Customer Journey Maps: Know the Importance and Creation!

The customer journey is the collection of interactions a customer has with a brand. It is a visual representation of customers’ activity, touchpoints, requirements, and perceptions throughout their relationship with the brand.

A map helps this to come in reality for a brand. Let’s check this blog to know the A-Z of Customer Journey Maps.

What is Customer Journey Maps?

A customer journey map gives you more deep insight into the customer profile, so you can go beyond the basic info. While the buyer’s journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase event, the customer journey refers to a buyer’s TOTAL purchasing experience with a specific company.

Difference b/w Customer Journey and Purchaser Journey

The customer journey is more dynamic and filled with emotional aspects like choice, dislikes, needs, cost impact, efforts and time, identity, nostalgia etc. It has a long time range. Whereas the Purchaser journey is a procedural activity which ensures the purchase to become a reality. The time length can be as short as 10 mins or max a few days.?

On a lighter note, you can say that the customer journey is a love story of a couple right from their first interaction. Whereas the purchase journey is the marriage ceremony and ritual that takes place in the end.

Importance of Deploying Customer Journey Maps

1- Increased Customer Experience Value

It always pays to know your customer with much more depth to understand their pulse. What makes them happy, what makes them jittery, what works against their mood, all of this if understood, creates a huge impact in customer experience. The higher the customer experience, the higher is the business outcome.

2- Speedy Business Conversion

Customers can face lots of obstacles during the entire journey with the brand. If these can be projected or anticipated by the brand with the help of customer journey maps, then obstacle neutralization becomes easy and quick. This results in a smooth and faster customer journey.

3- Customer Delight amp; Advocacy

The customer journey does not end at a single purchase. A customer who has got delighted from a purchase event often comes back for more. This ultimately makes them loyal brand advocates, increasing brand footprints.

Audience segmentation and personalized journeys will help create the WOW experience for the customer, eventually leading to customer delight.

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Necessary Ingredients for Customer Journey Maps

There are four pillars to map to build a customer journey plot map. Let’s see them below:

Equal Importance to All the Stages of the Journey

Your map should cover almost each and every stage of the customer journey, from initial awareness till post-purchase advocacy and so on. Don’t limit your focus to just the purchase stages; consider the holistic view.

Capture All Relevant Touchpoints

Identify and capture the most common touchpoints that customers have at each stage of their journey. These touchpoints could be a simple blog, social media feed response, email or reviews.

The 360-Degree Customer Experience

The journey of a customer can go through different emotions with ups and downs. The choices and needs and the opinions might change at different stages and touchpoints. Your map should comprehensively include these modifications.

Dynamic Solutions

Provide relevant solutions customized to each stage and touchpoint. These may not always be a purchase-based solution.

For Ex: an awareness-stage step could be a blog, multimedia post or social media feed? can help customers absorb or understand the topic.?

Stages Of Customer Journey Maps

There are 5 stages in a customer journey. Awareness stage, Consideration stage, Decision stage, Retention stage, Advocacy or Loyalty stage. Let’s understand them:

1- Awareness Stage:

The customer is in the very initial stage of identifying his problem statement which will result in a need. The approach at this stage should be to educate about the problem and its nature via blogs, emails, social media, etc.

2- Consideration Stage

Here the customer now understands that there is a problem for which he needs a solution. He starts searching and comparing for solutions online. This is where you can come up with comparative analysis mail or a lead phone call, to take it further. Customer success stories can also be sent via mail.

3- Decision Stage

Now things are pretty finalized. The customer is about to decide on the solution that fits his requirements. The brand here should facilitate the sales process as smoothly and as fast as possible. Free Demo, Free consultation calls, and Discount codes can help here.

4- Retention Stage

Finally, the deal is done. Now, you start with quick onboarding, instant support & service. If possible have a relationship manager assigned to manage the brand’s interaction, which can also maintain a history of same.

5- Advocacy/Loyalty Stage

This is the reward stage for both the customer and the brand. The customer gets delighted with the product and service, which encourages him to share and advocate the same among his near ones. The brand in turn gets business expansion along with a reputation for good.

Steps to Plot a Customer Journey Maps

Now let’s see the steps taken to develop a customer journey maps:

Step 1: Know your audience and customer persona: Understand and create a common trait based persona for different segments of the audience group. Exemplify with nomenclature if possible.

Step 2: List touchpoints: list all the key touchpoint channels for various stages of customer journey. For eg: Awareness stage will have touchpoints at Social Media, blogs or Digital Ads. Retention might have a complementary product walkthrough or feedback review. Similarly Advocacy will have Testimonials, Loyalty events.?

Step 3: Anticipate and preplan the customer experience at each touchpoint of the map: You need an empathetic approach at this step. Simply putting, you have to define the sentiments, the need, the questions, the obstacles at every touchpoint. Then successively plan engagements as per the above factors.

Conclusion

The customer journey maps not only help you with a better understanding of customers but also create better customer experience and satisfaction.

This helps in your business growth and retention.