A customer journey map represents every step of your customer’s journey as a visual representation. It helps to demonstrate a customer’s experience with your business or brand from beginning to end. Customers can come in contact with you in more than one way, so there will be different starting points such as social media, customer service enquiries, marketing referrals, and more.
Without a doubt, you want this experience to be as good as possible for a customer in order to turn their experience into a long-term relationship with your business. This is was important to make sure that no interactions slip through the cracks, which is why you can benefit from customer mapping journeys.
A customer journey map can help you to:
- Understand how customers interact with your business
- Identify whether a journey follows a logical order
- Highlight development priorities
- Gain an outsider’s perspective on your customer experience
- Focus on different needs throughout the buying process
To make your map as beneficial as possible, you need to make sure that you include every entry point where a customer enters their buyer’s journey. You can add any quantitative information from your web analytics, your CRM software, and more. You can even see, as an example, how efficient your live chat support and your call center assistance is when it comes to customer service.
A customer journey map can also show you just how well your experience matches up with your brand promise. As an example, if you label your customer experience as being fast and easy, but customers have to stand in long queues or hold on for long periods of time on the phone to get hold of someone, the experience won’t match up. You need to understand where there are mismatches and fix them.
Planning Your Business’ Future
With more customers shifting from offline to online buying, it’s important to use a variety of digital tools to help them with their purchasing decisions. This also means that businesses need to use more sophisticated processes and tools that will also very likely increase in the future. According to McKinsey, the number of customer touch points is increasing by around 20% every year.
To determine if your customer journey is the right one, you need to map out that journey before anything else. By not doing this, you risk having a unhappy customers and losing out on possible opportunities to increase revenue. By continuously optimising your business’ customer experiences along the way, you’ll be building long-term, solid relationships with your customers.
