Customer Mapping Journey

The customer's experience with your brand is not limited to your product or your service. It starts as soon as the customer identifies their requirement for the product or service and continues through the purchase to customer interactions post purchase. This experience takes them through a multitude of platforms, channels, interactions, and touchpoints. Each of these, thus, affects the customer's experience with your brand. Which brings us to the importance of understanding and optimizing your customer journey.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map or a user journey map is the visual representation of every step that a customer goes through as they identify, evaluate, shortlist, decide, purchase, and avail or utilize the service or product from your brand. The map illustrates the stages of customers journey and your brands corresponding touchpoints throughout the journey. An exhaustive customer journey map is built to showcase the customer discovery stages, their corresponding engagements, teams responsible for each of those engagements as well as the key performance indicators to help improve each stage.

Importance of customer journey mapping

Customer journey maps help identify and evaluate the touchpoints that every customer has with the company and improve upon the same. Whether the customer goes through multiple touchpoints before landing onto the right product or converses with multiple people on the call to book the right appointment, these touchpoints need to be reduced to ensure a better customer experience. But how many engagements before the customer is guided t the right place? What is the duration of engagement at each of these points of interactions? A customer journey map helps you understand just this. Mapping out your customer journey helps:

- Identify customer engagement touchpoints that have room for improvement

- Identify gaps in marketing communications and workflows

- Improve transitions between devices for customers

- Ensure the right data reaches the right person at the right time

- Identify the different entry and exit points for customers

- Helps improve customer experience and loyalty

‍Elements of a customer journey map 

Customer stages: The customer stages are usually depicted through the hierarchy of effects models where the customer's journey is usually broken down into 4 broad stages - Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action. These have been adopted into multiple variations where awareness can be known as knowledge or interest can be known as consideration, although these lead to the same major 4 or 5 stages.

Buyer persona: Another critical component is the buyer persona, which represents the customer group based on their actions, likes, and dislikes. A buyer persona helps the brand predict customer behavior and build a better customer journey for a customized experience.

Touchpoints: These are the points of engagement where the customer interacts with the brand such as the website, the store, the mobile application, customer service desk, etc. Each of these touchpoints also helps identify the team responsible for managing the customer experience at the touchpoint. The customer journey can be visualized with the help of this section as it highlights how many touchpoints the customer has to go through in order to conclude a purchase.This section holds the highest potential of optimization.

Customer experience: This section refers to the emotions that the customer experiences when in that particular stage of the customer journey. It must be noted that the customers' interests and emotions vary with their interactions and mapping the same down helps responsible team members achieve the particular response time and again.

KPI's: Key performance indicators or KPI's form another one of the critical sections of the customer journey map. This section lists down the metrics, goals, and actions that must be achieved to build a successful customer experience. The responsible teams for each section of the journey list their KPIs that help build their respective trackers going forward. KPIs help customer success personnel achieve the right customer experience at each stage allowing them to take whatever measures necessary to achieve the same. This allows the responsible employees the flexibility to find solutions at each stage while maintaining the standard experience of the customer.

These are just some of the critical components of the standard customer journey map. Let's take a look at an example customer journey map to understand the concept better.

Here's a customer journey map for a children's toy store that sells online and offline. The store is a national chain and sports a children's play area that their customers love. Let's take a look at how we can build an exhaustive customer journey map for the business:

First and foremost, you build your customer's buyer persona. For our business, here are a few characteristics that relate to our customers:

- Parents, guardians, and close relatives of kids between the age of 3-14

- Average age of parents between the age of 28-40

- Challenges include providing educational entertainment to their children and allowing them to explore, engage, and interact in a safe environment

- Another personal challenge faced by parents would be maintaining work-life balance

- Jobs include housekeeping, teaching, caring, handling work pressures, etc.

- Factors influencing buying decision would be - special occasions for kids, achievements of kids, or when feeling overwhelmed (looking for a break).

The above buyer persona has been built as an example. Be sure to include as many details as possible for your customer's buyer persona to identify all possible touchpoints throughout the journey.

Moving forward, we now fill in all the details in the map as shown below:

 As you can see, the customer journey map visually represents the experience that your customer goes through as it interacts with your brand. Whether it's a service business or a product business, each of the stages in the buyer journey must have all the right components mapped to it. As in our example, while the website and store experience took center stage, so did the play area offerings. The unique offering sets the brand apart and attracts customers. Managing this service requires on-point appointment management skills. Ensuring the customers experience smooth appointment scheduling with confirmations, reminders, and integrated payments, opt for applications such as Appointo, a simplified appointment management solution. Ensure such technological solutions aid most other customer experiences to bring in standardization and efficiency.