What is a Customer Journey Map and Why is it Important

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the path your customers take from discovering your brand to becoming an advocate for your brand. This map allows you to tell the story of your brand to your customers across several touchpoints. Mapping your customer’s journey will ensure your customers and their experiences with your brand don’t slip through any cracks. By mapping your journey, it also allows you to gain insight into common obstacles that the customer faces, allowing you to better optimize and personalize their experience.

With a staggering 81 percent of customers saying a positive customer service experience increases the likelihood they’ll make another purchase, according to a survey conducted by Zendesk, ensuring that your customers receive a seamless experience is crucial to the success of your business. There are more touchpoints in the customer journey now than ever before, making it more difficult to always ensure a smooth customer experience. However, once you have all possible customer touchpoints mapped out, you can put a plan into place to ensure each customer’s expectation is met.

Examples of Customer Journey Maps

Think about all the possible touchpoints your customers could meet. For example, your website, app, social media channels, and interactions with the sales team. Can you guarantee all of these touchpoints are going to wow your customer? It’s important to note that the customer experience may slightly differ across your various touchpoints for each user buyer persona. For example, a customer may come across your brand on social media, research your website and on the mobile version of your website and then finally purchase from their desktop. Additionally, a customer may browse your brand on your website and then leave your website, giving you the possibility to retarget them with a social media ad.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCE: The B2B Marketer’s Guide to Social Media Success

It’s important to note that different businesses approach customer journey maps in different ways. Some organizations have a single customer journey map, but it is more common to develop multiple maps. These can be customized to reflect different personas or the distinct journeys of buyers of different types of products or services. Check out our blog post on the 5 stages of the customer journey here! Touchpoints can also vary by customer. Some customers, especially Generation Z, may seek out your information through video content, while others may want to read written content about you and your product.

Surveys and interviews are also effective for learning about customer touchpoints, actions, and motivations. Some example questions to ask your customers include:

Exemplar Survey Questions

• How would you feel about recommending us to friends and colleagues?
• How easy is our website to navigate?
• How happy are you with the speed with which you were able to find what you were looking for?
• How long after you heard about our company did you make your first purchase?
• How could we have gone above and beyond?

By developing your own customer journey map, you are allowing yourself to step into your customer’s shoes and learn more about their thoughts and feelings towards the brand, allowing you to optimize the situation. Once you interview your customers and understand their thoughts, you can benchmark their desires against what they will actually receive from you as a company.

You can also identify unmet customer needs that you weren’t aware of. Mapping out how customers navigate through your site or app lets you pinpoint blockers, where they’re trying to engage but can’t, or where completing an action takes too much time and effort. Now that you are aware of this happening, you can update your website to provide the most relevant information at any key point of the journey. Once you increase your awareness of your customer’s needs to minimize frustrations with your brand by ensuring you are providing the right information to the right user, you are providing an overall better user experience.

Customer Journey Maps Roundup

Overall, ensuring you have a customer journey map mapped out for your prospects and customers will ensure high customer satisfaction, leading to retention. Once you understand the 5 stages of the customer journey, understand where your touchpoints lay, and which user persona you’re marketing to, you can now exceed your customer’s expectations.

Want to develop your own customer journey? Reach out to us today! We can help you to create customized customer journeys and automate your marketing efforts to bring your business to the next level.