Things You Need to Understand About Customer Journey Mapping

You may be a business owner, a manager, a designer or a copywriter. Irrelevant of you specialization, if your job somehow involves interaction with customers, the key to your success will be to fully understand what your product is like from their perspective. For that you need to be aware of all the touch points that your customers go through while interacting with your product, what difficulties they experience and what you can do about it.

There is a whole bunch of factors to be taken into consideration, so it’s not always easy to get a bird’s eye view of the entire customer journey. That is exactly what customer journey mapping is for. In this article we will cover the basics of customer journey mapping and the opportunities it can provide to product owners and managers. We will show you how to make a customer journey map and then use it effectively. What is CJM The general idea behind customer journey map is to identify all the touch points of the sales processes that customers go through along their way, find out where they may experience difficulties and confusion and eventually summarize it in a concise and illustrative form. Why CJM is important Creating customer journey maps can provide insightful information for all levels of company’s management. It also highlights the gaps in the customer experience, that would otherwise be hard to detect. Here a list of opportunities customer journey mapping has to offer to businesses: providing overall view on the whole customer journey; understanding crucial customer journey ways, where additional improvement will be most impactful; improving customer retention by managing the pain points and making sure that all the necessary information is available at each stage of customer experience; zoom-in a particular journey from a specific channel; prioritize the actions in their long-term user experience strategy. Most importantly, a well-made customer journey map lets a business minimize all the negative experience and maximize the efficiency of the paths that a customer goes along, which means more sales and better conversion rates. How to make a customer journey map Of course, there are no strict rules on creating a proper customer journey map, since it is something akin to a piece of art and depends mostly on your designer’s imagination.

However, here are a few guidelines for you to make it most informative. Normally, a customer journey map is some sort of infographic, which includes a timeline of user experience (ads, aware, desire, research, choosing, purchasing, etc. ) and a set of criteria to evaluate each step of a customer journey (customer need, customer expectations, touchpoints, pain points, problems, ideas, etc. ). All that combined presents a large picture of customer experience in a comprehensible and illustrative way. Define whose journey you are going to map, in other words, your persona. This may be a particular customer type, a target customer, or a group of customers.

The choice of a persona depends on the purposes of your journey mapping. Once you've created distinct personas, you are ready to create customer journey maps that describe the experience of each persona at various stages of their lifecycle with your product or company. At this step you are ready to conduct research and gather some data about the experience of your customers. Regardless of its form, a customer journey map should contain statistical and anecdotal (users’ testimonials shared personally or via social media in spoken or written from) evidence. This will help you highlight the feelings people get from interaction with your organization and tell the whole customer story. Normally, people are willing to participate and share their experience if they see that you are genuinely interested and that their feedback will help you improve their journey. How to use a customer journey map This must be the most complicated part of the entire process of customer journey mapping. The thing is that a customer journey map is not supposed to be hanging on a wall like a poster. Mapping a customer journey should be followed by specific actions aimed at user experience improvement. It is a good practice to update a customer journey map once in a while to see the progress of your work.

Customer journey mapping tools Basically, there are two approaches to mapping a customer journey. You can either leave it to a graphic team or an in-house designer, or use a special software that helps to identify the touch points and compile all the research data. That is exactly what the UXPressia tool was designed for — to provide best customer experience while analysing your customer experience. There are templates for all sorts of businesses, so you will only have to choose the appropriate one and fill it with your data. These are the basics of customer journey mapping, hope the article was useful enough to convey the significance of customer journey mapping. Thank you for reading, feel free to leave your comments below if something important was forgotten.