A company must understand how their customers behave, their patterns, and their pain points. Customer experience is not necessarily linear. Often, the customer journey is influenced by motivations and trends unrelated to your company’s service. Every customer interaction is unique, and the most efficient way to create a general understanding is with a customer journey map. This visual aid for your company, helps you gain insight into customer behavior patterns, and how to structure touchpoints, company vision, and focused services.
Here are the essential steps you should consider before starting your map.
1. Objectives and Personas
Understand your goals and map your intentions; otherwise, your plan will not achieve the results you desire. What customer behavior are you trying to understand? To help you in doing what? If it is hard to answer these questions, create a persona that resembles your average buyer’s behavior and journey. Once you have your fictional John Doe and diagnose how he acts in the marketplace, you will understand your targeted demographics and can focus on your goals for this map.
2. Touchpoints
How are your points of contact where potential customers interact with your company? Can you make a list of all these points?
How many are on the website?
Which is being used to their fullest potential?
Understand the behavior and lifecycle of your customers through your marketing tools like your website, market emails, social media promotions, online ads, and reviews. Your customer journey map should show where the traffic is coming from and what works.
3. Get Feedback
Once you have your customer persona, objectives, and touchpoints, request feedback from your best customer advocates. A great way to accomplish this feedback is through designed surveys. Ask existing and new customers who are interested in or advocates for your company to answer the survey.
Questions can be:
How did you hear about us?
On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to refer our company?
How can we improve our services?
Where do you interact most with our company?
For how long have you known us?
How helpful was your experience with us?
Create a customer journey map as an always growing project that actively changes and guides your organization to help the customer better. Understand if there are breaks in your chain that are leading to loss of opportunity. Do you need to decrease shipping? Is it hard to contact your business for support? Never lose a customer by always understanding and optimizing their journey. Even if changes seem insignificant like choosing a different font for the website, do it. Keep creating new maps, share it with the team, and keep updating yourself.
