Customer Journey Map

Understanding your customers is challenging.

Just when you know their wants and needs, something new comes up.

And when online shoppers abandon their cart, you might ask yourself:

• Why did they spend hours adding products to their cart just to close the tab?

The main reason is that you don’t know your customer’s journey when purchasing your product or service.

So in this post, we will learn about:

• What customer journey map is
• What they include
• How to create one

Let’s dive right in.

What’s a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map visually represents a customer’s experience with a company.

It is used to better understand potential customer’s needs and concerns of their purchase decisions.

Then this information can be used by companies to improve the customer experience, which results in:

• Higher conversion rates
• Improved customer retention

Basically, the customer journey is the interactions of a customer with a company before making a purchase.

Which can include:

• A customer becoming aware of a brand on social media
• Receiving an email after a purchase

This experience is specific to the customers and to understand your customer’s journey it’s best to ask them.

Why a journey map is important

A customer’s experience with a company is as important as the company’s products. 

From becoming aware of a product to the purchase, customers go through the buyer’s journey.

On this journey:

• customers see ads
• Speak to customer service reps
• Try to check out

All these stops on their journey influence their actions.

So understanding the importance of these customer interactions can help a business plan towards closing a sale.

But, it’s better to visualise this journey on paper so you can refer back to this resource.

The Customer Journey Map Process

Customer journey mapping is creating a customer journey map to visually represent a company’s customer experience.

It’s a customer’s interaction experience with a business in the form of a visual map.

And understanding this helps you see effective and efficient touchpoints where you can better interact with your customers.

From the first to last touchpoint, you can see:

• If customers reach their goals
• If they don’t, why? and how can they?

Customer journeys are not in straight lines

The customer journey can’t be in a straight line from A to B because buyers take different journeys.

So mapping the customer’s journey is hard to visualise.

And businesses can represent their customers journey using:

• Post-it notes on a wall
• Excel Spreadsheets
• Infographics

What’s most important is that the map is understood by those using it.

But before creating a customer journey map, you need data from customers and prospects.

Just remember creating a customer journey map might take long but it’s very valuable.

What’s in a customer journey map?

• Buying
• Actions
• Emotions
• Pain Points
• Solutions

Buying

A customer journey map has milestones along the customer journey.

So start by creating the path your business wants customers to reach a goal.

Use buying process stages listed horizontally.

Actions

Now detail what your customer does at each buying process stage:

• Being in the awareness stage
• Speaking to friends and family about their needs and how to satisfy them
• Taking a demo on your website
• Using cash or a debit card to make their purchase

At this stage, go through different ways your customers might reach the goal.

Emotions

Your customers are trying to solve a problem so they are feeling emotions like:

• Relief
• Happiness
• Excitement
• Worry

And long or complicated buying processes bring out these emotions at every stage. 

So add emotions in your customer journey map to help avoid negative emotions, keeping negative opinions away from your brand.

Pain Points

Pain points cause negative emotion.

So add pain points to your customer journey map to help find the stage your customers experience negative emotions and deduce them.

Solutions

Find solutions to pain points and potential ways to improve your buying process.

This helps customers experience less pain points and stay in a positive mood about your business.

What are touchpoints in a customer journey map?

Customer journey map touchpoints are where customers have a chance to make opinions about your business.

These points are where your business is in direct contact with potential or existing customers:

• A display ad
• An interaction with an employee
• A 404 error
• A Google review

Your brand is more than your website and marketing materials, so think about all the different types of touchpoints in your customer journey map.

Because this is where you will find opportunities to improve your buying journey.

Creating a Customer Journey Map?

• Set mapping objectives
• Profile personas and define their goals
• Highlight target customer personas
• List all touchpoints
• Decide on current resources and ones you need
• Be the customer, take the journey
• Make changes

Set mapping objectives

Before creating your map, ask yourself why you’re making one:

• What are the goals for this map?
• Who is it about?
• What experience is it about?

Then use this information to create a buyer persona based on the demographics and psychographics of your average customer.

Doing so helps you focus your customer journey map towards it.

Profile personas and define their goals

Next, do research and get valuable customer feedback with questionnaires and user testing.

And remember to only reach out to existing customers or prospects.

Because you want feedback from people who are:

• Interested in purchasing your products and services
• Who have interacted with your company before or plan to

A few examples of good questions to ask include:

• How did you hear about our company?
• What attracted you to our website?
• What problems are you trying to solve?
• How do you spend on our website?
• Have you ever purchased from us? If yes, what made you purchase it?
• Have you been on our website intending to purchase but haven’t? If yes, why?
• Is our website easy or hard to navigate? From 1 to 10
• Have you ever needed customer support? If yes, was it helpful or not? From 1 to 10
• What additional support do you need to make your process easier?

Highlight target customer personas

After learning about the customer personas interacting with your business, focus on one or two.

A customer journey map is the experience of one customer on a specific path with your company.

So grouping multiple personas in one journey, means your map won’t reflect your customers’ experience.

So when creating your first map, pick a common customer persona and their route with your business for the first time.

Remember, you can go back to the ones left out and create a new map specifically for them.

List all touchpoints

Touchpoints are places on your website where customers interact with you. 

From your research, list out all the touchpoints customers and prospects use and the ones they should be using.

Doing so when creating a customer journey map tells you actions taken by your customers.

For example, customers using less touchpoints than expected could mean they are leaving your website.

Or if they are using more than expected, could mean your website is complicated and has too many steps to the end goal.

So if you understand the touchpoints, you understand the ease and objectives of customer journeys.

Other places your customer can come across you online includes:

• Social channels
• Paid ads
• Email marketing
• Third-party review sites or mentions

So search your brand on Google to see where you’re mentioned, then verify this on Google Analytics to see where your traffic is from.

Then go down your list of common touchpoints and you will notice an action linked to it.

Touchpoints to think about when create your journey map include:

Customer Actions

List the actions your customers take when interacting with your brand like:

• A Google search for your keywords
• Clicking an email from you

This will show you if customers are taking too many actions to reach their goals.

So reduce the steps a customer takes for higher conversion rates.

Customer Emotions & Motivations

The action of your customer is based on an emotion.

And customer’s emotions change depending on where they are in their journey.

Emotions behind your customer’s actions are because of a pain point or a problem.

This information helps you present the right content at the right time for a smooth emotional customer journey with your brand.

Customer Obstacles & Pain Points

You need to know the roadblocks stopping your customer from taking action like:

• Cost

For example, your customer abandoning their cart because of high shipping rates.

So highlighting this in your customer journey can help you solve it with a FAQ page answering shipping cost questions.

Decide your current resources and ones you need

Your customer journey map goes over every part of your business.

Meaning everything that creates the customer experience.

So note the resources you have and the ones you need to improve the customer’s journey.

For example, your map shows your customer service team doesn’t have the tools to follow up with customers after a call.

Then using your map to advise management to get a customer service tool to solve this.

And including this new tool in your map, show how it impacts your business and brings value.

Making it easier to convince decision-makers to approve investments in proposals.

Be the customer, take the journey

After designing your map, it’s important to analyse the results.

With your finished map you will have the answers for:

• The number of people accessing your website but leaving before purchasing
• How to better support customers

Analysing the results shows where customer needs must be met.

Doing so builds a valuable experience and shows people your company can solve their problems.

But remember mapping the customer journey is all theory until you do the practical yourself.

So follow each personas journey through:

• Social media
• Reading emails
• Searching online

Make changes

Your data analysis will tell what you want from your website.

Use it to make changes to your website to reach these goals, like:

• Making distinct call-to-action links
• Writing longer descriptions about each products clear purpose

These changes will be effective because they solve customers’ listed pain points.

So don’t make changes hoping they will improve customer experiences, be certain they will.

Because with your visualised customer journey map, those needs and pain points will always be addressed.

How often should customer journey maps be updated?

Constantly improve your map by reviewing it every month or quarter to find gaps and opportunities in your customer journey.

Also use data analytics with customer feedback to find roadblocks.

Remember to keep stakeholders involved by sharing visualised maps on Google Sheets.

And regular meetings, either quarterly or yearly, also help to analyse how new products or offers might change the customer journey.

Customer Journey Map Types

Each of these customer journey maps have their individual benefits.

So this one you choose will depend on your purpose for the map.

Current State

For visualising what customers go through with your company, from their:

• Actions
• Thoughts
• Emotions

And this map type is used for always improving the customer journey.

Day in the Life

For visualising what customers experience in their daily activities, including your company or not, from their:

• Actions
• Thoughts
• Emotions

Going deeper into customers’ lives and their pain points in real life.

And this map type is used for meeting unfulfilled customer needs before they know they exist.

Also when developing new market strategies.

Future State

For visualising what customers will experience in future interactions with your company, from their:

• Actions
• Thoughts
• Emotions

Customers’ current experience will tell you clearly where your business fits in.

And this map type is used for portraying your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

Service Blueprint

After starting with a simplified version of one of the above mentioned maps.

Then, adding factors influencing that experience, like:

• People
• Policies
• Technologies
• Processes

And this map type is used for finding:

• The main causes of customer journeys
• The steps towards future customer journeys

Best Practices of Customer Journey Maps 

• Set journey map goals
• Survey customers about their buying journey
• Ask customer service reps about frequent questions
• Create journey maps for buyer personas
• Review and update each map after product releases
• Make the map accessible to your team

Set journey map goals

Decide if you need the customer journey map to improve the buying experience or launch a new product.

Knowing this will help you stay focussed on these project goals.

Survey customers about their buying journey

Your information on customer experience and what customers actually experience can be different.

So ask customers about their experience with your company to know more about the customer’s journey.

Ask customer service reps about frequent questions

Customers aren’t always aware of their pain points, just when something isn’t working.

This is where customer service reps can fill in the gaps and convert these pain points into business.

Then you and your team can understand them and act.

Create journey maps for buyer personas

Each customer isn’t the same.

But demographics, psychographics and how long someone has been a customer can help  when deciding:

• How they interacts with your business
• Make purchasing decisions

With this information you can group them into buyer personas and create a customer journey map for each.

Review and update each map after product releases

When your product or service changes, the customer’s buying process does too. 

Even adding additional fields to a lead form can lead to roadblocks for customers.

So monitor customer journey maps before and after making changes.

Make the map accessible to your team

Customer journey maps aren’t valuable to you alone.

Your journey map can bring your team together to give feedback.

And making your map accessible to your team keeps them focussed on the customer.

Customer Journey Mapping Benefits

Business is all about helping the customer to:

• Solve their problems
• Achieve long-term success with your product or service

And customer journey mapping is one step closer to that with benefits that include:

Inbound refocus of your company

Don’t find customers using outbound marketing, have customers discover you with inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing involves:

• Poorly targeting uninterested audiences
• Interrupting them from their daily lives

It’s costly, inefficient and annoys customers and prospects, chasing them away.

Inbound marketing involves:

• Creating useful and interesting content that your customers are searching for

It gets their attention first without sales being the main focus.

And mapping out the customer journey helps you understand what your customers:

• Find interesting and helpful about your company and website
• What is turning them away

Then using this information you can create content that attracts and retains them.

Create a new target customers

Not understanding the customer journey well, means not knowing your customers demographics and psychographics.

And you will waste time and money repeatedly targeting a broad audience compared to those interested in your products, services and content.

So to get an idea of your typical customer, you need to:

• Researching their needs and pain points
• Map out their journey

Then you can use this information to target that specific audience.

Implement a proactive customer service

A customer journey map is about the customer’s experience.

You see where people experience highs and situations where they experience lows.

This information allows you to plan your customer service strategy ahead of time to improve your brand’s value.

Using this strategy on your customer service makes your brand more reliable to customers.

For example, holidays are busier for customer service reps so send messages about new holiday hours to customers.

And about additional support available if reps are busy and actions to take for urgent problems.

This way customers know why they are on hold longer or won’t call outside new working hours.

Alternatives like chatbots or a knowledge base can be set up for finding faster solutions.

Improve customer retention rate

Seeing a full view of the customer journey helps you pick areas that need improving.

This helps customers experience less pain points and helps you retain more customers.

Customer journey mapping can even spot when customers are ready to leave your brand.

So logging behaviour patterns and actions of these customers can help you take action beforehand.

Create a customer-focused company

As companies grow, keeping all the departments customer-focused gets harder.

Unlike customer-focused support teams, others have sales and marketing goals not focused on what customers want.

But a customer journey map can be shared with your whole company.

They detail each step of the customer journey is valuable to marketing, sales and service.

Conclusion

Understanding your customer’s experience with your business, helps better cater to them at every stage of their journey.

Factors that influence this journey including:

• Customer pain points
• Emotions
• Your company’s touchpoints and processes

A customer journey map will help you visualise this information when:

• Optimising your journey for the customer
• Finding new business opportunity to serve customer’s unfulfilled needs

Now it’s over to you.

Tell me the steps you take when making a journey map for your customers?

Let me know in the comment section below.