approaching customer journey mapping

Customers want their experience with your brand to be seamless and relevant. So, how do we ensure that you are providing the best possible experience? The best way is to visualize how your customer interacts with your business by mapping it, this is also known as customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool that outlines and visualizes your customers path-to-purchase. The ultimate goal of creating this map is to better educate your business about your customers and their behaviors, it enables you to identify and relieve customer pain points, roadblocks and most importantly drive sales.

Other benefits to consider:

• Highlights where customers interact with your business
• Gives a bird's eye view of the entire customer journey
• Improved customer retention
• Identifies the gaps between the desired vs. actual experience
• Develop higher customer conversion rates

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So, how do you create a customer journey map? You need to include every point where your customer comes into contact with your brand, from digital marketing to print advertising to customer service and packaging.

You should build a customer journey map as a tool to use in your overall planning, here are our simple steps to help get your started when creating your own map:

1. Profile your customers
Create a profile or avatar of your target customers, including:

• Customers demographics
• Personality traits
• Income and economic information
• Emotional states 

 
2. Map touchpoints
Create a list of all the different ways a customer can interact with your brand. Some common examples include:

Online:
Website, social media, Google ads, email and shopping cart

Print:
Advertisement, editorial, catalogue and direct mailout

Customer service 

Packaging

Try Googling your business to see all the pages that mention your brand and use it as a checklist.

3. Identify pain points
Its important that once you have established your brands touchpoints that you look at potential roadblocks that are stopping your customer from making their desired action, for example the navigation on your website is confusing and unclear which makes it impossible to find your product range.
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Take the journey yourself and see what pain points you encounter when purchasing a product or finding out more about your services.

For instance:

• Are you achieving your goals on the website?
• When you are clicking on a Google ad, are you sent to a relevant page?
• What are the steps you are going through before reaching the shopping cart? 

 
4. Collect data from current customers
It’s important to include quantitative elements from your website analytics, CRM, feedback forms or call centre software as this will assist in providing a more accurate representation of your customers journey.

For example your call centre reports or customer feedback forms might highlight trends with customers asking the same specific questions about your service.

5. Analyse the big picture and build your narrative
At this stage you will notice trends and patterns in the experience. Once you have all this data you are ready to consolidate the information into a diagram or infographic that demonstrates your narrative.  

Customer journey mapping is a beneficial tool for businesses to understand how customers interact with your brand and enhance opportunities for your business to improve the journey. Your map is constantly changing due to customers demands and needs to be revisited regularly and updated as required.