T

he most exciting opportunity for you to leverage this year is the “customer journey.” You might have heard plenty of talk around the customer journey map. Well, you aren’t alone. You might have just set the first foot to your small business. But is your customer aware of your brand and trust you enough for a purchase? As a matter of fact, driving the customer journey for your brand is really hard to get. Similarly, the words, ‘customer journey map’, ‘customer experience’, and ‘customer satisfaction’ that drives value also don’t happen by accident. 

In order to achieve this, you need to create a defined process that includes these stages: 

  • Awareness – This is your first impression you create for your customers. In order to ensure that you are “first to be found”, the secret is to draw your customer attention. 
  • Education – Once you are successful in grabbing your prospects’ attention, educate them about your solution, your story, and how effective it is to resolve their problems. 
  • Sample – Let your prospects sample your business through free giveaways, demonstration, eBooks, downloadable documents, and galleries. Tell them how your solution will work for them. Indeed, positive interactions will fetch real results in the long run. 
  • Purchase and refer – While educating the prospects are still on the onus, once the customer says “yes” to your campaign, it is a valuable touchpoint! In due time, encourage your customers to spread the word of mouth through referrals from everyday interactions. 

But what exactly is the customer journey? 

To put it simply, a customer journey is a lifecycle that helps you understand how your customer travels across each touchpoint through the sales process. That is to say, you need to map it all- the touchpoints, channels and each customer interaction with the brand. Not only that. The more you understand your customer journey, the faster you can pinpoint your potential prospect and tailor your business to their needs. In fact, knowing the customer journey can help you address the evolving relationship between you and your clients. Remember: If you make your customer feel like a king, it’s nothing but your customer journey strategy, the biggest growth factor.  

For many, the customer journey is a major competitive differentiator that is pushing most of the organizations to break the silos. It’s no surprise that nearly 60% of the customers are willing to pay more for better customer experience. While 51% of legacy business is struggling to break out of a siloed business structure, 28% of businesses have been successfully digitized. Indeed, true customer experience scores high throughout the customer journey in a business relationship. 

Next, the question is… 

How will you shape the customer experience for your brand? 

Whether it takes weeks, months, a year or a lifetime to build customer relationships, knowing the length of the journey across customer touchpoints is a vantage point. This is where you need the customer journey mapping exercises that charts the users’ path. To put it simply, the customer journey map measures the customer state of mind that outlines all the actions and emotions in a customer’s daily life. This combines two powerful segments: storytelling and visualization. Not only will this help you to identify opportunities, but also provide a better customer experience going forward. 

Take a quick look at these top 8 tips to develop your first customer journey map that can prepare you prior to the beginning.     

8 Tips for developing a dynamic prospects journey map  

1. Define your brand goals to create a customer journey map  

It is important to realize that getting into the minds of your audience is a challenge. Remember. Your customer is a fictitious persona, wherein you need to outline every aspect of his/her journey within the map. So, before you dive in creating a customer journey map, ask yourself: 

  • What brand objectives you want to achieve through this mapping exercise? 
  • Who are the target audiences? 
  • Is there any organizational need that you seek to achieve? 

2. Research your customer type 

The more you research your customers, the easier it is to figure out the buyer’s persona. First, narrow your focus to one customer type. Second, figure out the path that helps you to track user experience throughout the journey with your company. 

3. Find out touchpoints and channels 

Next, list out all the touchpoints on your website based on customer interactions. This will give you an insight into the number of touchpoints they are currently using or likely to use in the future. Besides, you can also ascertain the steps to get to your end goal.   

4. Build an empathy map to visualize customer experience 

What’s stopping your customers from taking the desired actions? Identify them. Accordingly, highlight the pain points and obstacles in your customer journey. In the long run, this will help you to mitigate them. For example, an FAQ page that answers common questions about costs can be a great customer tool.     

5. Sketch customer affinity map 

Although you have prepared the empathy map, this is not enough. Still, you need to visualize their actions, thoughts, emotions, and feelings that your customer is going through in real life. Based on that you can group ideas and label your customer type, their experience and what stage he/she is in. 

6. Build customer journey timeline 

Over the course of time, now you can build a timeline map that reflects the customer experience through each touchpoint and channels in a given time frame. By highlighting each interaction about how your customer feels across the journey, you are much closer to improving customer experiences. Henceforth, the customer journey timeline is a continuous work-in-progress.   

7. Try out customer journey yourself 

So, you have designed a nice prospect journey map. But it doesn’t ensure that your work is done. Next, it’s important to analyze the results. Rather, ask yourself these questions: 

  • How many people are clicking my website? 
  • Is my customer abandoning the cart before making a purchase? 
  • How can I improve my customer support? 

By self-evaluating these points, you can find solutions to customers’ problems and the challenges in providing valuable customer support and experience. 

8. List out the Dos to improve the prospect journey 

The journey map is of no value unless your data analysis leads to the appropriate changes that you need to make to achieve your goals. List out the big and small changes that correspond to the customer pain points. Then identify the gaps and the opportunities and visualize the customer journey map. Eventually, you can ensure that the prospect’s needs and pain points are duly addressed.     

 

It’s simple, really. It just takes less than a day’s time to shape your customer’s journey. However, translating these insights can help you in removing as many pain points as possible! Want to learn more insights on creating customer journey maps?  Let us help you to understand your needs with our journey driven solutions.