How to Create a Map for Your Customer Journey
The most significant blind spot that companies have to deal with is understanding what their customer's journey is. What is it like to purchase your business? Understanding your customer's journey is a crucial part of improving the overall customer experience. Without this insight, you will never know the obstacles or challenges that your customers might be facing in their decision to make a purchase. You need to deeply understand what it is about your brand that attracts customers, and what could potentially turn them away. Essentially, you need to walk in their shoes. Below, we have five steps to consider when creating a customer journey map.
Determine objectives
What is the purpose of your customer journey map? What are you trying to determine by using this map? How will these results change your customer journey?
These are all questions that you need to ask yourself when you're building a customer journey map. The answers to these questions will help to plot the rest of your route.
Create customer personas
You can't follow a customer through their customer journey if you don't know who they are. Customer personas are created through surveying what your actual customers experienced by interacting and engaging with your brand. Ask them how questions about how they came to find your brand, whether they have made a purchase or not, what the customer service experience has been like, and anything else that will help you to mould and shape specific personas for your customer journey.
Identify all touchpoints
Touchpoints are all the places online that your customers can interact with your brand. These touchpoints could range anywhere from adding a product to their online shopping cart, engaging with a post on one of your social media channels, opening an email, or interacting with the customer service chatbot on your website. Once you identify these touchpoints, you'll get some immediate insight into what the customer experience is. Are there too many? Maybe your company website is too complicated, requiring too many steps to get to a purchase or a download. If you find that there are fewer touchpoints than you realized, it's time to create some new touchpoints on your website. It's all about balance and making sure that the right pieces are in the right place.
Plot the customer journey
After you identify your customer persona and narrow your touchpoint focus, you need to map out where the customer journey will go. Map out the actions that you want your customers to perform, and in which stage you want these actions performed. The critical thing about mapping out the journey is to make sure that your customers aren't getting anything they aren't ready. Each step in the journey should come with new information, but it shouldn't be overwhelming. Don't jump the gun on giving your customers information that isn't relevant to their position in the journey.
Take the customer journey
The most crucial part of mapping out a customer journey is to take the journey yourself. How will you ever know the obstacles, challenges and pain points that your customers are experiencing just by interacting with your brand? Engaging with your brand should never be difficult. Take notes on what works and what doesn't to make a richer experience for your customers going forward.
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