Your customers are everything. You know that. They probably also know that for the most part. So, it’s essential to ensure that once they’re through “your doors” that you don’t lose them, and that you help them get what it is they need. The good news is that you can do this much easier if you map out your customer journey. This is called customer experience journey mapping.
What Exactly Is A Customer Experience Journey Map?
A customer experience journey map is exactly as the name suggests: a map that details each point in the customer journey where your customers interact with your brand. It can be in the form of a simple diagram or an extensively designed project. Each touchpoint where you and the customer connect needs to be a properly mapped, thought-out experience from start to finish. The more touchpoints there are, the more the need for an extensive mapping process.
The following points will help you map out a clean, user-friendly and effective customer journey for your users.
1. Define Touchpoints Per Stage
You want to try and ensure that each point of the customer journey is accounted for, but this can be an overwhelming task. Therefore, it’s best to tackle different stages of the buying journey one at a time. In order to determine what requires the bulk of your attention, use your analytics to see where there are breaks in communication or experience and work on perfecting those stages first.
2. Define Your Most Likely Personas
Once you’ve identified which stage of the buying journey you are mapping out, think about the personas who will be interacting with your brand at this stage. Why? Because you don’t want to create a “one-size-fits-all” approach to your customer experience. It’s impossible that every customer would fit into the same bulk bin persona, so you need to take some time to identify who it is that will be making contact with you. Your personas should resemble actual customers who would come into your store and buy products.
3. Start Listing Your Touchpoints
This is an integral part of the final product as it provides the basis of your customer journey map. Pull on all resources within your business to ensure that you’ve considered every angle and every point of interaction possible. You don’t want to miss something that could be a valuable point of contact for your future customers.
4. Start Creating Your Map
Remembering that each point in the map is a customer touchpoint, start detailing the path from start to finish through the proposed stage. Also create a map for each persona. For each persona interacting with the map or journey, answer the following questions:
- What would have brought this customer here?
- What will they be experiencing when they arrive here?
- What questions will they have at this stage?
- What issues are they likely to encounter at this stage?
- What issues might stop them from progressing?
- How can we use content to move them forward in their journey?
- How can we help them move forward and take action?
As the map starts to become a visual aid, you can clearly see where the business can intervene to offer assistance, create additional content, provide more beneficial insight etc. It will also start to make more sense the further you get into the process.
5. Get The Validation You Need
Once you’ve clearly mapped out your customer journey it’s important to validate that you’ve done it correctly. One of the easiest ways for you to do this is to invest some resources in inviting customers to trial it for you and offer their feedback. This will give you the insight you need to confirm the work you’ve done, and perhaps even fine-tune it further from an external perspective.
Once you’ve implemented your customer journey map, pay attention to how customers engage with each touchpoint to ensure you’ve thought out the experience properly for each persona. There’s no shame in reconsidering certain points if they don’t align to the actual outcome.