An effective customer journey map helps a business to understand the steps and experiences that a particular customer persona goes through to achieve a certain goal. For example, this can be finding and purchasing a product that they want or resolving a customer purchase issue. In this article we explain the process of mapping out a customer journey.
Establish Your Buyer Personas
Before you can create an effective customer journey map, you need to be able to specifically understand who your customers are. You will probably find that you have several customer personas that engage with your brand. When creating a customer journey map, choose one persona to focus on.
To discover the types of personas that you have, you can ask customers questions about themselves, their pain points, how and why they considered or chose your brand, whether they have ever worked with your brand previously, what their experience was, and any feedback they have. You can also gather information from your marketing efforts to find data about your target audience such as age, gender, and location.
Determine Your Goals
Before setting up a customer journey map, it’s important to outline your goals. Here are some things to consider:
● Are you creating a new journey or updating an older journey?
● Are you trying to solve a specific problem such as improving the customer journey for a certain product or service? How will you measure the success of the improvements?
● How common is the customer journey that you will be mapping out and how important is it’s efficiency to your business?
● What type of customer experiences will your map track and for which customer persona?
● What are your goals for the persona you are creating the map for?
To help answer the above questions, you can talk to people in your company who are involved with customer satisfaction at various points of buyer journeys.
Choose Your Map Type
Once you have decided on your goals, it is time to decide on the type of map you want to create. There are three types of maps that are used most often. The most common one helps you to understand what customers currently think, feel, and do. Another type of map allows you to predict these things for the future. The third type of map helps you to understand the actions of customers during the course of a day.
Determine Your Touchpoints and Plot Your Map
The touchpoints are the areas within a customer journey where a customer can engage with your brand. For example, a touchpoint might be looking at a certain page on your website, looking at one of your company newsletters, or contacting customer support by filling out a form. You might find that there are too many or too few touchpoints for a particular customer journey and that you will need to make changes.
As you are establishing your touchpoints and adding them to your map, note the customer thoughts, emotions, actions, and challenges associated with them and when they occur.
Test and Analyze Your Customer Journey Map
Once you have a complete customer journey map, it is time to test it out. Walk through the process and notice where the touchpoints work well and where improvements need to be made. Create a measurement system for analyzing touchpoints in your journey.
CH Consulting Group provides unparalleled expertise in the Contact Center and Customer Experience (CX) verticals. We have a nationwide team of industry veterans that can assist you to achieve exponential growth, manage change, and generate profit. For a comprehensive CX assessment and strategic plan customized for your unique business needs, connect with us here today.
