Using Customer Experience Mapping in Your Pizza Business

Customer experience (often abbreviated as CX) is the customer’s overall perception of their experience with your pizza business. It is the sum of every interaction they have with your business, from when they first find out you exist to when they finish off the last slice of pizza in the box to when they share their experience with others. Everything you do along the way impacts the customer’s final perception of your business and whether they will come back or not. That’s why providing a great customer experience is the key to success.

The good thing is that you don’t have to guess about the customer experience—you can map it out! This article will explain customer experience mapping and get you started creating your first customer experience map.

What Is Customer Experience Mapping?

Customer experience mapping is a way of documenting every aspect of the customer experience from the customer’s point of view. It will show you the journey customers take when interacting with your pizza restaurant, and you can even use it to understand what customers are doing, thinking, and feeling at every point.?

Customer experience mapping will give you a holistic view of how your customers experience and interact with your business. Even better, customer experience mapping will help you identify pain points, difficulties, challenges, and friction along the way so you can find opportunities to improve the experience.

Customer experience mapping is sometimes referred to as the customer journey or customer touchpoints. Regardless of what you call it, the function and purpose of the map are the same—to understand how the customer interacts with your brand so you can provide a stellar experience every step of the way.?

Customer Experience Mapping Elements

There are many elements in customer experience mapping. Here are some of the features we recommend you include in your map.

Customer Persona

Before you begin your customer experience mapping, it’s helpful to think about?whose journey you are mapping.?Customer or buyer personas?are fictional representations of your ideal customers that you create with data and research. Understanding customer personas will help you map the customer experience for that specific customer persona.?

Yes, that means you may have more than one map! You may have maps for different customers (for example, college students versus a family with kids) because the journey may differ. You may also have maps for different situations (dine-in versus carry-out versus delivery). As you will see below, the stages may be similar across your customer personas, but the actions, thoughts, and feelings may differ across personas or situations.?

Stages

With a particular customer persona in mind, customer experience mapping begins with writing out the stages representing the customer’s distinct steps as they do business with you. For example, a pizza business may map out the following stages that depict a typical customer journey:

• Awareness:?First, the customer needs to know that your pizza restaurant exists! How do they find you? Where does their initial awareness come from?
• Contact:?Next, they have to do something to make contact with you, so you know they exist too. This could mean picking up the phone to place an order. It could mean doing a Google search to find your physical address. It could mean sending a message on Facebook to ask if you have a certain item on your menu.
• Ordering:?Next, the contact has decided to do business with you. What they order is dictated by what is on your menu, and how they order is dictated by the ordering methods you allow (phone, in person, online, app, etc.).
• Payment:?Payment may happen immediately after ordering or after they finish the meal, or when the pizza is delivered. It is best to look at it as a distinct stage in your customer experience mapping exercise.
• Waiting:?Whether the customer ordered delivery and is waiting at home, or they are in your restaurant waiting in a booth, the waiting time is an important part of the customer experience.
• Receiving:?At this point, the customer will receive their order, whether the pizza is brought to their table or delivered to their front door. Receiving has to do with that interaction and their initial impression when they look at the food, including its packaging and presentation.
• Consuming:?Perhaps the most important part of the customer experience is when the customer tastes what they ordered. Does it meet expectations? Are they satisfied with the purchase?
• Follow-Up:?While you could break this into multiple stages, we summarize it here as ‘follow-up.’ What does the customer do next? Do they share their experience with others? Write a review? Order again from your pizza restaurant next week?

This outline gives you an idea of what stages you may want to include in your customer experience map. Still, it’s important to think about the complete journey from the point of view of your selected customer persona and add (or delete) stages as necessary.

Touchpoints

Next, for each stage you’ve outlined, you’ll want to detail the exact?touchpoints?that your business has with the customer. A touchpoint is any moment that the customer interacts with your brand.

In the Awareness stage, a touchpoint could be your website, a Facebook ad, or a direct mail flyer that lets them know you exist.

In the Ordering phase, a touchpoint may be an employee who answers the phone or their interaction with your online ordering system.?

As you see, ‘interacting with your brand’ could mean something physical, something digital, or a personal interaction.

Action

For each stage, you can then detail the main action that the customer is taking. What are they doing at that stage? What is their goal? Although it may seem clear based on the stages you’ve created, it’s important to think about it more specifically from the customers’ point of view.?

For example, in the Awareness stage, is the customer looking for the closest place to order a pizza, or are they trying to find the pizza business with the best reviews? Is this person going to Google, Facebook, or a particular review site? Are they asking their friends? Digging into what the customer is doing at every stage and their goal can be extremely helpful.

Thoughts and Feelings

Digging in deeper, you can review each stage and begin to explore what the customer is thinking and feeling. Are they satisfied with the experience? Delighted? Annoyed? Put yourself in their shoes, or even better – ask them, so you understand their thoughts and feelings at every stage.

For example, in the Waiting stage, how does the customer feel about the amount of time they must wait for their order? If they are waiting in your restaurant, are the accommodations comfortable, and are they satisfied with the service from the wait staff?

Friction

As you’ve outlined your customers’ stages, touchpoints, actions, thoughts, and feelings, you may identify problems, pain points, or challenges with each stage. If the customer is experiencing any friction, write it down. This will be valuable information as you complete the next and final step of your customer experience mapping.

For example, in the Contact stage, customers may find it frustrating when they get a busy signal or are put on hold for long periods. This is important to know about because you can easily solve it by switching to a?cloud phone system with unlimited lines.?

Or in the Receiving stage, customers may not be happy with the presentation of the pizza when they open the box. This could lead you to explore if the pizzas are being prepared properly, if the packaging is adequate, or if they are being damaged in the delivery.?

Changes

A final step in customer experience mapping is to review the information you have gathered for each stage to determine what is working well and what could be improved. Look at each stage and think, “What could I change here to improve the customer experience?” Alternatively, you may ask customers what they feel about each particular stage and get their suggestions on how you can improve.

Using Customer Experience Mapping

Customer experience mapping is a great tool to discover how your customers engage with your business at every step of their journey. By reviewing each stage, you’ll be able to improve the experience of doing business with you and raise customer satisfaction. Customer experience mapping is an ideal way to gather information on your business. Give it a try, and you will benefit from the insights you gather.

To learn more about the author, visit https://clarityvoice.com/