Customer Journey Map (CJM). How to Build in 7 Steps

Customer support is an endless process you can never be perfect at. Preferences are changing, evolving, getting more complicated, and interacting with the market environment. It may even seem that all needs and interests of a customer are considered. And then, at one moment, everything turns upside down.?

Therefore, it is not enough to strive to know what the consumer wants today and what he is likely to want tomorrow. You should also understand and optimize the journey they take to close the deal.?

You will thus cut down the number of customers who get lost on their way and make their journey clear, consistent, and convenient. It is what Customer Journey Map is designed for.?

What Is CJM

Customer Journey Map (CJM) is an essential business tool that helps to visualize customer experience from item search to purchase. It can be a chart, diagram, or infographic — you will find a bunch of mechanisms of visualization and software solutions.?

CJM helps companies to better understand the needs and problems that motivate or hinder existing and potential buyers at every step in the funnel. This approach allows for the optimization of customer service, boost conversion, and retain customers, thus affecting the financial metrics of a company.??

Importance of CJM for business?

Customer journey consists of multiple steps: from lead generation and traffic engagement to the moment a customer has already converted.?

Understanding the sequence and consequences of customer interaction processes allows a business to plan and predict when a customer will decide to buy and why, for example, he will abandon the product already in the process of use. If you let things drift, you risk losing a significant percentage of your audience, both in the engagement and retention phases.

Customer journey is important both at the conversion stage and after it. In the pre-conversion period, it will help to carry out CRO and other measures to improve performance, such as increasing conversions. And while the customer is using the product, the customer journey map helps track customer behavior and the effectiveness of the support team to avoid rejection of the product or service.

It should also be noted that the tools for visualizing the stages are unimaginably numerous. Therefore, it is important to choose those suitable for your niche and tasks, as well as establish a process of data collation and interpretation. Unsettled processes can cause the loss of a valuable customer.?

7 Steps to Customer Journey Map

CJM helps businesses structure and group information about customer interaction with your product in one place and use it to plan marketing activities on attraction, retention, upselling, reactivation and other important activities that directly affect a company's profits and financial stability.?

I’ve outlined 7 steps that will help put this puzzle together.?

Step 1. Set clear goals?

Before creating CJM, ask yourself a question: why and who needs it? Who will directly use this map? What experience serves as a foundation??

Answers to these questions will help you create a customer persona. Accurately formed ICP will show the needs of potential and current customers that should be met to deliver enough value for further interaction with the product.?

Step 2. Learn more about your customers??

Collect information about your current and potential customers. Examine the available historical data and process the analytics data.

There are many valuable sources of information about your customers. Some of them you already have, and some you can collect additionally. You probably already have website analytics to help you understand where users are coming from, what information they are looking for, and at what stage they are leaving the site.

Another useful source of information is social media. Here you can check if your name is mentioned, and if so, in a positive or negative way. You can also track the demographics of your audience, see what content is most popular, etc. The depth of the data depends on a specific social platform.

Feedback in the form of surveys may seem a little outdated, but it's still a valuable tool for gaining insight into your customers' thinking. You might consider emailing the survey to users, offering a small reward in return, for example.?

It's also worth collecting and analyzing metrics. How often are your products or services used? How do people use your product or service? Which products or services are most popular?

Try to collect as much data as possible, because it's the foundation of your map.

Step 3. Form customer persona? ?

The ICP [Ideal Customer Profile] is a collective image that represents your typical customer. It's created based on the data we talked about in the previous step. There can be several segments, but I would recommend staying as focused as possible and not trying to target all of them at once.

The more information you gather, the more detailed buyer persona you'll have. Among the criteria that can be considered are:

• Demographics
• Education
• Hobbies
• Title
• Income range
• Goals/motivation
• Values
• Social circle
• Behavioral patterns, etc.

The more detailed your typical customer is, the more accurate your CJM will be.

Step 4. List out touchpoints?

In order to create an effective customer experience, it is necessary to take into account all key points of user interaction with the product, and vice versa, all possible touchpoints with the customer.?

That is, we need to understand how we can influence and adjust the user experience. This can be interaction on the site, in social networks, through email newsletters, paid advertising, PR mentions, and many other channels of varying degrees of "warmth".

?For each interaction point, you need to identify the actions the customer takes, their emotions and motivation, as well as potential obstacles and pain points that can prevent the customer from moving on to the next step.?

This might look like this:?

• Actions. Everything the customer has done while interacting.
• Emotions and motivation. The emotions that are behind the action and influence the experience at a particular point in the journey.
• Obstacles and pain points. Potential obstacles that can deter a client from moving on to the next point in the interaction.

Based on this, we can build response mechanisms from the product side.?

For example, one of the interaction steps is adding credit card data. What do we do if the customer doesn't add that data and leaves? What can we do to motivate him to come back? For example, we can add an onboarding process and explain why we need it, show that it's safe, or send an email that reminds the user of the incomplete step.?

Let's say a user abandoned a shopping cart in your store and didn't make a purchase. Why might this have happened?

Let’s analyze the data:

1. Perhaps the online store doesn't load this stage well, and there's some bug or inconvenience in the user experience.
2. Maybe there's no convenient mechanism for editing the shopping cart, which makes it easier to abandon the purchase rather than throw out unnecessary items or make changes and pay.
3. Another possibility is that the payment service you use doesn't seem to be secure, and a user doesn't want to enter their card number.
4. It is also possible that the user forgot about the purchase and closed the tab.
5. Or maybe he was shopping in several stores, and your offer didn't seem to be attractive enough in terms of price.

The options are endless!?

Then, depending on the situation identified, you can influence the audience's experience and adjust the user's path:?

1. Check and optimize the loading speed and display quality of the page for different devices and resolutions. If the behavior map shows that the user is trying to click on a non-clickable object or performing other actions that suggest discomfort with the UX - adjust the interface design.
2. Optimize the shopping cart, add automatic calculation of the amount, discounts, the ability to quickly edit the quantity, color, size (or other key parameters).?
3. Add enough security information or easy-to-understand onboarding to help a customer feel at ease with the payment process.
4. Contact a user through reactivation funnel and remarketing, reminding them of their purchase (by saving their cart), and showing the products they've looked at in the ads.
5. Offer special terms of purchase, a promo code for the first order, or other mechanisms that will help him choose you as a seller rather than a competitor.

This is a very local and understandable example, and of course the more complex the product or service, the more reasons, stages, and possible reactions there can be.? The key here is to analyze the information and try to respond to every doubt and discomfort of the user, be proactive. This way you can increase LTV and reduce the amount of lost profit.

Step 5. Determine the resources available and those you may require

Creating a customer map involves almost every aspect of the business, so an inventory of existing resources and those that will be needed to improve the customer experience is necessary.?

For example, when analyzing the map, it may turn out that the team does not have the necessary tools for effective interaction with customers. In this case, it is necessary to allocate an additional budget to implement the necessary services in the workflow.

Adding new resources to the map allows you to predict their impact on the business and determine the value they can bring. This approach allows you to optimize the use of resources and ensure effective management of the customer experience.

Step 6. Take customer journey yourself

Developing a customer journey map is just the beginning. It is equally important to test the path. Often a large percentage of flaws, errors, and logical inconsistencies are identified as early as the internal testing phase.?

Therefore, first of all, it is extremely important to test all the steps and go through the flow yourself. Based on the results, you can identify weaknesses and strengths, growth areas and opportunities for optimization.?

The second step is a limited test on a small cohort. Run campaigns on a limited budget and see how people go about it. Start with small samples, and build up the volume step by step. In the process, you're sure to see what isn't working the way you expected, and what isn't working at all.?

Analyzing the results can show where customers feel their needs are not being fulfilled, and where you are providing a valuable experience and help customers solve their problems.

Step 7. Optimize and improve!

A permanent data analysis provides insight into the changes necessary to be made to the funnel. It would be optimistic to say that this step is a one-time action.?

In fact, it's an ongoing process that needs to be honed, tweaked and improved constantly. It's a huge rat race in which competitors and you will try to provide a more satisfying experience, and customers will make choices every time, weighing the pros and cons. Loyalty isn't enough to be formed, it has to be maintained.

As a rule, when working with CJM, a company covers a certain path in manual or semi-automatic mode, and then consistently finds ways to standardize and automate specific tasks.?

This is how your product will grow into automated funnels, scripts, interaction mechanisms, and so on. As you introduce new tools, you'll also think about seeing all the information in one place, and the issue of analytics and unified dashboards with data will become acute.?

So, step by step, you will come to the most transparent and proactive mechanism of interaction with the client at all stages and will be able to constantly maintain a dialogue with them, optimizing and improving their experience.

Conclusion?

I often hear, "Yes, we know exactly who our audience is," but that confidence usually hides a very superficial view. A salesperson's perspective without a focus on the real value and the real experience a user wants to get.?

You have to understand your customers deeply and fundamentally. Data about what, when, and why a customer acts allows a business to plan things so that interactions at any stage of the journey are predictable and controllable. It's a time-consuming process, but it's worth it. A customer wins because they're getting a better customer experience, and you win because they're willing to pay for it.