Do you ever wish you could get into your customers’ minds as they’re interacting with your business to better understand their decision-making process? If only you could get them to take the next step, you could prove they won’t regret doing business with you!
Nurturing people through the customer journey is a requisite task for business results, and a customer journey map is the tool that makes that job more efficient and effective. Customer experience consulting experts like AdviseCX are highly adept at guiding companies through that process.
Maps are highly accessible. Gone are the days of printing pages from MapQuest or seeking directions from a gas station. Nowadays you probably carry a digital version in your pocket or purse daily and perhaps use it just as often (avoiding rush hour traffic, anyone?). As always, maps of different kinds serve various purposes, but generally, they guide our journey, helping us understand and navigate a route, pinpoint landmarks, and reach a destination.
You don’t really bother with a map when you know the route like the back of your hand, but how well do you know the journey customers take with your business? What speedbumps slow them down? Where do you provide open highways for acceleration? How efficient are the employees at the pit stops? What obstacles cause them to detour — or veer a different direction altogether?
Running a business without viewing your customer experience (CX) as a journey depicted on a map with real-time data … is like trying to give someone driving directions while Google Maps is offline — difficult and misguided.
What Is a Journey Map?
The customer journey refers to the total experience of customer touchpoints. Customer journey mapping is the method of visually representing that journey as a roadmap for use as an internal tool, and customer experience consulting experts use it all the time. Beyond just the touchpoints, a robust customer journey map includes customers’ associated feelings — such as frustration or confusion — and any actions you want them to take.
How Do I Use a Journey Map?
A journey map is useful across an organization. Marketing, sales, and service teams can gain insight into each stage of a customer’s journey, which can enable cross-functional understanding and collaboration.
There is no one-size-fits-all template. A journey map will look different based on your industry and business model (e.g., B2B, B2C, e-commerce, retail) as well as your desired information. For example, a day-in-the-life template can communicate which times of day you can offer the best support.
Generally speaking, once you have developed your customer journey map(s), you will be able to boost customer retention and sales through the following actions:
Read Customer Behavior
A robust journey map indicates all of the touchpoints you have with current and prospective customers. Teams can study customer behavior at each of these touchpoints to know which activities effectively keep and nurture customers through the journey or, even better, lead to a sale. These are the activities to protect and maintain. Teams can also learn which activities are less effective and represent opportunities to improve.
Improve Ineffective Interactions
Ineffective interactions might look like someone opening your email then not clicking through your links, or visiting your website but not adding a product to their cart. Knowing where customers tend to get stuck or abandon the journey illuminates where your team can focus its attention.
In addition to behavior, journey maps provide insight into customer sentiment at each touchpoint. Imagine how you might approach customers differently and develop customer-centric initiatives if you knew they felt fear or doubt at a certain point in their experience with your business.
Align Around a Vision
Journey maps can show more than the current state of the customer experience; they can show the ideal future state, too. A future-state customer journey map articulates the thoughts, feelings, and actions you want your customers to have. With these details specified, you can cast a vision for your team and align their efforts with that ideal experience. Managers can also use this when onboarding and training new team members.
Companies Seeing Success
According to a study by Hanover Research, “more than 96% of B2B companies report that customer journey maps are effective in developing customer loyalty and identifying gaps in communication touch points, with 94% reporting a high impact on increasing customer satisfaction.” The success rate is hard to ignore.
Companies also reported journey maps affecting the following goals, among others:
- Develop new products and services to match customer needs
- Improve service gaps for a better product experience
- Determine the ROI of marketing and advertising spend
- Target marketing campaigns to drive sales
One company, Rewind, which makes backup and restoration software for SaaS platforms, decided to map out a customer journey when revenue fell short of expectations. The map detailed a customer’s full journey including their thoughts and actions before even arriving at Rewind. In doing so, the team discovered a new buyer motivation and market segment, updated their go-to-market strategy, and realized a two-fold increase in product installations. The findings also enabled them to improve their marketing, efficiency, and resource utilization.
Customer Experience Consulting with AdviseCX
Rewind leveraged a customer experience consulting expert to perform the research and glean those profitable insights. Businesses benefit from a CX expert guiding them through the journey mapping development and assessment process.
We, at AdviseCX can help you make informed decisions that optimize your customer experience through our journey mapping services. Contact us today to get started.
