A customer journey map visually represents a customer’s experience with a business. Customer journey maps chart each point of interaction with a company, from first contact through the discovery phase to the first purchase and beyond. Mapping helps businesses identify each step in the buying process, what customers want from each touchpoint, and how well the business fulfills customer expectations. By revealing the places where customers get frustrated or the journey breaks down, a customer journey map can help businesses take action to fix gaps, enhance interactions, and remove friction from the customer experience.
How is a customer journey map created?
To build a customer journey map, businesses first define various types of customers using buyer personas that incorporate demographics, pain points, and other essential criteria. Next, businesses identify each potential touchpoint or interaction for each type of customer. Touchpoints include all the places where customers interact with the business during stages of the buying journey that include awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, and post-purchase. Once the journey is charted, businesses can evaluate the experience at each touchpoint to understand customer expectations, emotions, frustrations, and obstacles. This data enables the business to determine how the customer experience can be improved at each step on the journey.
What are the benefits of a customer journey map?
A customer journey map enables businesses to:
- Understand the buying experience through the eyes of the customer.
- Identify shortcomings, gaps, and friction in the customer’s experience and ways to improve it.
- Bring marketing, sales, and customer service teams together to deliver a more consistent experience across touchpoints and channels.
- Uncover opportunities to better engage customers at key pain points with specific content and brand interactions.
How do businesses analyze the customer journey?
The usefulness of a customer journey map depends on the ability to collect and analyze data about the customer’s experiences, feelings, behaviors, and decisions at each touchpoint. Traditionally, businesses rely on tools like customer satisfaction surveys, cart abandonment statistics, customer service ratings, and additional KPIs to determine how well a customer’s needs were met at each touchpoint. While each of these techniques offers some value, none can provide a comprehensive understanding of a customer’s mindset at each point on their journey.
