Customer Journey Map (Part 1)- get to know (and understand!) the customer's shopping path.

Just like in life you don't cover a distance and you don't move from point A to point B in the blink of an eye after snapping your fingers, so customers don't immediately decide to buy a given product or use a service. Everything is based on the road, a kind of journey. What the brand should care about is that the shopping path the customer travels provides them with many positive and pleasant experiences. This is exactly what Customer Journey is for, i.e. recreating and analyzing customer interactions and behavior at points of contact with the brand. The best tool to list and map needs, challenges, experiences and problems is the Customer Journey Map. This is the first step to taking care of the shopping "tourist" and successfully leading him to the goal, which is a satisfying purchase.

What is Customer Journey?

Customer Journey is a list of all the steps that a customer takes when contacting a brand, product or service. By recreating the customer's shopping path, we can see and analyze interactions at all points of contact with the brand. Why is it worth developing a Customer Journey? By looking at the user's experience, we identify areas that require refinement, learn about real needs and emotions, and verify the original assumptions. We get feedback on the brand and whether it meets the needs of the target group. This allows us to improve not only sales, but also other processes throughout the organization, including customer service (including after-sales), purely technical solutions, as well as marketing and communication. In this way, in fact, we can step into the shoes of our recipient to see if he is comfortable on the route we have prepared for him. We will then find out what we can do to make this journey even more satisfying for him.

What is difference between Customer Journey and?Customer Experience and?User Journey?

The terms Customer Journey, Customer Experience and User Journey are often used interchangeably. This is not the happiest solution, because there are completely different things under them. What are these differences? Customer Journey allows you to analyze all points of contact of your recipient with the brand, enabling better optimization of the shopping path, while Customer Experience is the result of customer experiences when contacting a brand, product or service at each of these points - it is a measure of his satisfaction with these interactions. Working on the Customer Journey allows you to improve the Customer Experience. So what about User Journey? User Journey focuses on user experience strictly in a specific digital channel. While in Customer Journey the focus is on interactions and purchases, in User Journey the most important is the process and analysis of the functionality of a specific digital channel. As you can see, all three areas intertwine in many places and each of them deserves separate attention.

How does Customer Journey Map work?

We decided to recreate our client's shopping path and take care of his journey. How to do it? The Customer Journey Map comes in handy - a tool for defining, arranging and visualizing interactions at specific points of contact between the "tourist" and the brand. Customer Journey Map can have different forms and components depending on the characteristics of the company, product or service. Considering what the purchasing path looks like, this is how the touchpoints in the Customer Journey Map will be shaped, along with the interactions related to them. Focusing on the Customer Journey Map, we focus on three phases of contact with the brand/product/service, i.e. before the purchase (awareness phase, information search and consideration), during the purchase (customer service, next steps and finalizing the transaction) and after the purchase ( both after-sales service and initiation and continued use of the product/service, as well as NPS or other satisfaction survey tools). As you can guess - the contact points examined at different stages will be different for each brand, so only the Customer Journey Map framework template can be universal.

Next Part 2 on Monday...!!