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What is Customer journey mapping, Examples & How it helps your business

By December 29, 2018 No Comments

Are looking for some information on customer journey mapping?

If the answer is “yes,” then congrats!

You’ve come into the correct place because this post will make you familiar with a lot of valuable aspects of customer journey mapping. And by implementing these strategies, you could make a radical change in your customer interaction and customer experience parameters. So, let’s dive into it.

Actually, it’s no wonder that customers are the main asset of any business. So, as a businessman, your prime goal should be something related to the improvement of your customer experience. And this is from where the importance of customer journey mapping comes into existence.

Customer journey mapping has emerged as a preferred tool for checking out the customer’s experience in your shop.

Even though many people think its creation as a cumbersome task, actually, it’s not that much difficult.

How?

Have patience. I’ll unfold all the answers one after another. You just keep on reading.

Don’t worry if you’re not a technically-savvy person, as anybody can manage customer journey mapping and there’s also nothing magical about it.

What is customer journey mapping?

With the term “customer journey mapping”, it’s clear that it’s something related to the mapping process of the customers’ journey in your place. Actually, the concept has become even more streamlined through its visual nature.

The customer journey mapping is a visual representation of each and every experience your customers have had with your brand. Moreover, it’s ranged from the original engagement to a long-term customer relationship.

A customer journey is not only about offering and buying something rather more intricate details are involved with this process.

Customer journeys have also come in different varieties. Customers could know about your business from various starting points, for instance, referrals, social media, marketing, search, customer service inquiries, and so on.

No wonder that every businessman wants to make customers happy by providing them with the best experience as much as possible. And that’s why each and every experience of customers needs to be taken into account so that no interaction can ever slip through the cracks.

In simple words, a customer journey map is a diagram or multiple diagrams that express the phases through which your customer move on while interacting with your brand, from purchasing your services or products online to accessing your customer care service to interacting on social media platforms etc.

How customer journey mapping helps to understand your customers?

Now, it’s significant to discuss the benefits of customer journey mapping in any business. So, let’s move on the discussion.

A properly-designed customer journey mapping helps any business to find out the real experiences of their customers.

This strategy helps business in acquiring insights into common difficulties of customers. And thus they can make a blueprint of how they can improve their customer service and how they would serve their customers as well as prospective customers in an efficient way.

Every customer wants to get a user-friendly and seamless experience when they start interacting with any brand. They also expect companies to be aware of and remember (when they back in future) their pain points and solve them accordingly.

It’s also important to assume their requirements in advance and gradually improve their experiences with the continuous learning attitude (here learning means finding the errors, resolve them and not repeating it again).

And all of these information pieces are required to prevent businesses from repeating same mistakes repeatedly.

To serve all these needs, customer journey mapping has come into existence. It helps in revealing issues involved with your customer experience as a whole.

The first benefit of customer journey mapping is the information of the starting point. It helps businesses to discover the platform from where customers have got the information of their offerings.

This mapping technique also helps to find out where customers most prefer to interact with the respective business.

Customer journey mapping also prepares the business to start focusing on specific customer requirements at various phases in the buying funnel. It also helps to gauge whether or not the customer journey is in a logical sequence.

Maybe you think that you have already designed a smoother sales process but it is the customer journey mapping that’ll show you the outside perspective of your sales process. This mapping will also help you figure out the gaps between the ideal customer experience and the actual customer experience.

An appropriate customer journey mapping is able to highlight development priorities and helps businesses to figure out their efforts and expenses (should be only spent on the most important factors of customer engagement and experience) to maximize the effectiveness of the entire sales process.

If you’re running a business and want to resolve all of your queries regarding customer interaction and experience, customer journey mapping is the ultimate solution for you. This mapping technique also helps to deliver customized and highly relevant experiences.

And the best part is you could easily measure its positive impacts on your business, for instance, reducing customer complaints by around 20% within one year only. That’s why businesses emphasize customer journey mapping technique with great attention and detail.

Customer Journey Examples

Customer journey mapping is not very difficult to design but it’s mandatory to design if you want to improve your customer engagement and customer experience.

And there is also no right or wrong technique to design a customer journey map. Basically, it features some sort of infographic with a timeline related to the customer experience. Sometimes, it also holds a storyboard or video.

It’s recommended to design a customer journey map as simple as possible. Although customer journey mapping will make you aware of the customer experience, it won’t tell you each and every aspect related to it. Rather, you’ll be familiar with the simple stories by which you could serve your customer requirements efficiently than earlier.

A customer journey map should address all the common pain points that users normally experience. And it should remind you that customer requirements must always be of topmost priority.

For instance, if your website is not user-friendly and doesn’t have proper information, then you could start getting lots of support calls. And it leads to the deterioration of customer retention rate.

Suppose, you have already a user-friendly website but many people are not technically-savvy and they might think it as a complicated experience. So, it’s better to figure out its solution beforehand. Mapping such customer reactions in advance might save a lot of expenses and time of your company.

Purchasing a product or a new service can be triggered by some emotions and a robust customer mapping technique captures at the minimum of one-fourth of such feelings. Thus you could get to know which type of content would best serve the purpose of all customers and drive them towards your service.

You could also figure out what type of voice or tune (formal or informal) are most preferred by your customers and prospects.

Customer journey mapping should also include the solution of bumps customers could experience throughout the purchasing process of your products or services.

And you could include such bumps by understanding how your customers usually navigate across different twists and turns of the entire purchasing process.

Your responsibility is to provide correct information at the correct place to lower confusion levels.

I hope you have got some ideas about certain customer journey insights. Just take a bigger look at the entire scenario thinking yourself as a customer, use your logic and voila! You could design a commendable customer journey map.

End to End Customer Journey Map

End to End customer Journey Map is another important aspect in this entire discussion. But, first, it’s important for you to know about the end to end customer experience.

End to end customer experience is the collection of interactions between customers and a company throughout the entire duration of the interaction.

Basically, the end to end customer experience holds three key elements:

The contact points of customers with the brand

The entire journey of customers

The environments in which the first two aspects have occurred

The sum of all these three factors creates the customer experience and interaction with your brand from start to end and it’s known as the end to end customer experience.

And coming to the point, an end to end customer journey map is the same as a general customer journey map but more emphasis should be on the following:

Customer Contact Points:

In simple words, customer contact points are those platforms from where people have information about your offerings.

Such platforms include brand name, services or products, advertisements, websites, social media platforms, offers, and so forth. Customer contact points also include the time when customers make their purchasing decisions for a particular brand.

The Customer Journey:

Companies, familiar with the tactics of dealing with customers’ experience, have a lot of benefits, such as improved customer satisfaction, increased revenue, churn reduction, and improved employee satisfaction. And to fulfill these criteria, you need to optimize your sales process to make it streamlined and more enjoyable.

You have to develop a complete reformulation of the work culture of your company to sharpen the focus on customer experience. You can follow the five steps below:

You have to understand the journey of your each and every client.

The next step is to find out the most important journeys of your clients.

You need to develop better processes for each of your clients.

Next, you have to spread such findings all around your company.

As a conclusion, you need to develop a culture to focus on the continuous improvement and enhancement of clients’ journey.

Even though the process is slow and laborious, you would get striking benefits.

End to end customer journey will help you analyze the flaws in your sales process so that you could improve it accordingly.

B2b Customer Journey Mapping

B2b customer Journey Maps are of different types, based on the different requirements of a business and the level to which business processes are included on the customer journey map.

The typical b2b Customer Journey Map:

This customer journey map provides strategic insight into the stages of the b2b customer journey. It includes the element of b2b touchpoints where customers could interact or engage with a particular brand at each phase of the journey.

The tactical b2b customer journey map:

It aims at a specific touchpoint (or a bunch of b2b touchpoints) for highlighting the entire journey that customers undergo at that particular stage. This kind of customer journey map is specifically important when analyzing a crucial touchpoint where performance should be of the highest standard. Tactical maps could play a valuable role for training teams, responsible for a specific phase of the customer journey.

E-commerce Customer Journey Mapping

In the tough competition of today’s e-commerce business fields, it has become a challenge to convert customer attention into long-term customer engagement. And that’s why e-commerce customer journey mapping has emerged as a powerful technique to know about customer experiences.

You can follow the three simple steps below to know about the customer journey in your e-commerce business. As a result, you can properly design an e-commerce customer journey map.

Awareness:

It’s that moment when a customer first finds you out and your services or products. Generally, after getting into your e-commerce website, they would start figuring out your offerings.

Consideration:

Throughout the consideration step, customers are analyzing your services and products and start deciding whether they would purchase or not. It’s actually one of the longer steps in the entire customer journey process and here all of the touchpoints take place.

If you could analyze properly, you’ll notice that during this step, some of your customers would start shifting from low intent to high intent. The low intent customers are actually on window shopping that means they are not in the mood of purchasing anything.

Remember, the more engaged a customer will become during this phase, the higher the chance of their purchase will be. As a result, they would become more high intent customers.

Acquisition:

This step is about customer conversion which every business hopes for. As of this stage, customers have made their purchasing and checkout decision. Some other steps are also there towards the process of reconversion. So, the customer journey in e-commerce business is comparatively forward so far.

Actually, there is no better way to analyze the likings and disliking of customers than figuring out the world through their eyes. And customer journey mapping shows the same and continuously helps in improving customer experience with your business.

So, what are you waiting for?

Design your customer journey map today. Hurry up!

 

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