Customer Journey Mapping - What is it and where do you start?
As digital tooling becomes more accessible, most businesses regardless of size now have the opportunity to deliver a sophisticated digital client experience.
However, as customer expectations for choice between products, services, and preferred channels increase, brand delivery and service design considerations are becoming an increasingly significant differentiator. As a result, understanding how your customers interact with your digital presence is more important than ever when seeking to gain or maintain a competitive advantage.
At the heart of digital service design lies the discipline of customer journey mapping which, when configured correctly, can provide a comprehensive framework for visualising, analysing, and optimising the customer experience, both in a digital context and beyond.
So, what is it?
Customer journey mapping is a visual representation of a customer's journey with an organisation, from initial awareness to purchase, post-purchase and ultimately through to advocacy. It allows organisations to empathise with their customers and provides valuable insights into their needs, feelings, and motivations at each stage of their journey. Ultimately however, it’s about making it as easy as possible for the customer to get the information they need at any given point in their engagement journey.
For the most successful firms, customer journey mapping is not only a core tenet of an overall customer experience strategy, but a live ecosystem through which the customer experience is continuously measured and enhanced throughout the business. Given that 80%* of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products, it’s easy to see why.
*Salesforce – State of the Connected Customer (6th edition)
Decoding the Customer Journey: A Step-by-Step Approach
There are no hard and fast rules here and approaches can vary depending who you speak to, however typically the following steps are used.
Step 1: Define your goals
Before you start, it’s important to be clear about what you want to achieve with your journey maps. Are you aiming to boost retention? Increase conversions? Enhance customer satisfaction? Defining these elements first will help to ensure your team remains focused on the task at hand and not distracted by other areas in the business that may also require attention. Many companies find the key to success is to start small and build from your learnings. This way you can start to incorporate or challenge the language and approaches used within an organisation collaboratively with all stakeholders.
Step 2: Define your target personas
This stage is about understanding your target audience and creating detailed personas that reflect their characteristics, needs, and motivations. What do we mean by a persona? Think of it as a detailed portrait, not of a specific individual, but of a common customer type. By piecing together demographics, motivations, behaviours, and even quotes, it’s possible to create a fictional representation that encapsulates the essence of a significant customer segment. This is an important step because it allows a business to focus on the sources of sales but also allows them to create an empathy lens which is vital to optimising outcomes for individual customer segments.
Step 3: Mapping the journey stages
This phase is about dividing the journey into separate components. Customer journeys typically unfold across five distinct stages:
Awareness: The initial stage where customers become aware of a brand or product through various channels such as advertising, social media, or word-of-mouth.
Consideration: Customers actively seek information and evaluate different options before making a purchasing decision.
Decision: Customers make a final choice and commit to purchasing a particular brand or product.
Retention: Customers continue using the product or service and form an ongoing relationship with the brand.
Advocacy: Satisfied customers become ardent brand advocates, recommending the brand to others and spreading positive word-of-mouth.
Within each stage, the aim is to recognise every touchpoint and identify the path that a customer will follow – search engine clicks, website visits, social media interactions, customer support calls etc. – wherever your business intersects with the customer.
This can be a significant undertaking, and part of the reason we recommend starting small and evolving your approach as you get familiar with the process. You may well find some of the parts you need in your existing infrastructure such as your email automation tools or even via process maps within your customer service function. Fortunately, there are also a number of free solutions available that you can use to aggregate your information into a cohesive map such as Miro, Custellence, Lucidspark etc to get you started.
Step 4: Step into the customers’ shoes
A journey isn't just about actions; it's also about the emotions that fuel them. For each touchpoint, it is important to consider what your customer might be thinking and feeling. Are they excited discovering your brand? Frustrated with a confusing interface? Where possible the aim is to empathise with their emotions, as they hold the key to improvement. This is where personas really add value. They breathe life into data, allowing us to see the journey through their eyes and we can use this empathy lens to develop a user-centric approach, guiding design decisions and improvement.
Step 5: Diagnose the roadblocks
No journey is smooth sailing. This is where we use the outputs of the previous stage to identify the friction points where your customers encounter obstacles – a clunky checkout process, unhelpful customer service, or confusing product descriptions. These pain points are also the opportunities for transformation, so it’s important to be clear on the steps needed to be resolved.
Step 6: Refine and redesign
Armed with your map and insights, it's now time to think about how the journey can be redesigned. Problem-solve the solutions that address the pain points and enhance the positive experiences. Here we are looking to create a "future state" map that envisions a smoother, more enjoyable journey for your customers.
Step 7: Share the outputs with stakeholders
Customer journey mapping is not a solo expedition. Share your findings with various departments – marketing, sales, customer service – to foster cross-functional collaboration. There are always useful insights to be gleaned and it decreases the likelihood of significant redesign exercises in the future in the event something fundamental is overlooked. It’s at this stage where you’ll also likely need to identify which remedial steps will need to be prioritised. There will likely be costs for changes to websites, new tools may need to be implemented or teams restructured so these will need to be scoped for complexity and where appropriate, taken forward into your change/delivery mechanism.
Step 8: Refine the map for continued success
The journey doesn't end with creating the map. Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) related to customer satisfaction, retention, and engagement metrics are vital to ensure continued success. This is where a Customer Data Experience Platform begins to show its worth. Analyse the data to see if the redesigned journey is delivering the desired outcomes. Be prepared to adapt and iterate, constantly improving the map based on customer feedback and evolving needs.
What benefits should you expect to see?
The benefits of customer journey mapping are manifold, empowering businesses to achieve a range of outcomes:
Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: By understanding customer pain points and expectations, businesses can tailor their offerings and interactions to deliver a seamless and satisfying experience.
Boosted Customer Loyalty: Positive customer experiences foster lasting relationships, transforming one-time buyers into loyal advocates who contribute to long-term growth.
Reduced Customer Churn: Identifying and addressing friction points early on can prevent customers from switching to competitors, minimising churn and maximising customer lifetime value.
Data-Driven Decision-Making: Customer journey maps provide a wealth of data that can inform strategic decisions across various departments, from marketing and sales to product development and customer service. This also provides a valuable reference point for those industries seeking to evidence compliance with regulatory obligations such as Consumer Duty.
Improved Collaboration and Alignment: The process of creating and analysing customer journey maps encourages cross-functional collaboration, breaking down silos and aligning teams towards a common goal of exceptional customer experiences.
The road to developing a customer journey framework for your organisation can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it. Journey maps aren't just about fixing what's broken; they're also about unlocking growth opportunities. By identifying unmet needs and untapped potential, you can spark creative ideas for new products, services, and ultimately a roadmap for greater profitability.
3 things to keep in mind for Customer Journey Mapping
Start small and keep it simple. You’ll have plenty of scope later to refine your original journeys with your preferred approach and key learnings
There are a myriad of free tools and resources out there that can guide you – use them
Make sure any journey mapping exercise is a cross-functional initiative – buy-in for any changes or recommendations is much easier to get up front and you’ll significantly decrease the amount of redesign.
If you would like to talk about how We3 Partners can help you with Customer Journey Mapping – please get in touch with us.
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