When you decide to learn about UX, one effective skill is making a customer journey map. This map shows the customer’s feelings during the use of a product or service. It might seem difficult at the initial stage, but don’t worry! In this blog, we mentioned 7 easy steps that help you to make an effective and clear customer journey.
According to the latest research, any company that creates a nice and helpful experience for their customers can get more loyal buyers and earn more money and fame. In this developing age, many organizations want to find new strategies to fulfill their customer requirements and keep them coming back.
Customer maps are a useful strategy that helps you track whether a customer likes your brand or not. It also assists in finding that your company fulfills the customer needs and what they want.
So keep on reading this guide to know about the 7 effective steps to make your first customer journey map.
What is the customer journey?
A customer journey is all the possible steps that a buyer takes especially when they interact with your brand before achieving a goal, such as buying something.
Making an effective customer journey helps your brand stand out in this competitive world and highlights the customers you care about. When a customer gets satisfied with your brand, they feel happy and like to buy again.
Understanding your customers will assist you in providing them with a great experience every time they visit your store. One of the easiest ways to do this is to make customer journey maps. These maps contain all the essential information about your customers and assist you in seeing what they want and how to improve their experience.
What is a customer journey map?
Customer journey maps outline the various steps or actions a customer takes in interacting with a business or website. They allow businesses to identify different areas that may cause problems in order to enhance the customer’s experience.
Customer journey maps typically contain an illustration or visuals, along with a few keywords capturing the essence of a customer’s feelings and actions in making their purchasing decision. The illustrative summary is based on research about various customer types and their behaviors.
The best maps are narrative in style so that they can portray the story of the experience of the customer. They tell this through images and a few words if necessary, so it is easily conveyed to the business.
Customer journey mapping also captures the “touchpoints” or moments the customer interacts with the business. Examples of touchpoints are searching for a product, researching, purchasing the product, waiting for delivery, or returning it. Each touchpoint was good, bad, or acceptable to the customer.
Creating a customer journey map typically involves facts, customer feedback, and some creative process. Every journey will be unique because every business and customer group is different.
The core of a customer journey map
Buyer personas are composed of individuals that represent various buyer groups. Customers’ feedback and actual data serve as their foundation. Typically, a project creates three to seven of these identities. Everyone needs a personalized customer journey map.
What an overall customer experience while utilizing your product or service is depicted in a customer journey map. It enables you to see what is simple and what is complex. In this manner, you may improve and simplify the consumer experience.
Each persona and journey map provides a broad understanding of the customer’s perspective, although they are not accurate.
7 steps to map the customer journey
Below we have mentioned the 7 steps to map the customer journey. Following these points enables you to create an effective customer journey map. Let’s start!
1. Set clear and effective goals
Before you start to make the customer journey map, it is essential to know the goals of you and your team. Smartly think about the facts that you want to find out and how you will benefit from them. Ask yourself what you want to learn from this work. Setting clear goals ensures that your work will be useful in the future and that you remain focused. This also saves your time as well as effort.
2. Collect data and customer feedback
At this stage you should know how the customer uses your brand and what they feel. Getting familiar with the customer’s feelings helps you stay focused. Walk through the journey yourself to see what customers go through. The important step to follow is to ask real customers for their thoughts and add this to your map. There are many ways to highlight customers feelings. One of the ways is to write down quotes from reviews and interviews. You can also add numbers from surveys, use emojis, pictures or colors to express a customer’s feeling at each step. This makes your map effective and helpful.
3. Define stages and goals for each
A customer journey map illustrates the journey a buyer goes through when interacting with a business. It typically consists of four sections:
Awareness: The customer is aware that they have an issue and initially hears about your product or company. This is when they begin seeking solutions and finding you.
Consideration: The customer examines what you have carefully. They visit your site, find product information, prices, reviews, and compare you with your competitors.
Decision: The customer makes a purchase. This involves ordering online, going to a store, or inquiring about payment and shipping.
Retention: Once they have purchased, the customer considers their experience. Good service, returns, and rewards lead to repeat business.
These phases can shift depending on what you want to discover. You might map out how customers use your product throughout the day or how they find assistance if they have an issue. This assists companies in knowing and enhancing how customers feel and behave at every step.
4. Identifying all touchpoints
Now that you have the steps in your customer’s path, you can list all the times your customer interacts with your brand in each step.
A touchpoint is any point at which your customer encounters your brand. This is when they come to your website, look at an ad, read a review, purchase your product or service, or speak to customer support.
Consider all the ways your customers can be exposed to your brand. Note down what they do at every touchpoint. Be as imaginative as possible and list out all the possibilities! A friend recommending your brand or receiving an email confirmation are touchpoints too.
By putting them down, you know how customers interact with your brand and how you can refine their experience.
5. Visualizing the journey
Visualizing the journey means making a clear picture of all the moments when a customer meets your brand first time. It highlights the path that customers prefer to follow from start to end.
List all of the meeting points for each kind of customer in the order that they occur. Make a timeline with these points. Include locations where clients may select different options based on their choices.
You can use different colors or icons to highlight if the experience at each point is better, moderate or bad. This way you can easily find out which part needs improvement.
6. Find out points of friction and pain points
When you organize the information gleaned from customer input, it is easier to see where customers might encounter difficulties.
Look for areas of frustration or pain points for the customers. Are there places that are confusing to navigate or difficult to progress through?
Keep track of when pain points arise, what causes them, how customers react to those points, and which of your company’s groups are involved. You may find there is more than one area of pain in the customer experience.
As you examine the customer experience, concentrate on the pain points that are the largest or most recurring, and will result in an improved customer journey if resolved.
Focusing on the biggest customer pain points will help to create a smoother experience for customers that is much more enjoyable.
7. Determine areas that need improvements
You can make your customer’s experience better by finding out that part of their journey that needs improvement. Once you identify the areas that need fixing, apply a solution to solve each problem. This is the important part of your map. After applying the solution, you can check the customer’s journey again.
If you failed to find a solution to the problem, then try to make a new map of how you want the customer journey to be. Now compare with real journey map. Comparing 2 maps helps you to better understand what your customers want.
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