The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them preferably in unexpected and helpful ways- Richard Branson
With increasing digital transformation in the past decade, customers have gone a big step from receiving information to empowered decision makers. Customers are heart & soul of any business. Mapping their requirements & preferences can help B2B marketers to promote their products & services. This proportionally improves customer loyalty along with brand visibility. Promoting more customers is a centric way of doing way of business. In the recent covid 19 pandemic has brought tremendous change in the way we do business, thus getting into the minds of business can be little challenging. But once you figured out what they want, buying for trends & preferences can be easily sorted out.
Having ever wondered why customers just close the tab after spending a long time in browsing or adding certain products to their cart. In other words, the customer takes several steps to get from point A to point B when it should take only one. Root analysis will conclude you don’t have a clear understanding of the customer’s journey to purchase your products & services.
What is Customer Journey?
The customer interaction in order to achieve a goal is often referred as customer journey. With the advent of internet & other social media apps today’s customers has a high probability to connect with brands that tricky business. And most importantly, there are many steps involved in gaining awareness via social media platform to receiving thank you mail for the purchase. Though there are many perspectives, the best way to understand the journey of your customers is by asking them what exactly they need.
This blog is all about creating an efficient & a smooth transition of customer journey & how to build an everlasting business relationship.
What is Customer Journey Map?
A visual representation of the process when a prospect or customer undergoes to achieve company goal is referred as Customer Journey Map. The ultimate aim of the customer journey map may differ from company to company. It may be making purchases, signing up for a newsletter, loyalty program or all. With this detailed customer journey map you’ll get a better understanding of what factors can be motivating for customers to achieve the your business goals.
Here key take away is not understanding of customer journey along. The best way is to visualize this entire complicated journey through the diagram. This paves way to design an efficient customer journey map.
Understanding Customer Journey Mapping:
Visualizing & mapping out the actions taken by customers while interacting with a business in order to achieve business goal is termed as customer journey mapping. In simple term combining comprehensive visual treat that describes a typical customer experience with your business. By understanding this relationship, you can create a more effective process for customer journey.
Customer journey is not always linear journey, it may be a multi-channel journey. This makes customer journey mapping difficult to accurately predict & visualize. Hence savvy business leaders use varieties of methods to represent the customer journey from excel spreadsheet to PowerPoint. For any customer journey mapping, you need to collect data from your customer & prospects as a first & foremost step. This process may be expensive, but it is worth investing.
A customer journey mapping is a significant milestone in the customer journey. With well research path draft your business intends for a customer to reach your goals. This is the blog we will be discussing about factors that are included in the customer journey map. They are
- The Buying process
- User Actions
- Emotions
- Pain Points
- Solutions
These are the elements of customer journey that describes each stage in the buying process. These elements provide various potential ways to achieve the goal. If a customer can form an opinion of your business then it is often referred as touchpoint in the customer journey. Touch point comes into place when business, then comes in direct contact with potential or existing customers. There are different kinds of touch points that help to uncover the journey of opportunities revolve around the buying journey.
Steps involved in creating a Customer Journey Map:
- Set Clear Objectives
- Profile Your Buyer Persona
- Define Your Goals
- Highlight Your Target Customers
- List Out All Touchpoints
- Connect The Elements You Want To Show
- Determine The Resources
- Make Changes According To The Customer Journey
Setting Up Clear Objectives:
Before you conclude into creating a map, you need make yourself in first place. Ask yourself what are the goals that directing customer Journey map. What goals can be directly mapped & specifically about? And entire conversation about based on experience. By answering all the questions, you can create a buyer persona. Customers with all demographics & psychographics gives complete details about your average customers.
Buyer Persona:
Learning about buyer persona is all about conducting good research. Get complete feedback about customers based on questionnaires & user testing. Here the most important thing is to connect with actual customers & prospects.
Here are few samples of questions to check with customers to understand buyer persona.
- How did you hear about a company?
- What attracted you the most in the company?
- List the problems you would like to solve?
- List out the goals you want to achieve with our company?
- Have you ever made purchases with our company?
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how easy it is to navigate your website?
- How was our customer support? Rate on the scale of 1 to 10
- Conduct Interviews
- Conduct email service
- Monitor or track user reviews all over social media
- Leverage web analytics
Highlight Your Target Customers
From the above step once you learn about different customer persona, you need to narrow down the focus on one or two of them. With marketing dashboard compare list of customer persona that is engaging for your business for the first time. From the list of research customer personas find out the best fit for your journey map.
List Out The Touchpoint:
Touch points are common medium or place through with all your customers interact with you. Based on the research you should list out the list of all touch points your customers or prospects currently using. This gives clear actions of what actions your customers are performing. Understanding the touchpoint is a tool that helps you to understand the objective of business & customer journey. There are many ways in which customers can cross you online apart from the website. They include social channels, paid ads, email marketing & third party review.
Determine The Resources:
Any customer journey would touch every part of your business. Highlight all the resources that create customer experience. It is important to make use of all resources you have that improves customer journey. With the help of many customer service tools accurately predict & manage every customer demand.
Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping:
- Proper channel optimization
- Increased customer engagement
- Eliminates ineffective touch points
- Improves customer focus
- Target customer persona based on a marketing campaign
- Target customers based on relevancy
- Improves employee accountability
- Helps to achieve realistic goals
Why Customer Journey Mapping Is Important?
Customer Journey mapping is one of the strategic approach to understand better customer expectation & crucial for optimizing & providing a better customer experience. With the growing trends in sales & marketing it is important for small & mid-sized business to have a customer journey as for large companies. An important aspect of the customer experience is buyer’s journey personalization. With the strong subject matter expertise, it is possible to create personalized experience across all the touchpoint.
- Optimize customer on boarding process
- Understanding of better customer persona & move persona from prospect to the buying stage
- Connecting dots & creating a logical order for buyers journey
The better you understand customer expectation, more tailor the customer experience.
Importance of customer mapping journey to enable Omni channel marketing:
With improved tools in marketing & customer service efforts highly personalized experience can be delivered to customers. This kind of combined approach is called as omnichannel marketing & customer service. Customer journey mapping plays a critical role in marketing & helps marketers to target prospects across different touch points. Omni channel marketing is often supported by omni channel customer service, where a customer can receive support across any channel to offer the best experience & resolve issues instantly.
Conclusion:
With the growing demand to collect customer data, you have all the right information for customer journey mapping. Hope with the help of this blog now you exactly know how to start arranging information in a visually appealing manner. Without an essential understanding of your customer & needs it is impossible to improve the customer journey. Hence, make sure you reach out the target audience to understand how they make decision & improve the business customer experience. Reach out to Data Marketers Group for effective customer journey mapping strategy.