Building a Customer Journey Map – How and Why

When running a business, there’s a tonne of vital things to consider – and it’s not just making sure your products are in stock or managing social media accounts. There are far greater concerns, one of them being customer satisfaction. Without it, it’s nearly impossible to keep a business running, while good relations with your clients may just be the thing that puts you at the top of the leaderboard. But how does one get around to doing that?

The easiest and, in my opinion, the most effective approach is by creating customer journey maps – you’ve probably heard of them before, but have never given them much thought. However, with the constantly changing customer expectations and the increasing difficulty of making sales, you just might need them. Customer experience is more important than ever – a single bad review may knock you right off your deserved pedestal, despite you offering products or services of the upper-most quality. Customer journey maps, sometimes also referred to as buyer journey maps or user journey maps, will make staying ahead of the competition effortless by helping you ensure a fantastic customer experience through visual representations of each individual’s interactions with your brand. It will become your go-to whenever you’ll need information on a client in order to meet their expectations.

What Does Customer Journey Mapping Help With?

Since the average person tends to use numerous ways to communicate with businesses – contacting them through different social media and different devices – it becomes difficult to keep up with them and ensure a great customer experience. With a journey map, it is easier to track their interactions with your company, and consequently provide them with better service. It helps you gain an insight into the customer’s needs and expectations, and even enables you to observe your own business through their perspective. This way, you’re able to improve your business relationship with them, and devise a plan on how to better what you do in the future.

Customer journey maps provide a strategic approach to personalized customer experience, with which you will soon begin to better understand your clients’ expectations. And mind you, this strategy is not only useful for bigger, already established enterprises – smaller or medium-sized companies can benefit from it as well. After all, personalization is one of the most important aspects of customer experience, as it makes them feel appreciated instead of feeling like just a source of income.

One of the greater benefits of customer journey mapping is simply understanding your customers more, as it gives way to differentiating between their actual desired experience and what they’re in fact receiving. And once you map out their interactions, you’re able to better spend and direct the money in the marketing department – this is where omnichannel marketing comes in.

What Is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing refers to personalized customer experience no matter where or what they’re accessing your business from. And this type of marketing translates directly into omnichannel customer service.

For example, if a potential buyer was looking at specific products on your business’s website, they might come across an ad with similar products while scrolling social media. This is what we mean when we talk about touch points – they are the foundations of a successful business model, and act as cornerstone pieces for customer journey maps, which are crucial in marketing.

Omnichannel customer service, on the other hand, refers to the numerous possibilities presented before the client when contacting a company – they can find support on social media profiles, ask for help over email or messenger apps, or even consult a member of your team through live chat. (By the way – did you know that more than fifty percent of consumers prefer live interaction with company employees?)

How Does Journey Mapping Work?

When starting out, you want to make sure to map out all customer touch points – these include any and all interactions with your brand, from visiting your website, browsing your products or services, reacting to or commenting on your company’s social media posts, to direct interactions with your employees either through e-mail or other media. These various touch points make creating a buyer persona incredibly simple – you get to know your customers’ habits, their preferences, interests, expectations, through which you’re able to personalize their experiences in the future.

If you have no idea how to approach the actual building of the map, or you need to be more time-efficient, you may want to invest in one of the many softwares designed specifically for this task. Not only will your journey maps be more efficient this way, they will be optimised as well. This kind of software is usually part of every marketing automation software, making your and your customers’ experience that much more carefree.