Customer journey mapping is extremely popular and more companies are turning to this practice. In fact, a recent Google search of the term “Customer Journey Maps” turned up 5.3 million results.

What are customer journey maps, and why are they such a big deal?

In short, customer journey maps visually represent a customer’s relationship with an organization. They are supposed to allow marketers to understand customer needs and address them effectively.

Sounds great, right?

Unfortunately, customer journey maps are not easy to design and often fail to meet their objective.

According to a recent E-consultancy:

“Half of the respondents (50%) said there are a ‘lot of missing parts’ of the customer journey and only 5% have ‘a coordinated approach across online and offline’ parts of their business.”

This article will help to identify the problems with customer journey maps and offer practical solutions for fixing them.

Back to the basics: What are customer journey maps?

As I mentioned above, a customer journey map is a visual representation of every experience your customers have with you. It helps to tell the story of a customer’s experience with your brand from original engagement and hopefully, into a long-term relationship.

It also does the following:

• Tells the story of the customer’s experience: from initial contact, through the process of engagement and into a long-term relationship.
• Identifies a string of events that can happen before, during, and after your customer interacts with your product or service.
• Helps organizations move from a transactional approach to one that focuses on long term relationships with customers built on respect, consistency and trust.
• Identifies major interactions of customers with the organization, and the user’s experience at each point

In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user goals and actions into a timeline skeleton.

Next, the skeleton is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative.

Finally, that narrative is condensed into a visualization used to communicate insights that will inform design processes.

A customer journey map should include the following components: initial contact, engagement process, long-term relationship.

So why is it so important we get them right?

According to research by LogMeIn released in (2016) and presented in a co-hosted webinar titled New Findings Into CX in ANZ, 9 out of 10 customers leave after one bad experience.

Director of The Customer Framework, Andy Green explains;

“The customer journey mapping process engages stakeholders and leaders to create a clear, cross-functional understanding of what happens to customers across the organization and encourage consideration of processes from the customers’ point of view,”

 The founder and CEO of Instinct Studios, Majid Shabir explains;

“It is difficult to say exactly how prevalent customer mapping is but it’s safe to say it’s not happening as much as it should be. It’s clear that when organizations develop a customer-centric model and respond to the needs of their customers, they experience higher levels of customer satisfaction, which is leading to improved sales and retention rates.”

A customer journey map takes many forms but typically appears as some type of infographic. Whatever its form, the goal is the same: to teach organizations more about their customers.

The benefits of customer journey maps include

• Helping organizations to easily identify customer objections across the whole buyer’s journey so organizations can address them
• Clarifying how different departments need to work together to address customer objectives
• Making it easier to develop a system for gaining customer feedback and improving customer experience
• Helping companies anticipate what needs to be considered so better business decisions are made
• Informing the different teams/departments within the company of user needs: For example, helping designers understand user perspective and motivation, helping copywriters understand user questions and feelings, helping managers understand customer experience so they can figure out how to improve the experience
• Allowing companies to see and approach things from a customer’s point of view
• Helping organizations learn more about their customers
• Helping companies learn about customer motivations, desires, expectations

Where Do Customer Journey Maps Go Wrong?

In an attempt to uncover the customer experience, companies can be led astray if the mapping exercise is not conducted effectively, producing maps that miss the mark or are completely useless. Below are some of the major pitfalls when conducting customer journey mapping:

1.   Selecting the Wrong Journey Mapping Framework

One of the key elements of creating a successful Customer Journey Map is the map itself, especially, According to B2C;

“The framework developed to capture the outputs of the mapping process.”

 However, According to a Nielsen Norman Group, Kate Kaplan;

“Over half (52%) of the responses from UX professionals were frustrations regarding the appropriate process and scope of journey maps “

The drawback is that not all frameworks are created equal, and choosing the wrong one can be misleading.

Also, the complexity of creating a successful Journey Map or simply not knowing where to start can create a lot of confusion.

The Solution: Select the Right Journey Mapping Framework

If you search the term “customer journey mapping” you will see a confusing array of information on the topic.

While everyone talks about journeys, they are often talking about different types of journeys used for different purposes.

Sometimes the differences are quite subtle.

For instance, a user experience and customer experience map can cover many of the same ideas. However, they are different and treating them as if they are the same is confusing for all concerned.

There are three main types of customer journey maps: User Experience Focused Maps, Marketing Automation Maps, and Customer Experience Maps.

1.User Experience Focused Maps

With UX focused maps, companies focus on understanding how users interact with their software, websites or applications.

Typically, they focus on understanding what users find intuitive and easy and what they do not. With this information, companies can design ways to make their software more simple and easier to use.

Techniques like click testing, web testing, card sorting and usability testing are used to document and understand how users actually interact with the software or website.

Below is an example of a user experience map. Notice how detailed the map is and how it considers all of the web pages and communications that a new user will receive.Notice also that it ends when the user has successfully created their profile. It does not consider other, non-software, aspects of the user’s interaction with the organization.

2.Marketing Automation/Sales Journeys

Sales Automation Journey Maps help the sales and marketing team to map the customer’s path from Awareness to Prospect to Customer.

The focus is to optimize the customer’s journey through the marketing process and maximize sales.

With a large range of email marketing, CRM and marketing automation systems now available and multiple potential communication channels (SMS, Facebook, etc.) these maps have become very important in understanding exactly what each customer and segment of customers is experiencing.

Below is an example of a high-level journey from one well known vendor (Marketo). Notice how many types of communication are considered and how many different areas of the company are involved.Without a map of the process it would be easy to miss an interaction.

3.Customer Experience Journey Maps

Customer experience maps typically seek to document the entire journey: from awareness to sales, delivery and service.

Of course, different areas may have greater or less detail but the overall journey is the goal.

Using this type of map, organizations seek to document the existing customer journey so they can focus on:

• Improving the customers’ perceived experience with the organization, i.e. have more loyal customers.
• Improving the organization’s delivery of that experience, in order to reduce costs or streamline operations.

The Rail Europe Experience Map below is relatively well known and you can see that it covers the entire journey (no pun intended) from research to post travel.So, to find the right framework, you need to start with your end-goal. This requires you to do the following:

• Articulate the business decisions the Journey Map will be used to inform
• Identify key questions the company hopes to answer
• Choose a framework that fits the objective, and whose design will capture required insights
• Make sure all points on the Journey Map contribute to the objective, and don’t distract from your end-goal

2.    Failing to focus on key segments or personas and assuming all buyers undergo a common journey

4 out of 5 brands claim to have a holistic understanding of key customer segments, yet just 22% of customers feel understood by brands.

This problem arises when companies don’t take the diversity of their customer base into account.

Remember; different customer segments with different attributes and goals will have different needs, expectations, journeys, and sentiments.

Moreover; different customer segments will naturally have different experiences with your organization.

So, consider the needs, questions, and emotions of a lower-income first-time homebuyer versus a wealthier buyer purchasing an investment property or vacation home. It’s essential that your journey mapping efforts explicitly target specific personas or customer segments.

The solution: Identify Representative Journeys For Specific Sets Of Target Customers

Where to begin?A good place to start is by defining who your target customers are and developing a thorough persona.

Recognize that your customer base is made up of a diverse group of individuals and develop numerous, segmented views that are representative of diverse customer journeys.

You should also determine the start and end points for the journeys you’ll be studying. These guardrails may shift a bit as you continue your work (especially when you ask customers where they think the journey starts and ends), but having a stated focus will simplify the rest of the process.

Also keep in mind that each segment of prospective customers shares demographic, psychographic, and behavioral traits. These data points can be lumped together to create synthesized portraits of your ideal customers.

Above all, don’t make the mistake of assuming that all buyers’ journeys follow a similar path and not taking into account how different they can be. Many marketers fall into the trap of assuming the customer journey itself is not diverse, and that customers follow a common path.

Link to personas

An effective journey map needs to take the above into account by doing the following:

• Looking at different groups within your target customer base and identifying their behaviors, motivations and product usage
• Identifying typical decision-making and buying patterns for these different groups of target customer
• Identifying representative journeys for specific sets of target customers (aligned in behavior, motivations, attitude and product use)
• Showing general patterns in the decision-making and purchase paths
• Illustrating key forks on the road, detours, roadblocks, etc. that affect different groups of customers in different ways
• Finding the balance between developing numerous, segmented views that are representative of diverse customer journeys, while not over complicating the process and making the output less actionable.

3.    Applying organizational views instead of customer perspectives

Companies often fall in the trap of approaching the customer journey from within the organization (retail store experiences, websites, customer service calls, etc.) rather than looking at it through the customer’s experience.

It used to be that offering a highly desirable product at a fair price would ensure you a steady stream of customers with little competition for their patronage.

Today, this no longer holds true.

Without customers, businesses have no value. This means it is essential for companies to understand how to acquire and retain customers.

In order to stay ahead of the competition, organizations need to rethink the ‘customer experience’ by taking the customer’s perspective.

However: Taking your customer’s perspective is a rigorous exercise that should cover all the phases of an individual’s decision-making process and (at least) acknowledge all the touchpoints – or points of contact, whether directly or indirectly connected to you – that can be used to gather information in pursuit of that decision.

The Solution: Opt for a Customer Centered Perspective

Before we can change our understanding of our customers, first we have to let go of some old ideas about markets and marketing; we then have to start thinking like our customers do.

Marketers used to believe the customer experience only started when the customer actually purchased a product or service. This turned out to be very short-sighted, because it ignored the customer’s initial interactions with the company or brand.

It can be very beneficial to look at the customers’ experiences at the time of first engagement with a brand.

In order to gain insight into your customers, you will first need to do extensive research, both analytical (surveys, Google Analytics, etc) and anecdotal (customer interviews, Q & A sessions).

You will want to find out what your target customers’ needs are, what their decision-making process is like, and how they prefer to communicate with or about your organization. When you have a real understanding of all these factors, you will be much better able to influence how they perceive your company and brand.

When you have collected plenty of data on your customers, use this knowledge to implement the following:

• Take on the customer’s view of the purchase decision process instead of the organization’s selling process
• Remember the customer experience begins at the first interaction with the company, long before they actual purchase your product or service
• Discover which communication channels (word of mouth, social media) most influence the customers’ decision-making process
• Measure the effectiveness of the company’s ways of communicating with customers
• Identification of the life stage of your target customers
• A way to document customers’ motivations, needs, and goals before, during, and after they interact with the product or service
• Increased understanding of the customers’ emotional journeys as well as their behavioral journeys

4.    Focusing too much on the process/journey and not enough on customer expectations or emotions

Companies often focus on the buyer’s journey and rarely ask: what does the customer expect?

As if that’s not enough, they also try to make the experience easy but often neglect to compare customer expectations with their actual experience

Excellent customer service and high customer satisfaction must start with understanding customer expectations.

When measuring customer satisfaction, companies generally ask customers whether their product or service has met or exceeded expectations. This is an important question to ask and is a key factor behind satisfaction.

If a customer feels like you did not deliver a service that was expected, they won’t come back and buy from you again. On the flip-side, if you deliver a service that exceeds customer expectations, you can bet they will come back to buy again, and tell all their friends about the experience.

The solution: Make Sure To Take Your Customer Expectations Into Account And Compare Them To The Actual Customer Experience.

Each customer has a preset expectation of what they hope to get out of doing business with your company and the company needs to live up to that expectation.For example, a customer paying for a luxury hotel will expect much more than simply a clean and orderly room, they will also expect top-rate service, and a friendly and attentive staff.

In short, there are two levels of customer expectations: desired and sufficient.

The desired level is what the customers hope to get out of their experience with the company, and the sufficient level is what they will deem acceptable.

Strive to achieve the desired level of customer expectations.

I think we can all agree what customers really want is a relationship. For example, many customers who were interviewed expressed a desire for an ongoing relationship with the same company representative.

So how can you better ensure customers’ expectations match their actual experience? A study by A. Parasuraman, Leonard L. Berry and Valarie A. Zeithaml which was posted by the MIT Sloan Review recommends companies start managing their promises.

This means to deliberately under-promise and over-deliver, so as to better your chances of exceeding the customer expectations. At the same time, make sure not to do so in a way that makes you less competitive.

Bottom line? There’s no one size fits all action that the company can take to improve the customers’ experience. To manage customer satisfaction, the company must take into account the situation the customer is facing and his/her emotional state and respond accordingly.

5.   Assuming people’s experiences and feelings are logical and rational when they’re really not

The simple truth is that customer journey maps are based on assumptions and most journey mapping only looks at the rational side of human experience. And the problem is: human behavior and emotions are extremely complex and not always rational.

Think about a product you bought recently, a person you enjoy spending time with, or a passion you have. What drew you to that product, person or passion? Chances are your answer will be a combination of facts and feelings.

Emotion versus rationality often conflict with each other and can be a challenge when we are trying to make a decision. Sometimes our best option does not excite us while we are drawn to an alternative option for no apparent reason.

This can cause a major challenge for companies trying to market their products and services, as they struggle to figure out whether to take a rational or emotional approach. The truth is that the best approach is often a combination of the two.

The solution: Take Into Account All Aspects Of The Human Experience.

You need to remember that you are dealing with complex individuals and that human behavior is often NOT rational and is instead based on strong emotions.

Furthermore:

Remember you’re dealing with real people with complex emotions, pressures and expectations.

This means, you have to make sure to look at all the aspects that make up human experience: the conscious and rational experience, and the emotional or subconscious experience. When marketing, also keep in mind that the best approach often has elements of both rational and emotional experience.

It is also important that you distinguish between a moment of truth (any interaction with the company) and a pain point (when things don’t go as expected) and respond accordingly.

Considerations when conducting customer journey mapping

Use Real Data to Get to Know Your Users

When designing a customer journey map, it’s essential to get to know users through research and gathering data. The map needs to have analytical and anecdotal evidence and highlight users’ needs questions and feelings during each stage of interaction.

A common source of analytical data is website analytics, which are useful for helping you understand where your users are coming from and what they want.

But proceed with caution, because website analytics are easy to misinterpret. For example, just because you have a lot of clicks doesn’t necessarily mean the user experience is positive.

Social media, search data, and surveys are some other ways to collect analytical data.

Anecdotal data involves collecting accounts of actual user experiences. These are commonly gathered through customer interviews and by looking at what they are saying on social media.

In other words: first hand user experiences are extremely valuable when developing a customer journey map.

Ask the Right Questions

When surveying your users, it is essential to ask the right questions. You want to ask questions that take into account the user experience, such as:

• Where does the experience start (and finish)?
  Remember that the customer experience starts with the first contact with your brand and ends long after they make a purchase.
• What emotions are you trying to evoke in the customer?
  You need to be clear on what emotions you are trying to evoke in your customers and a strategy on what actions you are going to take to foster these emotions.
• What are your customers feeling entering the experience?
  What issues are your customers dealing with when they come to you? What are their motivations, struggles and pain points? These considerations will influence their experience with your brand.

Understand how your customers feel and behave at different stages in the journey

In order to be effective, journey maps need to help managers, departments and stakeholders understand how their customers feel and behave at the different stages in their buyer’s journey.

This understanding allows them to identify both positives and shortcomings and develop concrete action steps.

Here are some things to remember:

• Identify positive and negative customer emotions and put them in context of customer behaviors, goals, expectations
• Don’t focus on just one customer interaction with the company, look at all of the interactions if possible
• Don’t forget to include performance indicators to identify areas of improvement, such as customer loyalty measures, customer satisfaction measures, and assessments of customer emotions at different stages of their journey
• Visualize the customer journey in a way that makes sense to stakeholders

The bottom line is this; for journey mapping to be successful, you need to really understand how your customers feel at each stage of the journey. Make sure to ask right the questions and do the necessary research until you have achieved this understanding. Only then will you be able to build a journey map that accurately represents your customers’ perspective.

The post Are Customer Journey Maps More Than A Pretty Diagram? Are They Worth The Investment? appeared first on Invesp.

Certainly, there’s really no easy way when it comes to understanding your customer’s experience. Many turn to customer journey maps. There are positives and negatives that come with customer journey maps, and like any other marketing research and documentation, it comes down to two things:

• Identifying the goal and purpose behind it,
• Knowing how actually to apply and use it.

If you go with customer journey maps, we highly recommend you keep the two criteria in mind.

In this post, we’ll be detailing the steps to help you craft a complete and comprehensive customer journey map for your business and discuss how to evaluate and use it effectively.

What Is A Customer Journey?

A customer journey refers to the process that a customer goes through when interacting with a business or brand, from the initial contact to the final purchase and beyond. It encompasses all the touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a company, both online and offline, throughout their entire relationship.

Understanding the customer journey is essential for businesses as it helps them identify opportunities for improving customer experience, optimizing marketing efforts, and building long-term relationships with customers. By mapping out the customer journey, businesses can tailor their strategies and communications to meet the needs of customers at each stage, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

What Is A Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a company or product, from initial awareness all the way through to post-purchase follow-up. It’s a marketing tool used to understand the customer’s experience at each stage of the buying process and identify opportunities to improve that experience.

These maps are a compact visualization of an end-to-end customer experience, and they can take many forms (infographics, illustrations, diagrams – all that good stuff). A customer journey map illustrates all the places and touchpoints customers come into contact with your brand, online or off… and they help you look at your brand, product, and processes through the customer’s lens so that you can visualize the literal customer journey through the funnel.

In this post, we’ll be detailing the steps to help you craft a complete and comprehensive customer journey map for your business and discuss how to evaluate and use it effectively.

How To Create A Customer Journey Map

I had a chat with Khalid, and he had this to say;

“The way we build the customer journey maps is through jobs to be done analysis.

When we start working with a company, we tell them to give us people, recent customers who just bought the items, and they’re still fresh in their minds.

Most interviews are forward-looking but don’t help build the customer journey map. Rather, we go backward and ask them questions like what was going on in their life that day they decided to purchase the item, etc.

We repeat this process across 5 to 10 customers, and then we go further to run website polls and send email surveys to validate the insights we got from JTBD.

All this yields so much insight that helps us see the different steps taken by customers.”

https://youtu.be/_kUexbOmbf0

Matthew Fairweather, director of Matthew Fairweather Ltd, says:

Customer journey mapping is really a mixture of art and insight… But that’s just a visual aid. The real work in customer journey mapping is using all of the customer information and data available to you from across the business and delivering a process and structure to their experience.

Here’s what you need to create an effective customer journey map:

1. Nail down your buyer persona

The first step in creating a customer journey map is understanding who your customers are.

Shay Namdarian of Collective Campus explains:

To best understand the customer, organizations need to develop personas. Really get into their shoes so you understand how they behave (including likes and dislikes) and why they do what they do. Although everyone is unique, these customer profiles provide guidance and input for the journey mapping.

If you haven’t already done so, get started on developing your buyer personas.

While doing this, keep in mind that it isn’t sufficient to have just one buyer persona. People at different buying stages will behave and interact with your business differently. So it’s worth distinguishing between someone who has been doing market research for a few months and is ready to make their purchase. And someone who has only recently begun thinking about solving their particular need (by trying your product/service).

2. Understand your buyer’s goals

Once you have your buyer personas built, the next step is to dig deep and understand what each of them hopes to achieve as they go through the customer journey.

Think about what your customers’ ultimate goals are in each phase (and remember that these may change as the process unfolds).

Some examples might be:

• Researching the different options that are available.
• Ensuring that s/he is paying a fair price.
• Seeking reassurance that s/he has all the necessary information about the product.

A great way to go about doing this is first to identify the paths that your visitor may take on your site. If your visitor is a member or a pre-existing customer, the first thing that they might do is to log in. Other activities include browsing, searching for products, and comparing products. Once you’ve nailed down a full list of these activities, you’ll be able to identify all your touchpoints and the goals associated with each touchpoint.

The next step is to determine the goals for each customer phase clearly on your map (as demonstrated in this sample map from Heart of the Customer).

By doing this, you’ll be able to examine how well you are meeting those goals and answering customers’ questions.

Different ways to understand customers’ goals

• Survey/interview different customer groups
• Get user testing feedback
• Study customer support emails/transcripts
• Identify customer questions in each phase
• Use customer analytics tools like FigPii to gather information

3. Map out buyer touchpoints

A “touchpoint” refers to any time a customer comes into contact with your brand – before, during, or after they purchase something from you. This also includes moments that happen offline/online, through marketing, in person, or over the phone.

You’ll want to take all potential touchpoints that occur between your customers and your organization into account. That way, you won’t miss out on any opportunities to listen to your customers and make improvements that will keep them happy.

So, how, then, do you identify customer touchpoints?

Because there are so many different ways for customers to experience your brand, the idea of figuring out all potential touchpoints may seem daunting at first.

However, you can make this task easier by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and walking through their journey step-by-step.

Ask yourself the following:

“Where do I go (and how do I get there) when…”

• …I have a [problem that your product/company solves].
• …I discover the product or business that solves my problem.
• …I made my purchase decision.
• …I encountered the business again after the purchase.

This should reveal all touchpoints pretty clearly.

Another way of accomplishing this task would be to ask customers directly about their experience with your brand – or put the above questions into a survey.

Additional tip: Use Google Analytics

If you have Google Analytics 4 set up for your website, there are two reports which you may find useful:

1. Behavior flow report

This report displays how a customer moves through your site, one interaction at a time.

It’s great for helping you understand how customers behave and what paths they take while navigating your website. It also reveals specific sources, mediums, campaigns, or geographical locations they come from.

Additionally, it can help you identify any pain points on your site where users may be struggling.

2. Goal flow report

The goal flow report displays the path visitors follow to complete a goal conversion.

It helps reveal how traffic navigates through your funnel and whether there are any points with high drop-off rates or unexpected traffic loops that need to be addressed.

4. Identify customer pain points

At this point, it’s time to bring together all your data (both quantitative and qualitative) and look at the big picture to identify potential roadblocks or pain points in the customer journey. You may also want to note down areas where you’re currently doing things right and figure out ways to improve.

To do this, ask yourself questions and interview customers and customer-facing staff.

Some potential questions might include:

• Are my customers achieving their goals on my website?
• Where are the main areas of friction and frustration?
• Where are people abandoning purchases (and why)?

Once you know where the roadblocks and pain points are, mark them down on your customer journey map.

For example, take this chart from UserTesting, which depicts positive and negative customer experiences by color code.

5. Prioritize and fix roadblocks

If you look at it from a micro perspective, here are some questions you can ask yourself: What needs to be corrected or built? Is there a need to break everything down and start from scratch? Or are a few simple changes necessary for a big impact?

For instance, if customers frequently complain about how complicated your sign-up process is, it’s probably time to revamp it and make things easier.

After identifying these roadblocks, take a step back and look at the big picture from a macro perspective. Recognize that the end goal is not to optimize each step or touchpoint just for the sake of optimizing it but so that you can push your customers down the funnel and bring them one step closer to converting.

At the end of the day, you want to be getting more conversions. So everything you tweak in each customer touchpoint should all be contributing to that one goal.

A Case Against Customer Journey Map

While fixing your roadblocks, here’s something to consider: most customer journey maps are company-centric. They look at touchpoints based on the company’s perception of where the customers should be. Instead of where customers are actually at.

Bearing this in mind, it makes sense to try and shift from this older, more traditional style of mapping to looking at a customer journey map as a model in which you can identify points to educate your customer. The key here is to build a content marketing strategy and an inbound marketing strategy that is compelling. So that it will draw your customers to engage with you and learn more about your products and your brand.

6. Update and Improve

Your customer journey map shouldn’t be left to gather dust on the shelf once it’s completed. Because your customers are constantly changing and evolving, your customer journey map should also be doing the same. Consider it a living document that will continue to grow and develop.

If possible, test, update, and improve your customer journey map every six months or so. In addition, customer journey maps should also be tweaked accordingly whenever you introduce significant changes to your product/service.

Stages Of A Customer Journey Map

The customer journey can be divided into several stages, which may vary slightly depending on the source but generally include the following:

1. Awareness:

This is the stage where a customer first becomes aware of a product, service, or brand. This awareness can happen through various channels such as advertising, social media, word-of-mouth, or online search.

2. Consideration:

After becoming aware of the product or service, the customer starts to research and consider their options. They might compare different brands, read reviews, and gather information to make an informed decision.

3. Decision:

In this stage, the customer decides to make a purchase. They have evaluated their options and are ready to buy. This could happen online or in a physical store.

4. Purchase:

The customer makes the actual purchase, completes the transaction, and becomes a paying customer.

5. Post-Purchase Experience:

The relationship between the customer and the business doesn’t end after the purchase. Businesses often engage in post-purchase activities such as follow-up emails, customer support, loyalty programs, and soliciting feedback. This stage is crucial for customer retention and building brand loyalty.

6. Advocacy:

If the customer is satisfied with their purchase and overall experience, they might become an advocate for the brand. They could recommend the product or service to others, write positive reviews, or engage with the brand on social media, thus influencing other potential customers.

Components Of A Customer Journey Map

There are different types of customer journey maps, but to create good customer journey maps, you have to include the following five components:

1. Touchpoints:

Touchpoints are the interactions between the customer and the business at various stages of the journey. These can be online, such as website visits or social media interactions, or offline, such as in-store experiences or customer service calls. Identifying touchpoints helps businesses understand where and how customers engage with the brand.

2. Customer Actions:

Customer actions represent the specific activities or behaviors customers undertake during their journey. This could include researching products, reading reviews, making a purchase, or seeking customer support. Understanding these actions provides insights into customer behavior and intentions.

3. Emotions and Motivations:

Emotions and motivations delve into the customer’s feelings and reasons behind their actions. Customers might feel excited, frustrated, satisfied, or confused at different stages of their journey. Identifying these emotions helps businesses empathize with customers and design experiences that resonate emotionally.

4. Pain Points:

Pain points are obstacles, challenges, or frustrations that customers encounter during their interactions. These could be issues with website navigation, unclear product information, or unsatisfactory customer service. Pinpointing pain points highlights areas that need improvement and can guide businesses in creating solutions.

5. Opportunities:

Opportunities are areas where businesses can exceed customer expectations and create memorable experiences. These could be personalized recommendations, proactive customer support, or loyalty rewards. Identifying opportunities helps businesses enhance customer satisfaction and build brand loyalty.

Types of Customer Journey Maps?

Since the customer journey is not linear, it also makes sense to have different types of customer journey process(s). There are different types of customer journey maps, and they all can help you improve the customer experience – but you have to choose/create a customer journey that aligns with your specific purpose. That said, now let’s take a look at each one of them:

1. Current State Journey Mapping

If you want to understand better what your customer experiences while interacting with your product or service right now, consider using current state mapping. This type of journey mapping is about visualizing your customers’ thoughts, actions, and emotions as they interact with your brand’s touchpoints.

Suppose you have a huge amount of visitors using the Chrome browser to access your site, but most of them leave your site without converting. You also notice from the journey map that the same type of customers use Safari or Mozilla Firefox browser to make a purchase.

Equipped with this kind of data, you can tell that your customers using Chrome to access your access are probably facing some issues. Current state mapping allows you to compare customer experience between these different browsers, therefore giving you room to uncover conversion roadblocks on underperforming browsers.

2. Future State Journey Mapping

As the name suggests, future state mapping helps you visualize what thoughts, actions, and emotions your customers will probably experience when interacting with your company in the future. In other words, they help you visualize the ideal journey you’d like your customers to embark on as they interact with your brand.

The future state is an effective customer journey map which is ideal for teams who want to close the gap between the current customer’s experience and where it should be. One important thing to note here is that there’s no future state customer journey design without mapping the current state first. You need to conduct research first, understand the current state, and then work on your future state.

You can also design a future state map if you have a new product or service and you want to illustrate your vision to your team and set clear strategic goals. Here are some more reasons why you should consider designing future-state journey maps:

• Keeps the focus on the customer
• Drive strategy
• Align teams
• Control power dynamics
• Uncover future pain points you’ll need to optimize
• Extract and articulate a vision

Unlike current state maps, future state maps are driven by business strategy.

3. Day in the Life Mapping

Sometimes, it’s necessary to know your customers’ real-life pain points. And, sometimes, when you look beyond how a customer interacts with your brand, you get to discover more about your customer behavior. This may entail asking for customer feedback or mapping day-in-the-life journey maps.

Day in the life mapping visually represents the customer’s journey in their real-life day-to-day activities. This type of journey map differs from the aforementioned ones in that it’s more about insight discovery than optimization. So it helps you discover your ideal customer touchpoints outside of your product, service, or brand.

4. Empathy Maps

Empathy maps are a tool that helps organizations gain a better understanding of their customers by mapping out their thoughts and feelings during the various stages of their journey. The purpose of empathy maps is to encourage organizations to think about their customers’ needs and desires in a more holistic way by taking into account their emotional responses, pain points, and motivations.

Empathy maps typically consist of four quadrants that represent the four key areas of a customer’s experience: their thoughts and feelings, their actions and behaviors, their pain points and challenges, and their motivations and goals. The quadrants are typically labeled “Say,” “Do,” “Think/Feel,” and “Pain/Gain,” respectively.

By using empathy maps, organizations can better understand their customers and develop more targeted strategies for engaging with them at each customer journey stage. Empathy maps can also be used to identify areas of improvement in a company’s products or services and develop more effective messaging and marketing campaigns.

Customer Journey Map Examples

To help provide you with a starting point, here are some awesome customer journey mapping examples you can use as customer journey map templates to create your own:

1. Dapper Apps

Dapper Apps’ customer journey map has five main phases:

• Research
• Comparison
• Workshop
• Quote
• Sign-Off

These help you systematically organize all your information about how your customer is interacting with your brand and gain insights from the knowledge.

2. IdeaRocket

dea Rocket’s customer journey map, on the other hand, follows a mostly circular path with 6 main phases:

• Interest
• Consideration
• Evaluation
• Pre-Production
• Production
• Video Usage.

While simple, it clearly outlines their process during each step of the customer journey. Based on insights from their SEM lead generation, the company focuses its CTAs for each phase according to what is appropriate for the visitor’s circumstances.

Customer Journey Map Templates

There isn’t an official template that you should be using… simply because no two customer journeys are the same!

Depending on the business, product, or service that is being mapped, best practices and design may vary. This means you have a great deal of freedom to explore and be creative – so construct your basic customer journey map using the following steps, and then go ahead and embellish it all you want.

However, if you need inspiration for your customer journey mapping process, here are some templates you can use:

The internet is not short of examples of customer journey map templates. You can look for more templates on websites like Canva and Lucidchart.

Customer Journey Mapping Benefits

As David Weaver (co-founder of Vintage Cash Cow) explains:

“A successful customer journey map will give you real insight into what your customers want and any parts of your product, brand or process that aren’t delivering.”

Customer journey maps are important for brands and come with many benefits. Here are some of the purposes of using customer journey mapping tools:

1. Identifying customer pain points:

At each step of the customer journey, you can get a deeper understanding of customer needs, actions, and what kind of questions they have. Knowing what kind of questions your customers have can help you know what you should really address on your websites. At the end of the day, you end up improving customer experiences.

2. Improves customer retention:

A well-crafted customer journey map considers post-purchase experiences. That knowledge helps you know why customers leave. And when you know this, you can enhance your strengths and improve your weaknesses.

3. Improves your marketing efforts:

When you understand how customers make decisions and which platforms they tend to use the most, you can create campaigns that are tailored to address their needs on those platforms.

4. You understand your customers better:

When you know all the touchpoints of your customers, you get an understanding of how your buyer personas navigate through your conversion funnel. This helps you personalize your marketing strategies in a way that leads to a positive customer experience.

Customer journey maps give businesses a way of getting into their customers’ heads, helping them gain valuable insight and understanding regarding common customer pain points. They also aid in building empathy for customers, helping brands understand what buyers want and how they feel.

5. Creates a new customer target base.

There’s a mental picture you have of who you think your customer is. In reality, most times, that’s not your ideal customer.

If you fail to have a customer journey map, you probably don’t completely know the demographics and psychographics of your customers.

This is bad for your business, and that’s because you keep throwing money down the drain targeting broad customer segments and interests. This leads to a spike in your CAC.

Researching your typical customers’ needs and pain points and mapping out their journey will give you a good picture of the people trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.

6. Improves customer retention rate.

A customer journey map gives you a full view of your customer’s buying process. This view helps you see areas of difficulty that your customer might encounter, and you can improve their experience there.

Being proactive in improving your customer experience and decreasing their friction points will encourage more customers to stay with your company.

A customer journey map shows you individuals who are on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors and actions of these customers, you can start to spot them before they leave your business. While you might not save them all, it’s worth the try since increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.

Final Thoughts

We’re entering an age where businesses are all about the customer experience.

By shifting the focus to the customer’s perspective, brands can better understand consumer wants and needs. This allows them to create a more effective and satisfying customer experience.

A customer journey map is a proven framework for helping drive greater customer insights and improving internal efficiencies. While they are more significant than a “silver bullet,” they are still exceptionally effective tools for helping brands identify engagement and enhancement opportunities, increase conversions, and bring in eye-popping ROI.

Are you using customer journey maps for your business? Feel free to share any tips we may have missed in the comments.

We’d love to hear from you!

Customer Journey Maps FAQs

1. When should you create a customer journey map?

Customer journey maps should be created when you want to understand your customers’ experiences and interactions with your business. It’s beneficial during the planning phase of marketing campaigns, when launching a new product or service, or when you’re looking to improve your existing customer experience.

2. How do you create an effective journey map?

To create an effective journey map, start by researching your customers, identifying touchpoints, understanding emotions and motivations, pinpointing pain points, and recognizing opportunities. Engage with real customers, use surveys and analytics, and collaborate with various teams within your organization. Regularly update the map based on evolving customer needs and feedback.

3. Why are customer journey maps important for digital marketers?

Customer journey maps are crucial for digital marketers because they provide insights into customer behavior online. By understanding the customer’s digital interactions, marketers can optimize website design, personalize content, target specific touchpoints, and enhance online experiences. This knowledge helps in creating targeted, effective digital marketing campaigns.

4. What makes a successful customer journey?

A successful customer journey involves seamless interactions, personalized experiences, and meeting customer needs and expectations at every stage. It is characterized by clear communication, easy navigation, quick problem resolution, and emotional connection. Successful customer journeys result in satisfied, loyal customers who are likely to engage with the brand repeatedly and recommend it to others.

5. What’s the difference between customer journey and buyer journey?

The key difference between the customer journey and the buyer journey lies in their focus and scope. The customer journey encompasses the entire relationship between a customer and a brand, including pre-purchase stages, the actual purchase, and post-purchase interactions. It emphasizes long-term customer satisfaction and loyalty. On the other hand, the buyer journey specifically concentrates on the stages leading up to a purchase decision, from recognizing a need to evaluating options and making a decision. It has a narrower focus centered around the activities and decisions directly related to the purchase process.

6. What’s the difference between a customer journey map and a user journey map?

The terms “customer journey map” and “user journey map” are often used interchangeably, but they can have nuanced differences depending on the context and the specific focus of the mapping exercise. In general, both types of journey maps aim to visually represent the experiences and interactions of individuals with a product, service, or brand over time.

Additional Resources

1. What are customer journey maps, and how to improve them?

2. The importance of providing a great customer experience.

3. The importance of customer experience management.

4. 5 Usability design tips for a better user experience.

5. Stop confusing usability optimization with conversion optimization

The post Customer Journey Mapping: How To Create Complete Customer Journey Maps appeared first on Invesp.

Perhaps even more frustrating is the lack of reasoning about why the rates are so poor. A Google search for “why are online conversion rates so low” produces only three results that actually talk about low rates, and two of those are really a “reverse psychology” approach to telling you how to improve rates.

The one remaining result, from econsultancy.com, echoes what we have maintained here on the Invesp blog as a major cause of low rates: digital marketers do not devote enough of their resources specifically to improving conversions.

Media Take Time to Mature

In the entire scheme of things, the ways and means of digital marketing are still in their infancy.

The history of media shows that as each new medium emerges, it mimics the media that preceded it. When the first radio broadcasts hit the airwaves, they were full of voices reading the news or written stories. Only later did we fully develop radio’s ability to entertain and appeal to our senses.

Many early television broadcasts were really just radio programs with a camera turned on them. Even “Mr. Television”, Milton Berle, took his radio program, and many of the same cast members, directly to TV. It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that television content evolved fully into something unique to the medium.

And we used the same “mimic-what-we-did-before” plan when we started selling on the world wide web. The misguided approach is clear even in the title of this article published in 1998: “Internet Shopping Network: The Malling of Cyberspace”. Interestingly, an excerpt from that article supports the idea that new media imitate the old:

“More than ever, a visit to the opening screens of America Online or CompuServe indicates just how tightly the biggest on- line services are interwoven with the nation’s largest TV networks, weekly magazines, daily papers, wire services and the like. The medium of the Internet is new, but its main “content providers” are mostly providing the same old content.”

Content in Context – Finding Digital Media’s Unique Value Proposition

Think of a hobby or interest that you pursue. Have you ever used the internet to learn more about it, to find like-minded people or even make a purchase related to your pursuit? Of course you have and, if you haven’t, you’re not using the web in the way that gives it its unique value as a medium.

Digital media are the first that can be used with a personal purpose: to make your life more meaningful.

Let’s say you enjoyed restoring old bicycles. Television and radio, even with thousands of channels, hold nothing for you; not a stitch of content. But on the web you can find bike restoration blogs, forums, websites, Instagram accounts, videos, products to buy – and you can even create your own content.

What Does This Have to Do With Improving Your Conversion Rates?

Increasingly, digital marketers are seeing a new consumer model where buyers align themselves with brands – and make purchase decisions – that are in line with the personal purposes for which they use the web.

The Path to Purpose Leads to the Path to Conversion

Google partnered with global marketing research company TNS and advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather to find the answer to “what can brands do to connect with these new consumers?”

Over a six-month period, they surveyed 2,458 purchasers of automobiles, beauty products and smartphones. Here are some of the conclusions they made:

• Deluged by content, consumers are filtering it to get to content that is relevant to their personal purposes and passions
• They are increasingly shopping with the same purpose that they consume digital content
• Expressing a brand purpose can help digital marketers breakthrough the content clutter

But it’s not until we look at the numbers that begat those conclusions that we can see the potential to finally break the logjam that keeps conversion rates stuck in the mud:

• Consumers choose brands that engage their passions and interests 42% more often than brands that simply advertise to them
• Purpose-driven consumers are 70% more likely to have made an online purchase in the last month (versus consumers who use the web for traditional entertainment or to simply connect with friends and family)
• They are 1.6 times more likely to rate a product online at least once a week (versus those who use the web for entertainment/connection)

Brands that Engage Purpose-Driven Consumers – And Brands that Don’t

From the use of child labor and collapsing sweatshops in Bangladesh, to the drain on natural resources caused by textile manufacturing, the fashion industry has felt consumer backlash to unacceptable practices more than most sectors. And perhaps that’s why they seem to be in tune with what lies in their customers’ hearts.

The homepage of Swedish fashion retailer H&M features a tiny, one-word link in its footer menu: “Sustainability”. But click that link and you go through the looking glass to a broad spectrum of content devoted to addressing consumers’ concerns about using more sustainable materials, conserving fresh water, ensuring fair wages and working conditions, animal welfare, recycling – and aligning with a brand that puts sustainability at the core of its business concept.

Canadian fashion brand Joe Fresh, who themselves felt the sting of involvement in a collapsed garment factory, appeals to the desire of Canadian shoppers to support their fledgling homegrown fashion industry.

A Sector that Misses on Appealing to Purpose-Driven Customers

The effect of poor indoor air quality, especially in our homes, is of increasing concern. We regularly learn more about the negative health effects of allergens, asthma triggers, mould spores and pests attracted to the dust and dirt in our homes.

So it would seem a natural for vacuum cleaner manufacturers to engage buyers in ways that touch on their desire to live healthier lives, especially when it involves their families.

But a look at the websites of Dyson, Eureka and Samsung – among the top search engine results – shows no sign of content related to living a healthier life. Indeed there is no apparent content devoted to anything that could be called a buyer’s “purpose” or “passion”. Unless that purpose is to own a more powerful vacuum cleaner – then they all claim to meet the purpose – which means they all fail in a golden opportunity to stand out from their competition.

Curiously, a recent post to Dyson’s Twitter account asks: “have you ever wondered how a firework works?”. While it can be argued that the tweet is in line with customer interest in fireworks and/or Guy Fawkes Day in the U.K., it’s still a fail. The appeal does not tie into the brand and fails to strike an emotional chord. It’s purely informational – like something you might hear on the radio or read in a book.

What can your brand do to find the path to your customers’ purpose – and put them on the path to conversion?

The post Conversion Path Optimization – How Your Customer’s Path to Purpose Can Lead to Your Path to Conversion appeared first on Invesp.

So what is the voice of the customer, and how can it be effectively used to increase website conversion rates?

Voice of customer or VOC, is a market research technique which extracts from customers’ (and prospects’) their specific wants and needs. Data is collected through methods such as surveys, interviews, reviews, etc.; it is then prioritized in relative importance and satisfaction. VOC is essentially a way to preempt visitor experiences and expectations through cognitive progression.

Voice of the customer is actionable data that includes a target market’s desires, pain points, preferences, trigger words, and FUDs, which are helpful with the creation of specific personas, as mentioned above. In any conversion optimization project, modifying a page should heavily be based on VOC and analytics (making the process quite scientific and razor sharp focused). And sometimes, for quick gains, VOC through the use of surveys can be proven more effective.

In order to maximize the benefit of VOC, we generally recommend to our clients:

• an on site survey with 3 – 4 questions
• a post purchase survey to gauge customer experience
• data-gathering of top 15 complaints, questions, and comments from customer service reps.
• Interviews of top customer experiences (specifically repeat business – why do they come back?).
• Listening to the chatter

All this information is gathered than analyzed and made a part of the final persona creation process. Let’s get into details of each of these recommendations:

On-site survey: There are a number of onsite survey tools that allow you to present visitors with a pop-up containing a quick response on their overall site experience, as well as gauging what they are doing on your site in the first place. You can also consider using exit pop-up surveys to figure out why visitors are abandoning your site. Some questions you can consider asking include:

• What is the purpose of your visit today?
• Did you find what you were looking for?
• If not, why?
• What was your overall site experience?

Of course these questions can be adapted to match your site service or products, but overall, they will give you a sense from your visitors of their overall experience, why they came, and what if anything did they accomplish.

Post-Purchase Survey: So great, you made a sale and got a customer. Is that enough? Never. One time purchases are not very beneficial to you in the long run. Now, you have the more difficult than ever task now of engaging that one-time customer to become a customer for a life, or even better, an ambassador for your product or service. That is why a post-purchase survey allows you the opportunity of engaging them, understanding their experience, and giving them an incentive to return. You can learn a lot about the service you provided and how to better improve it by listening to your customer’s experience.

Data Gathering: Many companies have customer representatives standing buy to address questions or concerns visitors may have. But how many companies are analyzing the data? Customer reps are speaking to all sorts of visitors at the different buying stages with questions and concerns about the site, about the products, etc. So the question is, how can you gather that information and successfully address it?

• Top 15: You obviously can’t address all questions and concerns at once, so start small. Take the top 15 concerns and questions and one by one, work on addressing them on your site. Once you’ve completed them, move on to the next 15.
• Have a solid data-gathering method: What’s worse than having the reps and just not using the data, is not gathering the data at all! Leaving the info in the heads of your reps alone will do you no good. You want to make sure your customer reps are noting the questions and concerns, and placing them in an organized file so you can easily be able to extract the information.
• Don’t dismiss VOC: Sometimes you really need to read into some of the comments or questions customers have. For example: when they say they can’t find something over and over again, that means there is an issue with your navigation, filtration mechanisms, or search. When they continuously ask about a certain spec of your product or service, although you may have it listed on the page somewhere, clearly, it is not obvious enough to your visitors.

Interviews: Interviews are a great way to hear the customers voice directly from their lips to your ears. We actually recommend two tier interviews:

• The customer service reps: What is their experience with the customers, what do they think the top concerns and questions on without reviewing the data (i.e. what sticks in their minds).
• The actual customers: What was their experience like? What changes would they recommend on the website? These questions and more can really help you become more in-tuned with your target market.

Listening to the Chatter: Social media, blogs, and customer reviews all give you a lens into what your target market are buzzing about. Set-up different alerts for mentions, monitor and interact with your visitors through social media, and consistently look at the good and bad reviews people are making on your site.

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