A look at your customer’s journey

Have you walked a mile in your customer’s shoes? Understanding your customer’s journey can be the difference between converting and not-converting; a visitor and a customer. But, how do you leverage your personas and customer experience data to truly empathize with the consumer?

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping?is a visual representation of the customer journey from the perspective of your customer. While this sounds straightforward, few companies can visualize the steps and actions a customer is taking and tell that story to their whole team, not just the marketing department. Journey maps enable your team to have a better understanding of customer expectations and current experience, as well as their optimal experience.

When wielded, customer journey maps are true game changers. In fact, according to a recent study, 85% of professionals who have used customer journey maps found that they result in increased customer satisfaction, fewer complaints, lower churn, and a higher NPS (Net Promoter Score).

How to Create Effective Customer Journey Maps

?Define the stages of your Customer’s Journey. The first step is always: what drove my customer to me in the first place? What problem were they looking to solve? What contract needs renewal?

With discovery as a launchpad, your customer journey map should continue on to marry the external and internal view (the steps your customer actually takes and the marketing/sales funnel).

Depending on how you sell, your customer journey may have different focus areas. You may even find that different products have varied customer journeys. For example, if most of your business is repeat business, you may have more stages focused on post-purchase stages like usage, renewal, and upgrade; but, if you sell products, you might focus on the trigger/awareness (discovery) category or trial/evaluation category. Decide what is best for your personas:

1. Trigger?– What was the triggering event in the personas work or life that caused them to begin searching for solutions???
2. Awareness?– How a persona comes to be aware of a brand, product or service that will help with their opportunity. Are they hearing about you through referrals or their own search efforts? Conferences and tech publications? Where do your personas go to help solve their problem??
3. Consideration?– How a persona looks at options and learn more about your product and solution to consider if it is a viable solution to their need. What steps does your persona take to learn more about your products or solutions? What information do they need to answer their questions??
4. Evaluating?– How the persona evaluates products and solutions. What steps do they take, what information do they need, how do they gather information? This is the stage where you are probably being directly compared to your competitors on key features, functionality, pricing, brand reputation, service, and support, etc. The list will depend on what is important to your persona.
5. Purchase?– How the persona buys. What steps do they take? How easy do you make it???
6. Post-Purchase?– How a persona begins to use your product or service. What steps do they take to onboard, implement your solution and what needs to they have along that part of the journey? What are their needs on-going as a customer and what value must be delivered for them to consider renewing or upgrading???

Understand the needs and behaviors of your Personas, not just your customers. Customers expect personalized experiences, but this is not the focus of a journey mapping exercise. A journey map helps you craft a personalized-feeling experience from a wide array of data and feedback and comprehensive Personas focused on how a customer moves through your funnel.?A customer journey map should span the organization and provide a customer perspective across marketing, sales, product and service that can be used to identify opportunities to create value. This is easier said than done. The challenge often lies in the functional silos in which most organizations operate.?Customers experience your company horizontally, across organizational boundaries, but most companies approach customer interaction on a functional basis.?

?To develop a meaningful customer journey map, these silos must be broken down so that action can be taken.?

1. Define what the persona values at each stage, not just when they see an ad. What is the customer trying to accomplish? What questions are the customer trying to answer at each stage???
2. Define the steps and actions the persona takes at each stage. What are the major activities/ steps the customer takes? What resources do they use? Who do they consult/ who influences them???
3. Highlight actions that are different or unique to this persona.?
4. Understand what the barriers might be from the persona’s perspective. What would prevent your persona from continuing on their journey???

Customer journey maps are living documents based on data and insights.

With the amount of data available to companies today and frequent customer check points for most (social media, email campaigns, text campaigns, etc.), there is no excuse to have an outdated, or worse, non-existent customer journey map.

While there are many CX tools and technologies to help, we suggest starting where you are, using what you have, and doing what you can. Layering technology or waiting for the data to be right impedes or delays the questions your current data can answer. And if you find that your data is lacking, your team can prioritize those areas to evolve to help solve those problems.

?Customer needs change and evolve even faster than your data, so maintaining these journey maps up-to-date helps you stay on top of changing customer dynamics as they happen. According to MyCustomer, the more frequently customer journey maps are updated, the more impact reported by the organization. In fact, they found that?56% of respondents who conducted customer journey mapping every month reported that the impact was ‘extremely positive’. This compares to 37% for those who conduct it every six months and only 22% for those who conduct it annually.?

Understanding Value

Customer journey maps are a great tool to give you a perspective of what steps the customer takes to evaluate, buy, and use your product or service, and their expectations at each stage. The next step is to evaluate how well you are delivering on those needs versus your competitors to identify where your customers are having positive experiences and where there are negative experiences.

If you feel that your team could benefit from Personas or Customer Journey Mapping, feel free to download our template or reach out to any of our team members. You can also check out our other articles on customer experience and personas.

Now, go help your customers Thrive!

For further reading, check out:

The Customer Lens: An Approach to Customer Touchpoint Analysis

Selling Beyond the Buyer's Journey