What is Customer Journey Map?
Customer journey map is a tool used in marketing and sales. Its purpose is to create the most likely path that the customer takes from the moment of first contact with the brand (e.g. displaying an advertisement on the Internet), through finalizing the transaction, to further actions related to the brand or the purchased product (e.g. leaving an opinion or filing a complaint). .
The form a map takes depends on its creator. You can use specially prepared software to create it, but there is nothing stopping you from creating your map in Excel, any graphic program, or even in an ordinary notebook. The most important thing is that the map created is legible and contains all important elements.
How will a customer journey map help you?
Marketing activities can only bring the desired and expected results when they are followed by a strategy. This must be based on data. A customer journey map is one of the tools that will allow your company to collect important information for use in creating or optimizing the sales process. What difference can preparing a customer journey map make?
Identification of customer needs, expectations and problems
Customer journey map is a tool that will, among other things, help you understand customer needs and expectations. By analyzing the map, you will also identify the problems they encounter – for example, you will find out at what stage of the path customers most often abandon the purchase. This will be a perfect time to take a closer look at this stage and try to optimize it. The map will also show how visitors interact with your store. In the era of abandoned carts, such knowledge may prove invaluable.
Collaborate with the team to improve customer experiences
Having a map will make it easier for you to plan marketing and sales activities for each of the stages that customers complete on their way to purchase. A detailed map should be presented to your company’s employees who are directly and indirectly involved in sales. It is worth encouraging the team to submit their conclusions about the current purchasing process in the context of the created map. This way you can trigger a brainstorm that will help you optimize the process.
Evaluation of the offer and the current purchasing process
well-prepared customer journey map should reveal the weak points of your store’s offer. This includes not only product prices, but also their availability, variety, forms and costs of delivery (parcel lockers, courier, the possibility of collection at service points or the company’s headquarters) and available payment methods (customers have recently particularly appreciated deferred payments and installments). 0%, but also the possibility of paying by BLIK or quick transfer using a payment gateway).
How to keep up with the competition? Get to know the e-commerce trends in 2024!
Planning beneficial changes
The newly acquired knowledge not only allows you to identify problems, but also to repair them. Having hard data and employee suggestions at your disposal, it is possible to develop changes that will have a positive impact on the functioning of the company. It is not only about improving customer service or creating a more competitive offer, but also about exploring available opportunities to inform customers about new products or promotional offers.
What stages should the Customer Journey Map contain?
Before you start creating your first customer journey map, we need to establish one very important thing: this map will not allow you to predict every customer behavior with 100% accuracy. What’s more, a lot of your predictions will vary depending on what industry you’re in and who your audience is.
You can illustrate the customer journey, for example, with a timeline that shows important stages of the purchasing process in your company. These milestones will vary depending on what you do and how your customers operate.
Example::
The FonPol store sells mobile phones and all kinds of accessories online. This store’s customer journey map may include stages such as:
- occurrence of need,
- product search,
- store selection,
- product purchase,
- post-purchase behavior.
What might the individual stages look like?
Need – the moment when the customer starts looking for a phone. This may be due to the desire to replace an old device with a newer one, buy a gift or replace a lost/broken camera.
Product search – this stage will include several minor ones, such as:
- looking for a suitable model (reading reviews, watching videos, using comparison websites),
- clicking on ads that will appear during your search,
- using search engines to find the best offer.
Choosing a store – at this stage, customers often:
- hey read reviews about the store,
- make sure the product is available,
- check delivery possibilities,
- check the expected order processing time,
- they verify whether the ordered product is shipped from Poland or, for example, from a warehouse in China.
Purchase – this is a very important point at which the customer places an order and pays for the product. Reaching this stage means that the customer has already accepted the price, delivery method, etc. However, it may turn out that the limited availability of payment methods will be an unpleasant surprise.
Post-purchase behavior – this stage may actually end before it begins (if the customer ends his adventure with the store after receiving the shipment), but it may also be extended over several days, weeks, or even months. At this stage, the customer can – from the seller’s point of view:
- do nothing (simply use the purchased product without further contact with the store),
- return the purchased product,
- leave an opinion about the product,
- leave a review about the store,
- make another purchase,
- recommend shopping in the store to your friends.
This is just an example of the stages included in one of the customer journey maps. A company that sells training is unlikely to be able to use the scheme mentioned above – the needs and expectations of customers will be different, and the journey will be completely different.
How to prepare to create a Customer Journey Map?
It’s time to move on to specific actions. Where to start and how to ensure that the customer journey map contains all the relevant data and is actually helpful?
Better customer service thanks to AI
Chatbots are nothing new, but today their functionality is much greater than a few years ago. Livechat implemented on the e-shop website will not only answer questions about product availability or opening hours, but will also suggest a product that the customer may like based on the purchase history, and even enable the purchase from the conversation level.
First: acquiring and systematizing data
If your company hasn’t been in operation since yesterday, you probably already have a lot of information that you can use in the process of creating a customer journey map. You have emails in which customers ask about products or report problems. You probably have opinions pointing to the so-called “pain points” of your company or, on the contrary, they highlight the good sides. You can also talk to employees who have direct contact with the customer – their stories will provide a powerful dose of information that you can use when “drawing” a customer journey map. Analytical tools such as Google Analytics (“Behavior” section) or Google Search Console may also be helpful – especially if you run an online business.
However, if you need more data, it would also be a good idea to research your company’s direct competition – customer reviews are often available for everyone to see. As part of the research, it is also worth going through the competition’s purchasing processes to verify their individual stages yourself.
Another available solution is to contact customers who have consented to communication from your brand. Ask them for their opinions on specific aspects of shopping in your store or conduct a survey.
Once you have a certain pool of data, you need to sift it so that only the truly important data remains. Thanks to the initial verification, you will save yourself some work – you will not have to analyze every, even the least important, piece of information, and the results will still remain reliable.
Second: choosing a map template
The collected data should be entered in a previously selected form. If you do not have your own template that you want to use to create a map, search the Internet and choose a template that is clear and contains a sufficiently large number of fields. You can freely modify each of these templates and adapt them to your needs.
To map your customer journey, you can use even the simplest, free graphic tools such as Canva. However, if you don’t care about the visual side of the map, even the familiar Microsoft Excel is enough to prepare a functional customer journey map filled with helpful information.
Creating a customer journey map
This is a complex process in which it is worth involving employees – especially those who have direct contact with customers. Their knowledge and experience may prove crucial in preparing the map. Once you have all the knowledge gathered (and organized), you can start adding its important points to the selected template.
Important
There’s nothing strange about reworking your customer journey map multiple times in the process of creating it. Information that may initially seem important will turn out to be of marginal importance in the course of work, while other information – omitted in the first moments of working on the map – may become a priority. The same applies to the stages of the customer journey. When confronted with the obtained data, the initial assumptions may have to be modified beyond recognition. The most important thing, however, is that the effect turns out to be helpful and has a real impact on the company’s further activities.
Map and marketing personas
When creating a customer journey map, you should constantly keep your marketing personas in mind. After all, the map is intended to be used to better understand customers – so it is an ideal opportunity to check the operation of previously prepared personas in practice and see to what extent the assumptions contained in them coincide with reality. It is also important that many companies should have more than one persona – especially if they run diversified activities or sell products or services aimed at different target groups.
Are emotions important data?
Although many of us would first respond to such a question with a firm “no”, it is worth analyzing the data we have also in terms of the customers’ feelings and emotions. Their opinions will often show specific emotions, which will allow us to decide whether a given opinion (especially one without numerical ratings) should be treated as positive, neutral or negative. Combining this data can make us realize that, for example, the payment stage often makes customers angry. Maybe it’s a matter of an unnecessarily complicated process, or maybe the lack of convenient payment methods? Each such premise is worth detailed examination.
Summary
Preparing a customer journey map is a complex but often necessary task. By collecting and organizing the data, we will obtain a picture that will allow us to influence the purchasing process in the company and improve it accordingly. Although it often seems that luck or unforeseeable circumstances are more important in marketing, this does not mean that we do not have tools to influence how customers behave in our online stores. The best example of this is the customer journey map.
