Customer Journey Mapping and Its Importance

What is a Customer Journey?

Customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that customers go through.

Customers should be a centre point of every company, and in order to be successful in business, it is crucial to listen to customers and fulfil their needs.

 

Customer journey typically consists of the following steps:

 

• Awareness
• Interest
• Intent
• Evaluation
• Purchase
• Retention

 

 

Customer journey starts when someone first interacts with your business. It could be via phone, social media, email, look on your website etc. The goal is to trigger another action, keep the lead or customer in the funnel, and potentially complete a purchase.

Purchase, which is often perceived as the business world’s most important action, is just one step along the entire customer journey. Each step is crucial, and a negative customer experience at any stage can be fatal and seriously impact a brands reputation. It can lead to a loss of trust, subsequently losing a customer, receiving bad reviews and an overall negative image.

Each customer journey has a different length, process and results. Therefore, it is essential to know each step of your customers’ journey precisely.

 

Customer Journey Mapping

A customer journey map visually represents how customers interact with your brand and their opinions about your business and products. Digital interaction provides a lot of data, and modern marketing technology allows marketers to see in more detail how customers interact with the company and what steps and considerations they take.

It allows you to track the progress you have made with your customers and provides more profound insights that will generally give a better overview of the business and your customers.

 

How to begin

To begin your customer journey mapping process, you should focus on different touchpoints and how your customers interact with them. Examples of touchpoints are the following:

 

• Website
• Outbound marketing efforts
• Sales team
• Customer service team
• Social media channels

Source: (Hypeinsight, 2019)

It is also important to identify customer personas and their goals. The next step is to identify and address strengths and weaknesses. Keep constantly working on your weaknesses to ensure your customers experience the smoothest journey without any distractions and issues and interact easily with your business

 

Why is it important?

 

1. More effective Inbound marketing

Customer journey mapping helps you to identify and understand customers’ needs. You can see the cuCustomer journey mapping helps you to identify and understand customers’ needs. You can see the customers’ relationship to your brand and at what stage they are in any particular moment. This helps you create a more effective marketing strategy, more suitable offers, and improve your customer communications, whether is be email or sms.

 

2. See the bigger picture

Thanks to customer journey maps, you can zoom out at your organisation and see the bigger picture. You can see your organisation, products and processes from multiple points of view. You will be able to see the journey from the perspective of your customers, employees and stakeholders.

 

3. Identify problems

Customer journey maps also help you identify and resolve the problems and gaps in your user experience. Organisations often use metrics to identify problems, but you will also understand why the problems occur and what causes them with the help of customer journey maps. You will be able to pin point where your customers struggle the most and where you lose the majority of them along the journey.

Once you identify the issues, focus on fixing them so your customers have a smooth journey and overall great experience with your brand. It can also help you discover more market opportunities.

 

4. Competitive advantage

Every year companies lose a significant portion of their customer base because of poor customer experience. Companies are expected to compete primarily on customer experience in the near future instead of just lowering prices. Companies that better understand their customers’ needs will likely excel in their sector and take a greater market share.

 

5. Better results

Improving your customer experience will also help you from the business and financial point of view. If customers are satisfied with your service, they are more likely to repurchase your products and become loyal customers. As a result, they will generate more sales and revenue for your business.

Please contact us directly if you have questions about customer journey planning or learn how can Circulator help you with your email marketing.