Customer journey mapping is an excellent tool that gives a visual presentation of the entire process a customer goes through when interacting with a business. From initial awareness to post-purchase advocacy, this map helps businesses understand and improve every touchpoint along the customer’s journey. By looking at this journey in detail, businesses can find insights into a customer’s behaviour, identify pain points and create strategies to increase the overall customer experience.
In this article we will explore what customer journey mapping is, its importance, and the steps to create a map.
What is Customer Journey Mapping?
Customer journey mapping is a visual representation of the process a customer goes through to achieve a goal within your business, such as making a purchase or spreading word about your product or service. This tool helps businesses understand and address customer needs, pain points, and interactions across different touchpoints.
The importance of Customer Journey Mapping?
Customer journey mapping offers a number of benefits, including an improvement on the customer experience, increase to customer insights and a rise in customer retention. By understanding the journey, businesses can identify and look at pain points, creating an effortless and more enjoyable experience. Mapping also gives a deeper understanding of the customers behaviour and their expectations which can lead to more effective marketing strategies. Responding to issues and improving the overall experience can lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The 5 Stages Of The Customer Journey
- Awareness – Customers are at the beginning stage of their journey, likely researching into different solutions to the problem that they are having. At this stage they may find your website through a Google search or a recommendation from a customer at the advocacy stage- We will go into the importance of brand advocates later on in the article. – At this stage you just want to offer informative content that helps to solve their problem. They are then more likely to remember your brand name and continue along on the journey.
- Consideration – The customer has done their research and is now considering a purchase between a number of different companies. With any purchase these days there is a huge amount of information available, so customers are likely to spend longer in the consideration stage. Keeping your content simple, concise and focused on how it can solve customers problems is key. You likely have their email at this stage so sending some simple articles/posts related to the product they have been looking at could prove useful.
- Purchase – The customer has now entered the purchase stage, keep this stage simple. The customer wants their receipt and any additional information that will prove valuable for their purchase.
- Retention – This stage involves following up after the purchase has been completed. Check on the customer to make sure they are happy with the purchase. Offer them helpful articles that can help them to access all of the features available to them.
- Advocacy – This is questionably the most important phase of the journey. Any customer in the earlier stages who sees a number of bad reviews is likely to second guess their decision to make a purchase. On the flip side a positive brand advocate can encourage extra sales and create loyal customers with no extra cost to your business. Creating brand advocates should be the goal, not just sales.
What Are The Steps To Create A Customer Journey Map?
- Set your objectives – Establish what you would like to achieve by creating a customer journey map, such as improving the customer experience, or understanding where potential customers are being lost.
- Identify customer personas – Create detailed profiles of your target customers, including their demographics, behaviours, needs and goals.
- Map customer touchpoints – List all the points where customers interact with your business, from initial awareness to post-purchase assistance.
- Find data – Use surveys, interviews, and analytics to gather data on customer experiences at each touchpoint.
- Visualise the journey – Create a visual representation of the journey, highlighting key interactions, emotions and potential pain points.
- Analyze and improve – Use the map to look at areas for improvement and create effective strategies to add to the customer experience.
A customer journey map can prove incredibly useful to any business in helping them to optimise their processes and create loyal brand advocates. One area that cannot be avoided in this journey is the importance of customer communications. Here at Sefas we offer a CCM (Customer communications management) software called the Harmonie Communication Suite (HCS). To find out more about how this software can support your business, get in contact today.