Sometimes it might get difficult to comprehend what customers are thinking. You believe you've taken into consideration their demands and requirements, yet new technologies, tastes, and purchasing trends evolve.
Most of the customers spend hours adding products to their cart and then just remove them after some time. Customers take several steps to move from point A to point B whereas they should do it in one step.
You might not have a clear understanding of the customer's journey to buy your goods or services. If this is the case, don't worry. We'll help you out.
In this blog post, we'll explain what a customer journey map is and what are its benefits along with a few customer journey mapping examples. So, let's get started with understanding customer journey mapping.
What is Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a diagram or roadmap that shows the ways a customer interacts with a business. It gives insight into potential customers' demands and worries, which may either encourage or restrict their activities. This data enables businesses to optimize the customer experience, resulting in increased conversion rates and client retention.
The customer journey is the series of interactions that a customer has with a company to reach a goal. There are frequently many and various processes in between generating brand exposure via social media and receiving an email following a successful purchase. This can not be a guess based on your assumptions. The physical experiences that your customers have are particularly distinctive to a customer journey.
As a result, the greatest method to learn about your customers' journeys is to ask them.
Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping
Companies might think that they don’t need any customer journey map as they understand their customers’ needs and pain points. In reality, things are not like this as you need customer journey maps to know your customers’ experiences, objections, fears, and roadblocks.
Here are a few other benefits of customer journey mapping that you can achieve by simply brainstorming and creating customer journey maps.
Focus on inbound marketing
Rather than searching for customers through outbound marketing, companies can use inbound marketing to let customers find them.
Outbound marketing is ineffective and expensive. Inbound marketing involves providing engaging, valuable content that your customers are looking for. It captures their interest and focuses on sales.
Through customer journey mapping, you may learn what makes your company attractive and helpful to your customers, as well as what turns them away. By knowing this, you can develop content that will entice them to your business and sustain them.
Build a new customer base
Understanding the customer journey helps you to know the demographics and psychographics of your customers. This will save you time and money by narrowing down the target customer.
Analyzing your typical customers’ needs and pain points and mapping out their journey will give you a good idea of the type of customers that can make purchases from your company. This way you can build a new valuable customer base.
Build a responsive customer service system
Customer journey mapping highlights the moments where customers will have a good experience as well as a bad and frictional experience. Knowing this earlier will enable you to design your customer service strategy and act at the most appropriate times to optimize the value of your brand to the buyer. A responsive customer service system will make your company appear more reliable to customers.
Customer retention
Completely knowing your customer journey can help you identify areas for improvement in your customer journey. Doing this can reduce customer pain points which can prevent them from leaving your company. You might not be able to save all the customers but can try to do at least 4-5 % as it can boost profits by 25-35% or even more.
Customer Journey Mapping Examples
A company's goal is to take its customers from one point to another. A purchase decision about a product or service drives this decision to move along these points. This path must be guided by potential customers. Here are some examples to draw inspiration from while creating your customer journey map to assist steer your company in the right way.
Spotify
This is a customer journey map example of Spotify, a music app that entertains people. Spotify’s customer journey mapping example includes stages, steps to be taken, thoughts at each stage, touchpoints, actors, and their emotions. If your company is similar to Spotify, you can take inspiration from this customer journey mapping example.
Template
The next customer journey mapping example is a template example that provides an outline for companies to understand their customers' experiences. You can start working on your customer journey mapping with this template.
E-commerce
Another customer journey mapping example is an E-commerce customer journey map that focuses on actions and emotions in customers’ interactions with the company. This customer journey mapping example includes customers’ goals, expectations, experiences, problems, ideas, and opportunities. All this helps a company to understand their customers’ problems which means you can focus more on solving those highlighted problems.
Service-based
The last customer journey mapping example is of a service-based company. This customer journey mapping example of a service company includes customer actions, onstage contact person, backstage contact person, support process, and physical evidence. You can see if this customer journey mapping example relates to your preference for customer journey maps.
Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices
Customer journey maps can help companies a lot in improving their customer experience and smoothen their customers’ buying journey. Here are some of the customer journey mapping best practices to assist you in creating better customer journey maps.
Define your objectives
Be clear about what you need from the customer journey map. Identify your objective as to whether you want to improve the customers’ buying experience or bring a new product to the market.
Understand customers' buying journey
Things don’t work on assumption. You assume certain things about your customer’s experience can be completely different from what your customers experience. So leave the guessing game and ask your customers about their likes and dislikes by conducting customer surveys for your company and its products.
Focus on FAQs
Customers are not experts so most of the time they are not able to identify their exact pain areas; they just know what they are facing. Then your customer service team plays a role in translating customers' feelings into business terms. So, you can take a record of questions that customers frequently ask from the customer service team. Then you can focus more on those pain points that customers frequently ask about.
Create different maps for different buyer personas
Various factors such as demography, preferences, etc. can affect a customer’s interactions with your business and purchasing decisions. So, groups similar category customers into buyer personas and different customer journey maps for each persona.
Update customer journey maps after each product release
Customers’ buying journeys will change with changes in your product or service. Even a simpler change can affect your customer journey a lot. So, don’t forget to review and update your customer journey maps after each product release.
Get started with Customer Journey Mapping
Once you know your customers' experiences with your company, you can satisfy your customers at every point of their buying journey. Customer pain points, sentiments, and your company's touchpoints and processes are all aspects that might influence this journey.
Whether you're improving your customer journey or discovering a new business opportunity to meet a customer's unaddressed requirements, a customer journey map is the most efficient method to visualize this information. Take inspiration from the examples above to begin planning your company's future customer success.
