What is a Customer Journey Map?
Customer journey map, or customer journey map, is a tool used in marketing and sales. Its purpose is to create the most likely path a customer takes from the moment he or she first encounters a brand (for example, viewing an ad online), through the finalization of a transaction, to further actions related to the brand or purchased product (such as leaving feedback or filing a complaint).
The form that a map takes depends on its creator. You can use software specially prepared for this purpose to create it, but nothing prevents you from creating your map in Excel, any graphics program, or even in an ordinary notepad. The most important thing is that the created map should be legible and contain all the relevant elements.
How will a customer journey map help you?
Marketing activities can only produce the desired and expected results if they are followed by a strategy. This in turn must be based on data. A customer journey map is one tool that will allow your company to gather relevant information for use in creating or optimizing the sales process. What can preparing a customer journey map change?
Identification of customer needs, expectations and problems
Customer journey map is a tool that will allow you, among other things, to understand customers’ needs and expectations. By analyzing the map, you will also identify the problems they encounter – you will learn, for example, at which stage of the path customers are most likely to abandon a purchase. This will be an excellent time to take a closer look at this stage and try to optimize it. The map will also show how visitors interact with your store. In the era of abandoned shopping carts, such knowledge can prove invaluable.
Work with the team to improve the customer experience
With a map at your disposal, it will be easier for you to plan marketing and sales activities for each of the stages that customers go through on their way to purchase. A detailed map should be presented to your company’s employees who are directly and indirectly involved in sales. It’s a good idea to encourage the team to report their findings about the current buying process in the context of the map created. This way you can generate brainstorming that will help optimize the process.
Evaluation of the offer and the current purchasing process
A well-prepared customer journey map should expose the weaknesses of your store’s offering. This consists not only of the prices of products, but also their availability, variety, forms and costs of delivery (parcel machines, courier, the possibility to pick up at service points or the company’s headquarters) and available forms of payment (customers recently particularly appreciate deferred payments and 0% installments, but also the possibility to pay with BLIK or a quick transfer using a payment gateway).
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Planning beneficial changes
Newly acquired knowledge is not only the ability to identify problems, but also to fix them. With hard data and suggestions from employees, it is possible to develop changes that will positively affect the company. It’s not only about improving customer service or creating a more competitive offering, but also about exploring available options for informing customers about new products or promotional offers.
What stages should a Customer Journey Map include?
Before you start creating your first customer journey map, we need to establish one very important thing: this map will not predict every customer behavior with 100% efficiency. What’s more, a good portion of the predictions will vary depending on what industry you operate in and who your audience is.
You can illustrate the customer journey, for example, with a timeline that shows the important milestones in your company’s buying process. These milestones will vary depending on what you do and how your customers operate.
Example:
FonPol store is engaged in online sales of cell phones and all kinds of accessories. The customer journey map of this store may include such stages as:
- occurrence of need,
- product search,
- store selection,
- product purchase,
- post-purchase behavior.
How might the different stages present themselves?
Need – the moment when a customer starts looking around for a phone. This may be due to the desire to replace an old device with a newer one, buy a gift or replace a lost/broken phone.
Product search – this stage will include several minor ones, such as:
- Searching for the right model (reading reviews, watching videos, using comparison sites),
- Clicking on ads that start showing up in the course of a search,
- Using search engines to find the best deals.
Store selection – at this stage, customers often:
- read reviews of the store,
- They make sure the product is available,
- check delivery options,
- check the expected lead time,
- verify whether the ordered product is shipped from Poland or – for example – from a warehouse in China.
Purchase – this is a very important point where the customer places the order and pays for the product. Reaching this stage means that the customer has already accepted the price, delivery method, etc. However, you may be unpleasantly surprised by the limited availability of payment methods.
Post-purchase behavior – this stage can end properly before it began (if the customer ends his adventure with the store on receiving the shipment), but it can also be stretched over several days, weeks or even months. The customer at this stage can – from the seller’s point of view:
- do nothing (simply use the purchased product without further contact with the store),
- return the purchased product,
- Give feedback on the product,
- Give feedback on the store,
- make another purchase,
- Recommend shopping at the store to friends.
This is just an example of the stages found in one customer journey map. A company that sells training is unlikely to be able to use the scheme listed above – after all, customers’ needs and expectations will be different, and the journey will be quite different.
How do you prepare to create a Customer Journey Map?
It’s time to move on to concrete actions. Where do you start and how do you ensure that your customer journey map contains all the relevant data and actually proves helpful?
First: Data acquisition and systematization
If your company hasn’t been in business since yesterday, you certainly already have a lot of information that you can use in the process of creating a customer journey map. You have emails in which customers inquire about products or point out problems. You probably have reviews pointing out your company’s so-called “pain points” or, on the contrary, highlighting good points. You can also talk to employees who have direct contact with customers – their stories will provide a powerful dose of information that you can use to “draw” a customer journey map. Analytical tools such as Google Analytics (the “Behavior” section) or Google Search Console can also be helpful – especially if you have an online business.
However, if you need more data, it’s also a good idea to research your company’s direct competitors – often customer reviews are available for all to see. As part of your research, it’s also a good idea to go through your competitors’ purchasing processes to verify the various steps yourself.
Another available solution is also to contact customers who have consented to communication from your brand. Ask them for their opinions on specific aspects of shopping at your store, or conduct a survey.
With a certain pool of data at your disposal, you need to sift through it so that only the truly relevant ones remain. Pre-verification will save you some work – you won’t need to analyze every piece of information, even the least relevant, and the results will still remain authoritative.
Second: Choosing a map template
The collected data should be applied to the form you have chosen in advance. If you do not have your own template that you want to use in creating the map, search the resources of the Internet and choose a template that is clear and contains a sufficiently large number of fields. Any such template can be freely reworked and customized to suit your needs.
To make a customer journey map, you can use even the simplest, free graphic tools such as Canva. However, if you don’t care about the visual side of the map, even the all-too-familiar Microsoft Excel is more than enough to prepare a functional customer journey map, filled with helpful information.
Creating a customer journey map
It’s a complex process that’s worth involving employees – especially those who deal directly with customers. Their knowledge and experience can prove crucial in preparing the map. With all the knowledge gathered (and organized), it remains to start applying its salient points to the chosen template.
Important!
There is nothing strange about repeatedly reworking a customer journey map in the process of creating it. Information that may initially seem important will turn out to be of marginal importance in the course of work, while other information – overlooked in the first moments of working on the map – may become a priority. The analogy is with the stages of the customer journey. The initial assumptions, when confronted with the acquired data, may have to be modified beyond recognition. The most important thing, however, is that the result should prove helpful and have a real impact on the company’s further activities.
Map vs. marketing personae
In the course of creating a customer journey map, marketing personas should be constantly kept in mind. After all, the map is supposed to serve the purpose of better understanding customers – so this is an ideal opportunity to test the performance of previously prepared personas in practice and see how well the assumptions contained in them coincide with reality. Also important is the fact that many companies should have more than one persona – especially if they have a diversified business or sell products or services aimed at different audiences.
Are emotions valid data?
Although in the first instinct many of us would answer such a question with an emphatic “no,” it is worth analyzing the data we have also in terms of the feelings and emotions that guided customers. Their opinions will often manifest specific emotions, and these will allow us to decide whether to treat a given opinion (especially one without numerical ratings) as positive, neutral or negative. Juxtaposing this data can make us realize that – for example – the payment stage often makes customers angry. Perhaps it’s a matter of an unnecessarily complicated process, or perhaps a lack of convenient forms of payment? Any such premise is worth detailed examination.
Summary
Preparing a customer journey map is a complicated but often necessary task. By collecting and organizing data, we will get a picture that will allow us to influence the company’s purchasing process and improve it accordingly. Although it often seems that in marketing it’s more about luck or coincidences of unforeseeable circumstances, this doesn’t mean that we don’t have the tools to influence how customers behave in our online stores. The best example of this is the customer journey map.
