Customer Journey Mapping: the What, How and Why
You hear consultancies talking about Customer Journey Mapping a lot — so, what exactly is it? In this article, we 'map' out the What, How and Why of Customer Journey Mapping
What is Customer Journey Mapping?
Customer Journeys are notoriously known for being oversimplified on the surface but in fact are extremely intricate as you dive deeper. The Third industrial Revolution, which is a documentary we highly recommend watching, highlights what a customer's experience when interacting with your brand's touch points. (Read our takeaways by clicking here)
Customer Journey Mapping is a holistic and customer-centric approach that enables you drive business growth. It begins with getting to know your company, service and product, to post-sales interactions. By mapping out the complete journey your customer takes, you are able to not only directly influence the customer's experience over the whole sales process but also extra primary insights through first hand feedback from customers. Understanding the distinct difference between your customer's buying processes can be an eye-opener as it allows you to understand the various behaviors and interactions with your company or brand.
Why do you need a Customer Journey Map
With today's technology, the list for the touch-points your customers can interact with you have become never-ending. Which is why it's more important than ever to be clear about where your power of influence is at.
Some examples of touch-points
- Social media
- Email / newsletter
- Online advertisement
- Company events, Zoom webinars
- Referrals
The difficulty this brings...
With the multitude of channels and touch-points, it makes it even more difficult to keep track of how your customers get to know the work that you do. Which is why it is more important than ever to prioritize and refocus the efforts of the company, get a clear idea about the company's physical and online touch-points, which can help incredibly in locating the target customer base.
Getting a clear understanding on your customer base will provide you with the opportunity to implement proactive customer service plans, and also improve customer retention rate. It will also allow for predictions of the next steps of your target customer in the future.
How we help our clients develop their Customer Journeys
One of the core services we provide in the Strategy module is Customer Journey mapping, which involves taking you through the 6 stages:
- Awareness — how are customers coming across or hearing about your company?
- Consideration — your potential customer is now doing research and comparing your products and services to those in the market.
- Buy — your prospect has made a decision to go with your product and service by purchasing.
- Use — this is where your customer fully experiences the user friendliness and effectiveness of the product or service purchased.
- Help & support — when the customer reaches a bottleneck, this is where they will reach out with questions to your support team.
- Deepened relationship — if your client has had a pleasant experience with you company, they may considering re-purchasing or keeping an eye out for future offerings. this is the chance to focus on customer retention.
In order to map a more accurate journey, we work with our clients to develop buyer personas to walk through these stages, this allows for better understanding of the target customer's pain points and expectations.
With customer journey mapping, we aim to help you understand your customers inside-out - what questions they have, and the overview of their experience. This way, you can witness how your clients move through the sales funnel, and identify opportunities that drive growth.
Are you looking for a great strategy to kick start your business? Reach out with us today through email or messenger and let's chat.
