What Is a Customer Journey Map?

Many businesses today say their number one priority is to please customers. Although this sounds good, most companies are not even aware of how a customer interacts with their business and what pain points they have when accessing services. This leads to a gap in understanding the typical customer for a business and what their experience is like. Businesses need to understand customers’ needs in addition to each point of interaction they have with their company. This is why customer journey maps are vital for companies to understand and incorporate throughout their operations.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of each engagement a customer has with your business. With a customer journey map, businesses can have a storyline of how a customer interacts with their business from beginning to end. This allows you to place yourself in the mind of a customer and see what the lifecycle is for the average customer of your business.

Many businesses are unaware of just how much friction their customer lifecycle has and how many customers they lose due to a poor customer experience. A customer journey map provides employees and decision makers within the company with a complete outline of a typical customer, and this can be used to make optimizations that improve the customer experience.

Why is a customer journey map needed?

Visualization: Customer journey maps give a visual representation of how a customer interacts with a business. With a visual of how customers move across the business, you can remove any pain points and improve the overall customer experience.

Personalization: The modern business today needs to personalize the customer experience. Customer expectations are at all-time highs and businesses are unable to personalize experiences without knowing their customer journey map.

Components of a customer journey map

Personas: Personas are fictional characters that mimic the average customer for a business. It’s very important to create personas because that will provide businesses with an accurate depiction of who they are serving. When creating personas, make sure to include data like demographics, motivations, fears, characteristics, etc.

Touchpoints: Touchpoints are the points of interaction that the persona has with your business. This includes how the customer discovered your business, how they interact on your website/app, how they evaluate your products and services and how they make a purchase. These touchpoints indicate to businesses exactly where they are gaining and losing customers. Optimizing these touchpoints can help increase revenue significantly.

Roadblocks: Roadblocks indicate where the pain points for the customers lie in their journey. When a customer comes across a roadblock, they generally exit their journey with your business, and you lose them. These roadblocks make it difficult for customers to interact with your business. Identifying them will help remove them and reduce any friction in the customer’s lifecycle.

Are you answering your customers question or are you making them work to find answers?

To learn more about customer journey maps and how to use them in your business, get a free consultation here.