Best practices for creating a customer journey map

A customer journey map is an essential tool to understanding how a customer experiences your company. Although customer journey maps are great, not all customer journey maps are equally effective. It’s important to understand the right components needed for a customer journey map in addition to the best industry practices. Below are some of the best practices you can use to incorporate into your customer journey map to make it as effective as possible.

Set clear goals:

The first step you should take when creating a customer journey map is to define clear goals and expectations. This will dictate other parts of the customer journey map and your approaches. Some examples of goals you can set include improving customer engagement, increasing revenue or increasing customer retention.

Create specific personas:

Once you set your goals, you need to start creating the personas for your customer journey map. Personas are fictional characters that mimic what the average customer of your business looks like. You need to be as specific as possible when creating the persona to adequately utilize other best practices. Your persona should include data like demographics, goals of the persona, specific characteristics, etc.

Hubspot has a convenient online Make My Persona Tool.

An example persona can be a 18-34 year old young, professional woman who prioritizes convenience over price for a coffee company.

Include the emotions of the customer:

Incorporating the emotions of the customer is essential to create an effective customer journey map. For each touch point in the customer journey map, the customer feels certain emotions that can influence their next step. When customers give you feedback, jot down what emotions they felt at each step of their journey. This will help improve the experience for future customers and create more positive experiences.

Which one is an easier buyer's journey?

Don't make your ideal client search for information!

List pain points and negative experiences:

The pain points and negative experiences that a customer faces in their journey map are vital points for businesses to understand. These pain points are a good indicator for companies regarding where they have gaps in their customer experience. By identifying and addressing these pain points and negative experiences, your business can reduce customer churn and improve retention.

Be honest. You are probably asked the same questions frequently. Don't make potential customers ask! FAQ's allow you to be upfront with how you handle the typical pain points.

List successes:

It’s just as important to list down the successes and positive experiences that a customer has in addition to the negative ones. This is where companies can find what worked in their customer experience and double down to create more positive experiences. Companies can gain a competitive advantage in user experience by utilizing positive reinforcement in their customer journey map.

Reviews are a great way to share success stories.

Case studies are also effective for sharing positive experiences.

Reduce interactions:

Many customer journey maps are long and complicated. This can result in customer’s taking a long time to make a purchase decision or exiting the customer journey map altogether. It’s important to reduce the number of total interactions, so the customer can efficiently go from finding out about your business and making a purchase decision. This is increasingly important as the modern customer’s top priorities include convenience.

 Make the content easy to find on your website. A recent survey of what people want to see on your website makes this easy.

Source:HubSpot

For more details you should read Website Necessities in 2021.

To learn more about how to use best practices in your customer journey map, get a free consultation here.