When the global financial crisis crippled economies in 2007, businesses had to rethink the way they marketed and sold their products and services.  At the same time consumer behaviour was changing with the emergence of digital technology.  Interactions with channels were way up and so too was customer expectations. To succeed, brands needed to meet customer needs and exceed expectations across all touchpoints in the customer journey, with a focus on delivering a customer experience that drives loyalty and referral.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the process and actions a prospect or customer takes when choosing to buy a product or use a service within your company. To create the customer journey map you need a room with a blank wall space, a good template to follow, lots of post-it notes and group of people representing staff from different areas of the business, and ideally some customers.

For any Customer Journey Map to be successful, it needs to be developed from the customer's point of view - not what you and your business perceives your customers point of view to be. 

Why do I need to build an effective customer journey map?

The reason is simple, the customer journey is the process by which your customer interacts with your company in order to achieve their goal. Not having a clear process can make your prospects feel confused or annoyed by the way they are forced to interact with your website or process of doing business.

Nowadays the interactions that a company has with their customers varies across channels. There are many steps in the process and as a company you can't predict how the interaction will go without a clear and effective customer journey map to determine and control the digital and physical experiences your customers will have when they interact with you.

How to create an effective customer journey map?

When mapping a customer journey you need to visualise it so it reflects the key stages or events the drive decisions.  Often a good place to start is the key stages in your marketing and sales process; Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Purchase.  This is then detailed with an overview of what the customer is thinking, feeling and doing during each stage of the journey.  You can then go as far as overlaying the comms you currently provide at each stage of the journey to get a clear view of the gaps between what your customer is looking for and the information you are providing. When all the key information is in place you will get a comprehensive visual that describes your customer journey and the current experience your customer has with your organisation.

You can learn how to organize the information and build the most effective and efficient experience for your clients by knowing this relationship. From the first to the last touchpoint, a consumer journey map points out what is working and what's not and sets a clear roadmap of activities and focus areas to improve your customer experience.

There are a few steps or questions you need to ask yourself when creating a customer journey map:

Before setting an objective for your map you need to know why you are doing a map. Who is this map for? Or, what is the experience I want my customers to experience when they are interacting with my brand? Does my mapping takes into account my buyer personas? If not ask yourself how can your mapping interact with your buyer personas.

You need to get some context of what your customers are going through and understand their pain points. You can use surveys to get in their head and use their feedback to create a perfect customer journey map. Once you've done this, focus your efforts in the personas that will likely become your customers.

Focus on the path and interactions your prospects will go through when they navigate your website or your communications in general. Set clear expectations of what you want them to do when they see a call to action on your site, emails or ads and what are the next steps until they reach their goal.

How can customer journey mapping help my business?

We know that you might think that this doesn’t apply to you or your company because you understand the needs of your customers and that this may seem like a lot to take in and it's also a lot of work and time that you cannot waste on doing something like this but if you do this, you will be working towards maximizing customer success and solving customer problems by helping them achieve long-term success with your product or service.

1. Switch from Outbound to Inbound

By having a clear customer journey map you can start focusing on prospects that really matter instead of focusing on everyone. Inbound marketing focuses in the creation of interesting content that is useful to your customers while outbound marketing focuses on seeking general audiences and disrupting them with useless content for them.

When you switch from outbound marketing to inbound marketing you can start mapping your customers journey based on the content they are consuming and the actions that they are taking on your website that later on will become SQL ( Sales Qualified Leads ).

2. Get to know your audience

If you don’t have a clear customer journey, you are probably targeting a broad audience and that will only cost you more money and less sales. Target people that are interested in your products or services and that will likely become SQL.

3. Improve your customer service

If you are making a roadmap of your whole process, you will be able to see where your customers will likely experience some problems. Knowing this ahead of time will help you improve your customer service strategy

4. Don’t give your clients a reason to leave

Surveys show that 33% of customers will switch brands after a bad experience. When you have a clear customer journey map you can minimise the areas of your process where a bad experience might occur to your customers.

Now that you have a general idea about how to build an effective customer journey map it’s your turn to do it! If you feel like you still need help, at Happy we specialise in providing this service for our clients. Leave your info in our contact form and our specialists will contact you as soon as possible!