Creating Effective Customer Journey Maps: A 4 Step Guide

The business landscape is continually evolving, and so it is important for sales professionals and business owners alike to adapt to these changes. With the speed of data creation and how competitive it makes the marketplace, it is now crucial for businesses to thoroughly study their ideal buyer personas and find new and better ways to nurture them. This can often be done by improving their customer journey and move them along the buying cycle.

One of the many tools that help you do this is Customer Journey Mapping.

So you may ask; What is customer journey mapping?

How does it work?

Why do you need it in your business?

How do you devise a customer journey mapping strategy that works for you?

In this blog post we are going to explain what customer journey mapping is, and created a simple 4 step guide to help you to create one.

Customer Journey Mapping and What it Entails

Customer journey mapping is essentially a tool that helps you picture the overall feel and experience of a customer as they use your product or service.

Viewing your product or service from the perspective of your customers can provide you a unique perspective into why certain customers choose to use your products and services while others opt for your competitors’.

Customer experience has become very important in recent years where customers are now starting to value their experience with a particular company as important as the quality of their product or service, and in some cases more. This made customer journey mapping even more crucial to your business’ success.

In essence, this tool helps you connect with your customers in a way that helps you serve them better. 

Advantages of Customer Journey Mapping

Some benefits of using customer journey mapping include,

• It helps bridge the gap of knowledge between you and your consumers. It fosters a platform where you can engage with your users and make improvements to your product features and better target your consumers.

• It also helps you better understand your customers. By thoroughly undergoing the customer journey in your clients’ shoes, you can highlight lapses in your customer UX (user experience) you otherwise might’ve missed. You can then fix these problems by improving the customer journey in these touch points.

• It fosters a deeper connection with your customers. When done right, customer journey mapping effectively captures a good percentage of all the emotions your customers go through from the moment they get your service or product. Using this, it becomes easier for you to structure your content and deliver it in a positively impactful way.

Basic Types of Customer Journey Maps

There are essentially three basic ways in which customer journey mapping is practiced. They are:

1. Current State Mapping
2. Future State Mapping
3. Day in the Life Mapping

Current State Mapping

This is basically a form of customer journey mapping that analyzes how your customer experience operates today. It emphasizes on finding and resolving all existing pain points in your customers’ journey.

Current state mapping is very extensive as it captures everything about your customers’ journey beginning with their very first contact with your business. This type of customer journey mapping utilizes every resource drawn from your customer, ranging from,

• Their thoughts,
• Emotions, and
• Existing behaviors.

Through this, you are better able to see what your current customer experience is, and what it’s lacking. From here, it becomes possible to more accurately adjust your process accordingly.

Future State Mapping

This type of customer experience map focuses on overhauling the old journey map in favor of a new one. Rather than analyzing and looking for ways to improve the old journey experience, it is specially designed to help you create a new and better experience.

While it doesn’t neglect current state mapping, future state mapping aims to help you create unique experiences for your customers that they can find exciting and rewarding. With this method of mapping the customer journey, resources like creativity and innovation are given more priority than data.

One especially important benefit of adopting this type of customer experience mapping is that it’s capable of effectively helping you to discover new opportunities that are crucial to meeting customer desires and hopes. 

Day in the Life Mapping

This type of customer journey mapping bears considerable similarity to current state mapping with the difference that it takes on a more expansive scope.

Day in the life customer experience mapping helps you better understand the intricate use of a product or service by a customer and clearly highlights any challenges they might encounter while using your product/service.

It is so detailed, that it takes into account the time these issues are likely to come up. What really distinguishes this type of journey mapping from the current state is that it aims to improve your customer user experience through optimizing and improving the little details, like each day-to-day activity.

Now that you’ve seen the benefits of mapping your customers’ journey, how do you create a client journey that works best for you? Here is a simple customer journey map creation process you can follow.

4 Step Guide to Creating Your Own Customer Journey Map

1. Conduct persona research
2. Define customer touch points
3. Identify the touch points to penetrate
4. Prioritize and fix roadblocks

Step One: Conduct Persona Research

This helps you to identify what type or group of people you would be better served marketing your product to. When you have a pre-defined group of people who you’ve been able to ascertain have a need for your product or service, it is easier to accurately map their user journey.

You can carry out persona research through,

• The use of webmaster and search engine analytics
• Reviews online
• Various social media platforms
• Analyzing your current customers
• Using customer surveys 

For more information on how to create a buyers persona, you may check out our blog post here.

Step Two: Define Customer Touch Points

After you have successfully conducted your persona research, you need to find the various points your customer will have contact or interaction with your product or service. 

You can do this through the following main stages:

• Awareness,
• Assessment,
• Decision, and
• Post purchase

To accurately pinpoint your customer touch points, you should review your sales and marketing process, with the aid of a content map, to ensure that every possible interaction your customer has with your company is covered.

To learn more about content mapping, please read our blog post here.

Step Three: Identify the Touch Points to Penetrate

With so much data gathered, how do you effectively determine which touch points to focus on and when?

Asking yourself crucial questions that your prospective and existing customers may have when identifying the solution of their pain points can help you determine where best to channel your efforts.

• Where do your customers go when they have a need that has to be met?
• Where do your customers go to find the exact resource that solves this issue or need?
• Where do your customers go when they are ready to make that purchase decision?
• How do your customers interact with you after their purchase has been made?

Step Four: Prioritize and Fix Roadblocks

Once you have been able to identify lapses from Step Three, you can then order them according to importance and sort through the list.

Upon implementing your solutions to any challenges your customers might’ve encountered on their customer journey, it is also vital that you analyze the effects of the solutions you’ve implemented and act on the feedback.

Conclusion

If you haven’t mapped your customer journey yet, you should start looking into this soon. You will find the practice to be very beneficial in helping you to understand your customer’s overall experience with your business. This way, you can continue to improve it and be able to stay ahead of your competition.

Is this information useful? What is your experience with customer journey mapping? Comment below and let us know!

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Other Related Blog Posts:

• How To Create A Buyer Persona In 4 Simple Steps
• Content Mapping Made Simple: A 5-Step Guide to Getting Ahead of Your Competition