Customer Journey Map – Regardless of our perception about the age-long saying “Customer is King”, it is generally agreed that businesses exist to serve customers. A business without customers is just an association of individuals pitching products to deaf ears.
Customers’ place in a business cannot be overemphasized as they are the only singular factor that is capable of boosting business health or otherwise in the shortest of time.
Knowing the importance of customers to a business’ growth, how can a business increase its customer base and eventually increase sales? One of the proven ways to increase customer base is by creating a Customer Journey Map.
A customer journey map is an illustration that explains the customers’ experience. It does this by identifying customers’ key interactions with the organization. A customer journey map captures the users’ feelings, questions about the products and more importantly, what motivates them to patronize a particular brand. A user’s journey map can appear as an illustration, infographic or diagram.
Regardless of the forms, they exist to teach businesses more about their customers and put the users in the centre of the organization’s strategic thinking.
Why should we Map the Customer Journey?
Not only did the internet increase the ease of doing business for business owners, but it also eased business transactions for buyers. By so doing, it increased customers’ expectations from brands. Nowadays, Customers want a brand that can seamlessly connect with their experiences and make meaningful suggestions.
With a comprehensive customer journey map, you will get real insights about your customers’ wants and the parts of your brand or product that aren’t meeting the customers’ expectations. With these insights in hand, you can improve the quality of your customers’ experience, become more consistent and more importantly, make more sales.
BELOW ARE THE STEPS FOR MAKING AN EFFECTIVE CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP IN 2020
While variances and tweaks are expected (as no two customers are the same), the steps explained below are applicable to most modern-day businesses.
- Identify your buyers: The first major step involved in the successful creation of a journey map is by identifying your buyers. Which strata of society are your customers? What does the demographic report say about them? Can they be given a single persona? These and many more are questions that must be answered before we can successfully classify the buyers.
- Understand your buyer’s goals: Once we’ve successfully classified the buyer’s persona, the next best thing will be to study the buyer’s reason for aligning with the brand and what they hope to achieve by doing so. You can achieve this by identifying the path that visitors (new and existing customers) take on your website. Are they just searching for products or comparing prices?
By observing your customer’s path, you will become better placed to identify all the touchpoints associated with each customer.
- Highlight Buyer touchpoint: How do we highlight customer touchpoint (“any interaction -including encounters where there is no physical interaction – that might alter the way that your customer feels about your product, brand business or service.”)? Judging from the definition, it feels like a daunting task. However, this task of mapping out a customer’s touchpoint can be eased by interviewing customers, walking in their shoes and using Google analytics.
- Identify customer roadblocks: By making sense of the derived data, we can reveal the parts of our business that are currently producing optimal results and the parts that customers view as pain points.
- Prioritize and fix the customer roadblocks: Putting in mind that gaining customers is far more difficult than losing customers, device plans to fix the pain points. The pain points might be as little as a simple tweak or as big as building from scratch. After all, the main objective of your business is to make sales while satisfying customers.
- Embrace flexibility: In the race to having an effective customer journey map, the key is adaptability. You must be on the continuous lookout for improved ways to achieve your goals. Customers evolve and their needs change. Therefore, you should be willing to test for new variables and adapt to new changes as they arise.
Regardless of your stance about the saying “Customer is King”, customers’ influence over businesses cannot be overemphasized in today’s world. To understand customer’s wants and needs, businesses must be willing to see their businesses from the customer’s eye and there is no better way to do that than having a customer journey map. For free consultations about how you can create or update your existing customer journey map, contact us at Lead web Praxis.