Customer journey mapping provides insight into the customer experience and allows you to identify areas of improvement that can help you save time and improve customer satisfaction. By understanding how customers interact with your business and what they go through throughout their journey, you can build a marketing strategy that streamlines the customer experience and saves you time.
"A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a company. It provides an understanding of the needs and concerns of potential customers, which directly motivate or inhibit their actions. This information allows companies to boost customer experience leading to higher conversion rates and improved customer retention."
Identifying touchpoints is an essential part of the customer journey mapping process. It helps businesses understand how customers interact with your business from the awareness stage through to being a customer or even a past customer.
We can define touchpoints as any interaction between a customer and the brand. This might include visiting websites and social media pages, attending events, reading emails or hearing radio ads, and interacting with staff. By understanding these touchpoints, businesses can gain insights into how customers experience your products and services.
Every touchpoint along the user’s path should be analysed to identify how a customer reacts or behaves. Businesses can gain insight into the different needs by analysing customers' emotions, feelings, pain points and actions. You can use these insights to determine product and service pricing, service delivery, distribution channels and positioning. It can also help decide which business resources can be used at each stage of the journey to enhance customer experience and drive efficiencies for the business.
Further, understanding customers' behaviours and how they interact at each stage of the journey helps to identify where customers might face obstacles and drop off the journey path.
Identifying the potential drop-offs in a customer journey map is essential to understanding and improving the overall customer experience. It helps pinpoint where a negative or less-than-perfect experience is causing customers to churn or even drop off before they become customers.
Assessing the customer journey for drop-off points allows businesses to improve the customer experience at those key points, increasing conversion rates and returning customers.
The customer journey mapping process also allows organisations to improve processes business-wide. Understanding how a customer interacts with your business and your people, as well as how data flows from the start to the end of the customer journey can be a game-changer when looking at your processes and business technology.
Automation comes hand-in-hand with analysing processes. Determining which processes can be improved and taking time to discover the data that flows throughout the processes can help identify which elements of your processes can be automated. When looking at automation from a marketing perspective, this could include:
Data collection for CRM
Automatic emails based on key events such as birthdays or abandoned carts
Triggers for collecting customer testimonials based on jobs being complete
Adding prospects to nurture campaigns based on actions such as downloading content
Customer onboarding
Overall, taking the time to do a customer journey map will have ripple effects across your organisation. Not only can it improve the positioning and messaging of your brand, but it can have massive advantages for you as a business owner or senior manager. If we can put in processes that can streamline data collection or task automation, we can give you back time in your day to focus on the revenue-generating activity instead of tasks that could be made easier and more efficient.