What Is Customer Journey Mapping?

On the surface, customer journeys may seem straightforward – you provide a product and they purchase it. But look more closely and it’s very easy to see that the customer journey is becoming more and more complex. This is why it’s necessary to engage in customer journey mapping.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is reinterpreting customer expectations every single day, with the average consumer now utilising 10 channels to communicate with businesses. All these touchpoints create ever more complex customer journeys, making it far more difficult to always ensure a great customer experience.

So, customer expectations are certainly undergoing a major transformation. The question is then: how can brands are able to meet these expectations and make sure that every customer journey is smooth? One excellent way to understand as well as optimise the customer experience is a process called customer journey mapping.

What Is A Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual narrative of every engagement that your customer has with your service, brand, or product. The creation of a customer journey map puts you directly in the mind of the consumer, so that you are able to see where you may be missing the mark, what you are doing right as well as where you are able to make improvements across the customer life-cycle.

Customer journey mapping lays out all touchpoints which your customer might have with your brand – from how they hear of you first through social media or brand advertising right to their direct interactions with your product, website, or support team. Customer journey mapping includes all of the actions which your customer takes in order to complete an objective across a period of time.

What Are The Basic Concepts Of Customer Journey Mapping?

A customer journey is a journey of a prospective customer about various points of contact with a product, a brand or – alternatively –  (touchpoints) of a company through all available channels until he performs a preferred target action. A customer journey can stretch over several hours or days:

• Major target actions are purchases, orders or inquiries.
• Touchpoints are any type of contact points between customer and your business, from classical advertising (ads, TV or radio spot, etc.) through online marketing activities right down to the opinion of a friend or information on review sites.
• Available channels such as telephone, web, branch, marketing communications as well as service interactions.

What Are The Benefits Of Customer Journey Mapping?

Having a good understanding of a customer’s journey across your entire organisation does so much more than boost your revenue which is associated with marketing campaigns, lower your service costs as well as shrink your sales cycle. It allows you the opportunity to discover how to be consistent when it comes to providing a positive customer experience and keeping customer loyalty.

When done properly, customer journey mapping assists with:

• Increase customer engagement through channel optimisation.
• Distinguish and optimise moments of truth in the CX.
• Eliminate ineffective touchpoints.
• Move from a company to a customer-focused perspective.
• Destroy silos between departments as well as close interdepartmental gaps.
• Target particular customer personas with marketing campaigns that are relevant to their identity.
• Understand the circumstances that may have resulted in irregularities in existing quantitative data.
• Allocate ownership of various customer touchpoints to enhance employee accountability.
• Make it feasible to assess the ROI of future UX/CX investments.

How Can I Optimise My Customer Journey Map?

Mapping out many different customer journeys across many different buyer personas can be quite time-consuming. And once you have mapped them out, you still need a way to offer a personalised omnichannel customer experience based on your map.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

So if you’re serious about customer journey mapping then you need to learn more about this process on our Digital Marketing Course. Follow this link to find out more.