How To Serve Your Clients with A Customer Journey Map
In today’s consumer-focused world, it’s easy to forget that the buyer’s journey is a nuanced path with far more complexities than we realize. Have you ever stopped to wonder what thought processes someone goes through from first hearing about a product or service to finally making the purchase – or not? If you haven’t, we’re going to show you more about the Customer Journey Map and why it’s crucial to your business’s success to understand it.
What Exactly Is a Customer Journey Map?
A Customer Journey Map takes the choices your customers make when interacting with your brand and “maps” them out visually so it’s easier to understand the minds of your clients. This will help you get to know their needs, issues, and desires as they work through all your touchpoints. These “touchpoints” are anything from your website and social media to the interactions a customer has with your sales team.
If you’re asking yourself why you should bother going through the trouble, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and imagine broken links that frustrate you or descriptions that aren’t clear – information like that is invaluable and will only improve your buyer experience.
Let’s go through how these maps are created so you can get started on your own.
How Do You Create a Customer Journey Map?
The good news is that these maps start out simply. Open a new Excel sheet and start brainstorming what you know about your customer’s experience with your company. Cover all key events, what motivates your customers and any pain points that you think they may experience. From this, sketch an actual map that will help you visualize your customer’s journey. By doing this, you’ll be able to logically look at your processes and optimize them.
This map will clearly show you that the buyer’s journey is anything but linear. It can be cyclical or multi-directional as well as multi-channeled.
If you’re realizing that you need more data to plug into this map, go to your source directly and survey your customers. While gathering this information can be time-consuming, it will pay off in the long run after your touchpoints and processes are clearly mapped out and you’re fully aware of the potential paths your customer may take from the beginning to the end.
The best Customer Journey Maps show the good along with the bad. You should be fully aware of the pain points they encounter as well as their possible actions so you can have empathy when deciding if/what changes need to be made.
Why Is Customer Journey Mapping Important?
If you’re not already convinced that a buyer’s journey is something you should be intimately aware of, let us give you a few more reasons. By understanding how a customer goes from researching to clicking “buy,” you’re able to condense a massive amount of information and turn it into an easy-to-read visual that will forever dictate your methods and improvements.
With this information, you may choose to do any of the following after analyzing the data:
- Invest more in Inbound Marketing
- Refocus on customer service
- Redefine your target client
- Try to improve customer retention
With objectives like this, it’s clear to see why you should spend some time creating your own Customer Journey Map. Your business AND your customers will reap the benefits from it for years to come.