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.
