain points may raise issues in an offering, thus making the customer experience more personalized and satisfying, leading to greater loyalty, satisfaction, and revenue for the business.
