8 Steps to Creating an Effective Customer Journey Mapping
Ashutosh Chandra | 14th July 2020
Customer journey mapping visually represents the processes a customer or prospect goes through to achieve a goal with your company. Customer journey mapping assists in getting a sense of your customers’ motivations, needs, and pain points.
It’s not just enough to simply understand the customer journey. It’s best to visualize it into a diagram for reference, and UX research and design services can assist in the process. For this purpose, the customer journey mapping comes into play.
Importance of Customer Journey Mapping
Most businesses think they understand the needs and pain points of their customers. But it may be true at the surface-level only. To maximize customer success, it is essential to break down the customer journey phase by phase, align each step with a goal, and restructure your touchpoints accordingly. Ultimately, it’s all about solving customer problems and assisting them in achieving long-term success with your product or service.
Now, these are the three points in which a customer journey mapping supports businesses:
- refocusing with an inbound perspective
- Creating a new target customer base, and
- Creating a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.
Related Steps Involved In User Journey Mapping For Digital Designs
Now, let’s understand the steps and processes of creating an effective customer journey mapping.
Follow these 8 steps to create an effective customer journey mapping:
1. Set clear objectives for the map
Before diving into creating your map, ask yourself why to make one in the first place. What are the goals to direct this map? Who is it specifically about? What experience is it based upon? It would be great to create the buyer persona based on the answers to those questions. It is a fictitious customer with all of their demographics and psychographics representing your average customer. Having a clear persona directs every aspect of your customer journey map towards them.
2. Profile your personas and define their goals
The next step is to conduct research. Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback is through questionnaires and user testing. Always ensure to reach out to actual customers or prospects, and not random people or relatives. Feedback of those people is important who has interacted with your company before or plan to do so. Also, those who are actually interested in purchasing your products and services.
Some examples of good questions to ask are:
- How did you hear about our company?
- What first attracted you to our website?
- What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? and so on.
Use the buyer persona tools to fill in the details procured from customer feedback.
3. Highlight your target customer personas
After learning about the different customer personas that interact with your business, narrow your focus to one or two of them. Customer journey maps track the experiences of one customer type who is taking a very specific path with your company. Grouping too many personas into one journey won’t accurately reflect your customers’ experience on your map.
Also, Read | UX Strategies For Effective Conversion Rate Optimization
4. List out all the touchpoints
Touchpoints are all the places on your website that your customers can consider for interacting with your business. Research and then list out all the touchpoints your customers and prospects are currently using.
Touchpoints are an important step in creating a customer journey map because it gives insight into the actions your customers perform. Whatever the case, understanding the touchpoints is a tool that assists in understanding the ease and objectives of customer journeys.
5. Identify the elements for your map to show
Customer journey maps consist of four types while each having their own benefits. Depending on the specific purpose of the map, it’s important to choose the proper one.
These are four types of customer journey maps:
- Current state
- Day in the Life
- Future State
- Service Blueprint
Get to know more about these four customer journey maps and their benefits in detail here.
6. Determine your current resources and the ones that are essential
Your customer journey map touches on most parts of your business. That highlights all the resources that go into creating the customer experience. So, it’s important to take inventory of the resources available and the ones that are essential to improve the customer’s journey.
Also, including new tools in your map, assists in accurately predicting how they’ll impact your business and drive outsized value. This makes it simpler in convincing the gatekeepers and decision-makers to invest in your proposals.
7. Take the customer journey yourself
The work is not yet finished even after designing the customer journey map. After that, the most important step of the process is to analyze the results. Ask yourself questions related to the click rates on your website but people closing out the website before making a purchase. Also, consider the ways to better support your customers. Consider these points after finishing up your customer journey map designs and analyzing the results.
8. Make the necessary changes
The necessary changes, small or big, are effective if they are directly correlated with what customers listed as their pain points. Don’t just blindly make changes in the hopes that they will improve customer experiences. Research and consult before doing so. Always ensure to address the needs and pain points of your customers with the support of your visualized customer journey map.
Conclusion
Customer journey maps offer businesses the power to get into their customer’s minds. Businesses also gain valuable insight and understanding regarding their common customer pain points. Consult Oodles UX consulting services for more assistance.
Image source: Google images
