What Is Customer Journey Mapping, and Why Is It Important?

Introduction 

Customer behavior is very difficult to interpret. When you think you have finally understood them completely, some new factor jumps in and proves you wrong. Here is where customer journey mapping comes into the picture. Consider the time when the customer first interacts with your business at the beginning of the journey and when the customers make a purchase from your business at the end of the journey. Besides these two points, there are many other stages involved in a purchase journey, and if a customer faces any kind of interruption while connecting with your company, there are very high chances that the customer will never try to reach the end and quit in the middle. 

What Is a Customer Journey Map? 

A customer journey map is a visual representation consisting of various diagrams depicting the stages customers have to go through while interacting with the company during the journey. In simple words, it is a map describing the various checkpoints and paths of customers’ journeys while interacting with a company. Mapping out this journey is called customer journey mapping.  

Why Is Customer Journey Mapping Important? 

Customer journey mapping is an important process that is followed in various departments of a company. It has several benefits: 

  1. Customer Journey mapping helps you to figure out the weak points in your customer service system and identify and remove the obstacles that may arise in the user journey, thus making it swifter and interruption-free for consumers.
  2. As you can develop an obstacle-free path for your customers, it helps you to provide a good customer experience. There are various benefits of providing a good customer experience. It helps you to increase customer retention rates for your company which helps to build a loyal customer base for your business. These loyal customers can turn out into loyal brand advocates, which will help you in tough times. Along with retaining old customers, a good customer experience helps to gain new customers and thus increases the average order value per customer, thus increasing the profits for your company.
  3. Through journey mapping, you can find out the missing points in the journey and add them accordingly, which will help you lessen the friction in the sales funnels and eventually drive your customers towards sales.

However, you must first design a customer journey map to gain these benefits. To design a customer journey map, you need to visualize the journey and implement it in the form of a diagram. 

Let’s discuss the best ways to optimize your customer journey maps.    

What Makes a Good Customer Journey Map? 

Before optimizing customer journey maps, we must understand the different aspects of journey mapping. 

Factors included in customer journey mapping: 

  1. Customer pain points: The first thing included in a customer journey map is the problems faced by the consumers during their journey.
  2. Customer interactions: Also known as customer touchpoints, customer interactions form an important part of any journey map. The way through which the customers carry on their journey and how they interact with the obstacles is to be included in the journey map.
  3. Customer emotions: Your customers’ feelings while on the journey are also important. These emotions can be highly variable depending on the number of obstacles they face and the length of the journey.
  4. Removing the obstacles: The final and most important thing in the journey map is identifying the obstacles and implementing solutions to minimize or completely remove these obstacles. The fewer interruptions, the more positive the impact on your business.

Now that we know the different factors involved in customer journey mapping, we can start creating and optimizing our journey map. To start with the customer journey mapping process, you need to choose between two processes: journey and process mapping. 

The Key Differences Between Process Mapping and Journey Mapping 

  • The journey mapping process puts the customer journey experience in the form of a diagram. They try to outline the pathway that customers have to follow to reach their destination, i.e., the purchase process. Depending on the needs of the company, a journey process map can describe the entire customer journey or only a small part of it. Depending upon their use case, they can be highly detailed or only prepared to provide an overview of the customer journey.
  • The Process mapping method tries to emphasize the different business processes and illustrates them in the form of flow diagrams. The process can be anything, from the sales process to the customer service process.

Which Method to Choose? 

Choosing between the two methods for customer journey maps can be difficult. Most companies try to develop and sell products or services. The expert teams in the company use these customer journey maps to design and develop products/services to improve the customer experience and offer them their desired product. In such cases, the use of Process mapping should be avoided. The journey mapping process is the best way to create a better experience for the end-user and helps the company to identify the customer pain points and develop the products or services accordingly. 

The process mapping method is best suited for optimizing a small business process. It is useful when there is no expert team involved, and you just want to optimize a particular process for the better functioning of the company. There is almost zero involvement of the customer experience factor in the customer journey and their experience in the Process mapping method. 

How Can I Activate My Customer Journey Map? 

Once you have developed a customer journey map, you need to activate it, i.e., bring it into use or optimize it. 

1. Set the Goals for Your Journey Map 

You have to decide for what purpose you will use your journey map, like improving the end-user experience, increasing sales, or launching a new product. 

2. Connect With Your Customer Support Team 

The best way to optimize a journey map is to find the shortcomings in the journey. These can be found by connecting with customer support and the service team. Through them, you can find out the pain points or frequently faced problems by your customers while interacting with your company. Internal collaboration is the best way to io optimize the journey maps. 

3. Personalize the Customer Journey Map 

To make better use of the journey maps, you can personalize them for different types of customers. Most people assume that all customers are the same, i.e., all the customers interact with the business in the same way. The interaction of the customers with your business varies from customer to customer. It depends on various factors. 

4. Stay Updated 

You should update your journey maps from time to time, especially before any major events like a product launch, decisions that affect customer behavior, etc. if you don’t do this, your decisions might turn out to be obstacles for your customers to interact with your company. Strategically planning all the things will help you make the best use of the journey maps. 

5. Get a Review About Your Customer Journey Map 

Getting a review is the best way to find out the mistakes in anything. You can get your journey maps reviewed by expert teams and various departments in your company. It will make your journey maps extremely detailed and reliable for implementation. 

Examples of Customer Journey Mapping 

Here are some real-time examples of customer journey mapping: 

1. HubSpot 

HubSpot’s Journey map is a great example of personalizing the journey maps based on customer persona. They have included various stages in their map, which indicate the different emotions and connections a customer feels at different stages of the journey. It also describes the various actions that the customers might take under the influence of these emotions. 

2. Dapper 

The Dapper platform has designed journey maps that are good examples for many B2B companies. Their journey maps focus on the different purposes for which the customers might interact with their business describing their emotions, pain points, and queries that they may ask for each purpose. They have also built an SOP to follow for the types of queries from their side. 

3. Lego   

They have designed their journey map in the form of a chart known as ‘The Experience Wheel’. It represents all the various stages a customer will go through while interacting with a business. They have included the customer pain points in the chart and the various feelings the customers will go through at different stages. The simplistic design of the map makes it easier to find the areas where improvement can be made. 

4. Carnegie Mellon University 

They have designed a customer journey map for future state customers. It is an extremely detailed map that includes all the different factors like customer emotions, customer actions, customer touchpoints, etc. they have even proposed the changes to be made along with mentioning the example scenarios for each phase. 

Conclusion 

Customer journey mapping is an important practice adopted by many companies for the benefit of the company as well as the customers. Customer journey maps are a useful tool that has helped to improve the customer experience. Providing a great customer experience, in turn, has helped the companies gain new customers and retain old ones. 

Customer journey maps are not only limited to the buying journey; they can also be implemented in other departments like marketing, customer support, etc. 

We hope this article has helped you learn something new about customer journey mapping and the various aspects involved in journey maps. Once you have learned about optimizing the journey maps, you start making one for your company and start gaining benefits! 

UNext Jigsaw offers an Executive Program in Strategic Sales Management, which can help you learn the concept in a detailed way and shape your professional journey.  

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