Customer Journey Mapping
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer experience. It is a critical tool for innovation, aiding in the identification of customer needs and impact of a new solution on the customer experience. For marketing teams, customer journeys help us design effective omnichannel campaigns. For sales teams, customer journeys help teams define actions to execute before, during, and after a sales call to effectively move customers through the buying journey.
Building customer journeys
The customer journey captures customers’ experience across all touchpoints, or interactions with a company or brand. Hence, to map a customer journey, you need to understand and score a customers’ experience at each touchpoint.
To do so, you need to follow three steps:
1. Gather information on the customer journey: Observe and engage with customers to gather and analyze relevant information. The goal is to identify all critical touchpoints, and employ techniques like ‘a day in the life’ and ‘moments of truth’ to pinpoint crucial customer interactions.
2. Evaluate the customer experience at each touchpoint: Score the customer’s experience at each touchpoint using metrics like satisfaction, willingness to recommend, or trust. The example uses a standard 5-point customer satisfaction scale
3. Draw the current customer journey map: Armed with the scores for the customer experience at each touchpoint, you can then draw your customer journey map using a 2-dimensionsal graph where you include touchpoints in the x-axis and the customer experience score in the y-axis.
Ideating with customer journeys
Customer journey maps are valuable as a tool for innovation, marketing, and sales teams. For instance, innovation teams can use customer journey maps to improve their ideations efforts. They can also critically revisit touchpoints to uncover potential improvement areas (or “pain points”) which are opportunities to improve the customer experience and the profitability.
Marketing teams can use customer journey maps to plan actions and move customers through their journey, improving their experience and value for the company.
Sales teams can use customer journey maps to detect critical objections and concerns that can help them design better sales interactions, and choose the right evidence (e.g., use cases or data) to bring in sales interactions.
In sum, customer journey maps help you obtain a consolidated view of your customers’ experience, highlighting, for specific customer, personas, key touchpoints, their goals, improvement areas, and company benefits.
Download the Customer Journey Mapping tool
