Nowadays, it’s all about the customer experience. It is essential for companies to know how and when customers come into contact with them; for this we recommend creating a customer journey map. This map records the customer experience across all touchpoints, from social media and live chats to email, providing an insight into each interaction between the customer and the company. A customer journey map can take many different forms, but what’s important is that it makes sense to you and helps you to better understand the customer’s journey through your goods or services.
Touchpoints and emotions
The customer journey map will help you to understand how far your customers are through the purchasing process and what is on their mind. To make this clear, the customer journey is split into individual phases, for example pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase. These phases can be further split into individual steps as needed. The following points are then included under each respective phase:
What is your benefit from it
By putting yourself in their shoes, you can get to know your customers better just by creating a customer journey map. This will give you an insight into their thinking and emotions, and the challenges that they face, allowing you to further improve their customer experience. You will obtain an objective view of your sales process, not from the perspective of the salesperson, but rather the customer. You will discover what they find interesting and helpful, and what gets in their way. This will help you to identify what content needs to be placed where, what is missing and what is superfluous and possibly misleading, by sharpening your focus.
Different people, different journeys
Use what are known as personas to avoid having to create a customer journey for each individual customer. Personas are simplified representations of your potential customers. Finally, it is important to remember that each persona has a different customer journey. The customer journeys of different generations will differ; for example, a millennial will be more likely to encounter your brand through social media than a baby boomer, who will find it using print media. Millennials will use live chat or email to complain about a problem, whereas baby boomers prefer to call customer service. The customer journey map will help you to get to know your customers better. You will understand their thinking and emotions better and know what is on their mind. You can use this understanding to take appropriate action and create positive experiences for your customers.
