Step-By-Step Guide to the Customer Journey Mapping

Tuesday, 13 August 2019 / Published in Ecommerce, Influencers and A-Listers, online business

A Step-By-Step Guide to the Customer Journey Mapping

A common question that is asked by every seller or potential service provider is “How do we get our customers to do what we want them to do?” But that’s the wrong question to ask.

The question that you need to ask is, “How I can provide my customers with what they want while achieving my goals?” Now focusing on this point is the starting of the customer journey mapping.

What is Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a vital visual representation of every experience your customers or service recipients have with your organization.

The customer journey map is an illustration of all the touchpoints your company has with your customers.

It can reveal where your company is precisely fulfilling the people’s needs and where it is letting them down so that you can focus on your strengths and weaknesses.

Types of Customer Journey Map

● Current State Mapping

The main focus of Current state journey mapping is identifying the problems of customers regarding your service and solving them. It exists throughout the journey of a customer with your organization. This process mostly relies on customer interactions and their behavior. Current state mapping maps the customers’ reaction to your product, their opinions, excellent feedback, critical feedback etc.

The goal of Current state mapping is to map customers’ response and make changes in your production or marketing plans accordingly.

● Future State Mapping

Future state journey mapping is very different than current state journey mapping. Current state journey mapping will give you insights about how you can make changes in your existing plan. But Future state mapping is focused on creating an entirely new experience for your customers.

It is all about going ahead and planning a completely new strategy and new experience for your customers.

● Day in Life Mapping

This kind of mapping is mostly incorporated in advertising, communication, innovation and product development journey. It is mapped based on a few points.

When during the day customers interact with your product, brand or service?
How do they incorporate your product into their daily lives?
What are the problems they are trying to solve when they use your service?

So, when you have a journey map of a day, you can identify the problem your customers are facing and then create something to resolve that issue. It is a prevalent customer journey mapping method.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map?

Now that we know what a customer journey map is and what are its types, let’s see how we can create one for our organization.

Step 1: Understand the Behavioural Stages of the Customers

Based on your business, customers may navigate your online platform. A B2C company may have only a few defined phases, whereas a B2B company can have different layers to the representation of their products.

Your persona can give you a clear understanding of what a customer goes through while being a potential buyer of service.

The next step will give us an understanding of which level fits into which stages.

Step 2: Identify the Goals of Customers in Each Stage

Identifying customer goals is one of the most critical stages of journey mapping.

You need to know what customers want to achieve as they move through the behavioral stage. You can use several sources to collect this kind of data. Few of them are,

Surveys
User testing/beta testing
Interview transcript
Customer service emails of call records

After collecting and analyzing this data, you’ll be able to see if your product is up to the mark or not. And if not, what are the issues with the service you’re providing.

Step 3: List down the Touchpoints

Let’s start with what touchpoints are. Touchpoints are the instants where your customers interacted with you, and you have supported them to reach their goals. These touchpoints will be grouped together and added to the relevant stage of your customer’s journey. You can analyze the touchpoints using two reports.

Behavioural Report

The behavior flow report will use the statistical data of the movement of the customer on your website. It will help you know how your user is moving from one page to another.

You can differentiate this traffic by any parameter and analyze the data given to you.

Goal flow report

Goal flow report will help you ascertain if users are achieving the goal that you chose through the funnel.

You will be able to determine if a user or a few of them are leaving the website abruptly in the middle of their path or route. And you can also get to know about the place where your traffic reverts or loops back.

Both these tools are available on google analytics. You can analyze your data using these tools.

Step 4: Draw the Customer Journey Map and Analyse the Result

Now you’ve collected all the data you need. It’s time for the assessment. So, you need to determine the simplicity or complexity of your system in getting work done. You need to analyze the following points:

What are the obstructions in your system?
The number of people that left the process they were doing somewhere in the middle

The Google Analytics report that you’ve got in the step before will be able to show you exactly where the issues are coming up. And the behavioral reports will be able to show you why the customers are dropping out of the process.

Analyze the actions of your customers and assess how many times your customers’ needs met each touchpoint during each phase.

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Step 5: Optimization of Experience for Further Communication

So, you first need to segregate the touchpoints according to their priorities. You can rank the pages for ease of the process. And then you need to determine what you are putting under testing.

Take a simple example. If you are giving a subscription to a particular service, your customers are skeptical about getting locked into that plan. So, you need to be clear about the terms of the subscription. And that will make the customers less cynical about your service.

When we map a customer journey, you need to understand it is not going to be a linear process. There are going to be ups and downs. Getting people to your website without jumping or skipping steps won’t always happen.

So, you need to take as much time as you can to understand your customers and their goals. And how they move through your online platform. This assessment can give you a way to make your customers happy and will help you grow your business.

About the Author

Amanda Athuraliya is the communication specialist/content writer at Cinergix, the team behind the development of Creately. She is an avid reader, an experienced writer and a passionate researcher who loves to write about all kinds of topics.