How to create a customer journey map in no time !

For organic growth in your business, it is vital to understand your customers. However, it can sometimes be challenging, with new trends and preferences materialising frequently. Moreover, every user has specific reasons for connecting with your business and a unique journey through your products and services.

Most people give as much importance to their customer experience as the quality of the service or product they are seeking. In fact, according to Forbes, 74% of consumers are most likely to buy based only on their experiences. For that matter, you must create customer journey maps to understand the specific needs of your visitors and improve their user experience to retain customers.

With this article, Growth Jockey will provide every answer you seek about customer experience management and how to create a user journey map effectively.

What is a Consumer Journey Map?

A consumer journey map is a graphic presentation of the consumer’s experience with your brand. It records the entire timeline of events involved in completing a purchase. Such as the first visit of a consumer to your website, stages of product engagement, and the steps taken to conclude the purchase. An ideal consumer journey map includes all the touchpoints to understand your consumer's experience with your brand. It helps you identify all the hiccups experienced during the journey to improve user experience by understanding their point of view.

To create an effective user journey map, you must gather appropriate information about your customers. Examine what marketing strategies attract visitors and go through product data to understand how users respond to your products. Moreover, directly asking your customers is the best way to do this. A well-constructed user journey map will help you significantly improve your brand's user experience.

Why Is It Important to Map Your Customer’s Journey?

Providing quality customer experience gives you an edge over your competitors. Creating compelling customer journey maps is the key to delivering a smooth experience to your potential buyers.

Visualise User Pain-Points

A visual of your customer’s thinking and motivation behind reaching your brand to their behaviour at each step of the journey helps you improve your service to suit their requirements.

Improve Cross-Team Functionality

A customer journey map helps everybody involved in your business grasp the customer's perspective of your product or service to help them work together toward enhancing user experience.

Clarify Areas of Ownership to Improve Employee Accountability

As your company grows, it increases the chances of a customer needing clarification about whom to reach out to for their specific needs. A detailed customer journey helps everyone clarify ownership areas and take responsibility for their job.

Improve Conversions by Eliminating Gaps in the Process.

A detailed customer journey map helps you find the gaps in the conversion process that result in potential customers leaving midway. Identifying the irregularities can help incorporate rapid changes to improve customer retention.

What Needs To Be Included in a Customer Journey Map?

Two customer journey maps can always be different, as each customer has a unique experience with your brand. However, specific components are consistent in every consumer journey map.

Purchasing Process

A customer journey map typically includes all the significant junctures a user stops at while making a purchase. It entirely depends on the type of product or service you intend to sell and how the customer uses it. You can start creating a journey map by including stages that can be roughly set as follows:

• Brand awareness

• Product Engagement

• Final Purchase

• Product Experience

• Continued Purchase and brand advocacy

Consumer Emotions and Actions

An effective user map records a consumer's actions at each stage of the purchasing process. This includes their initial research or request for a demo of your service or product at the decision stage and the final payment stage to complete the purchase.

Besides actions, it is also essential to note your consumer’s emotions at various stages. For instance, a lengthy payment process might result in frustration for your customer. Including these emotions while creating user map will help prevent consumers from forming negative opinions about your brand.

Pain Points/ Hiccups

Every negative emotion faced by your customer erupts from a pain point. Identifying and adding pain points to the user journey map will help you provide an optimum user experience to enhance your brand’s credibility.

Solutions for the Identified Problems

It is essential to note the potential ways to improve your company's buying procedures so that customers experience fewer hiccups in connecting with your business. Growth Jockey helps you find out-of-the-box solutions for all the problems to ensure healthy growth for your business.

How to Construct a Customer Journey Map?

The contents of each journey vary from user to user, but you can have a basic structure by following these steps:

Set Your Objectives for Creating a User Journey Map

Before you begin drafting a journey map, it is essential to identify why you need this map to determine its cope. You can either create a highly detailed map that encompasses the entire process or focus on one particular stage.

Create a Profile of Your Customer

Generating consumer profiles will help you define their goals and give you a perspective on their needs and preferences. The key is to create realistic customer profiles, which require much research to collect appropriate data. The best source for this data is customer feedback and general surveys.

However, asking for feedback only from people interested in purchasing your products and services is essential. They are the potential consumers who have interacted with your company earlier or might do so in the future.

Select Your Target Customers

After going through all the customer personas that connect with your business, you need to focus on the customer whose journey you want to analyse. Building a generic map will not accurately demonstrate a specific customer's journey. You can begin by interpreting their first interchange with your brand and how their journey advances.

Note-Down Customer Touchpoints

Touchpoints refer to any interchange or engagement between your brand and your customers. You are analysing your research to note the touchpoints in the consumer journey. It can include your website, social platforms, paid ads, email marketing, third-party review sites or mentions.

This is a crucial step to determine your customer's actions. Examine which touchpoints have higher engagement and which need to be optimised for improved user experience.

Determine Customer Actions

The next step is to note your customers' everyday actions throughout the process. It might be a google search for your brand or clicking on one of your marketing emails, and the list goes on.

It will help you identify where your customers should be taking fewer actions to move forward. You can take steps to reduce this number so that your customers can reach their goals sooner. Accurately predicting your customer's actions will help you provide a better user experience, resulting in more lead conversions.

Evaluate Your Existing Resources and the Ones You Need to Enhance Customer Experience

Your customer journey map will provide a detailed overview of your business and accentuate all the resources you use to create a customer experience. You can analyse if these resources are enough or if you need to add new ones to enhance your customer's journey. Growth Jockey helps you find the necessary resources to achieve these goals.

You can quickly determine which touchpoints need more support and where to cut down. Moreover, you can accurately predict how the existing or new resources will affect your business and improve ROI.

Analyse the Map to Incorporate Necessary Changes

The sole purpose of this map is for you to analyse the results so that you can take the necessary steps for improvement. Find out which touchpoints are driving people away before making a purchase. Interpret how you can provide better customer support to them.

A thorough analysis will help you take the crucial steps for improvement. These changes will guarantee a smoother customer experience since they will directly associate with the customer's pain points.

Wrapping Up

With Growth Jockey, you can learn about the emerging trends in your industry and how they will affect your customers' actions to map their journey accurately.

Once you have successfully constructed a customer journey map, you will be able to understand your customer’s experience with your business. It will help you explore the various factors affecting your customer’s journey and understand the characteristics of your potential customers.

Customer journey maps differ for every customer, and you will find innumerable variations of the core concept. However, this dynamic nature of maps increases their significance in your sales strategy. They help you make decisions based on accurate predictions, which provide better consumer experiences and ensure positive business growth.

At Growth Jockey, we are dedicated to crafting personalised models that successfully tackle the key challenges encountered by our clients across diverse industries, enabling them to enhance the user journey. Regardless of your company's size, whether it's a small-scale enterprise or a large corporation, you can now leverage advanced technology to optimise the user journey. Take a decisive step towards unlocking the next level of growth for your brand by contacting us today!