Understanding your customers’ minds can be challenging. When you think you have known their needs and wants, a new technology, buying trend, or preference emerges.
Several things happen in the purchasing process that leaves businesspeople wondering what the problem might be. For instance, why does a client spend more time adding products to their carts only to abandon them at the checkout?
Or why do customers take many steps to navigate from point A to B when it should take only one? A simple answer is that you likely need a clearer understanding of your customer journey when buying your products or services.
In this article, we will explain all you need to know about a customer journey map, what it is, and its benefits to your conversion rates.
What is customer journey map analysis
Different definitions have been used in the customer journey map area. The customer journey mapping concept itself can be quite confusing as different people define and implement it differently.
Regardless, this field has evolved to ensure that the customer journey map is defined and executed to meet the customers’ needs.
According to the dictionary, a journey is a process of moving from one place to another. Similarly, a customer journey is the steps customers take in their purchasing journey or while completing a transaction with a business.
Customer journeys involve multiple channels that must be followed to complete a task or get the desired result. Examples of these interaction channels include creating an online account, contacting customer service, making a purchase, creating an invoice, or engagements through the business’s social media accounts or on live chat.
In a nutshell, customer jour mapping is the act of capturing what your customers think, feel, and do as they try to complete a transaction or achieve something. It is customer-driven and executed from their point of view.
It is advisable to understand that customer journey mapping is a process and a tool that includes mapping of the current state, day-in-life mapping, future mapping, service blueprinting, and execution through customer journey management.
Understand customer journey management
Customer journey management is a customer service facet of understanding, planning, implementing, and optimizing journey maps portfolio to help realize a positive customer service experience.
A critical part of Customer journey management is the analysis or customer journey analytics, which entails tracking and analyzing how clients use various channels to contact your business. It covers all the present and future channels that interface directly with customers.
The aim of customer journey analytics is to enable businesses to provide optimal customer experience across all the touchpoints by giving cross-functional teams the necessary insights to execute it.
The process is data-driven and gives life to your customer journey mapping. It allows you to appropriately adjust each channel and step of the journey, highlighting everything a customer may need.
Furthermore, it enables customer experience optimization so that clients can achieve their desired outcomes and value.
Benefits of customer journey mapping.
As a means of identifying customer touchpoints and understanding how they affect customer experience to provide appropriate solutions for positive customer experience, customer journey analytics have the following benefits:
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Allows you to retarget your brand with an inbound perspective.
Instead of discovering your clients through outbound marketing, you can let them find you by employing inbound marketing strategies.
Outbound marketing includes tactics that are poorly aimed at uninterested or generalized audiences and seek to interrupt clients from their daily duties. This marketing approach is inefficient and costly. It deters and annoys prospects and customers.
On the other hand, inbound marketing involves crafting valuable and interesting content that customers are searching for. It entails grabbing their attention first before focusing on conversion and sales.
By doing in-depth customer journey mapping, you get to understand interesting and useful content for your audience and what turns them away. After this, you can create more such information to grab them and keep them in your business.
Image alt text: an illustration of a customer journey mapping model.
Author credit: By Michaela Heintz – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86241787
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Helps create a new customer target base.
Without doing a customer journey analysis, you will fail to understand your clients’ psychographics and demographics. \
This is actually dangerous since it is a waste of time and money to set up a marketing campaign that targets a broad spectrum of customers more than those who are interested in what your brand offers.
Researching your customers’ pain points and needs and understanding their journey maps gives you a clear picture of the types of prospects who are genuinely interested in achieving a goal with your company. Therefore, you target your marketing efforts to a specific audience.
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Helps you create proactive customer service.
Customer journey analysis is like a roadmap toward customer experience. It helps you identify where prospects will face challenges and where they’ll get delighted while interacting with your brand.
Knowing these prior allows you to plan and execute your customer service strategy appropriately and intervene in time, maximizing your brand’s value to clients. Also, a proactive approach to customer support shows your audience that you are a reliable business.
You can also implement offline support systems such as help desk software like chatbots to stand in when your team is unavailable or engaged somewhere. This way, people won’t call you outside your work hours.
For faster solutions, you can build an informative knowledge base with basic questions and steps to solve various technical problems.
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You can boost customer retention rates.
When you know your customer journey, you can easily identify areas you can wait and improve on. And when you get this correctly, your clients will experience fewer challenges along the process, reducing the chances of them leaving your business for competitors.
Customer journey analysis helps you point out people who are likely to churn out. And if you go through their common behaviors and actions, you can develop a solution to help them stay. Although you cannot retain all of them, you will probably reduce your customer churn rates.
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Can help you develop a customer-focused mentality in your business.
As your brand grows, it becomes difficult to coordinate all areas to be as customer-centric as your contact center, success, and support team. You can always set sales and marketing objectives that do not resonate with your customers’ needs.
It is, therefore, important to share your customer journey mapping results with your entire team. The good thing with these results is that they map out every single step a customer is making during your interactions. And these insights are essential for your sales, marketing, and customer service departments.
The process of customer journey analysis.
Customer journey analytics gives you the insights you require to successfully manage the customer purchasing process. From reducing churn rates to identifying customer behaviors, this analysis will let you leverage behavioral data for your financial gains.
Here is the process to follow when doing customer journey mapping:
1. Map customers’ journeys and aggregate your data.
First, businesses need to develop a customer journey map and leverage the data you got. Strong customer journey analytics tools will help you do successfully do this, reducing the time you need to spend collecting data from third-party locations, survey results, or customer service chat platforms.
Intelligent customer journey analytic systems will also let you track data in real-time, enabling you to create a comprehensive map that responds to current customer behaviors.
They should also be able to gather insights from multiple channels to let you understand customer interactions from all perspectives; sales, marketing closing, and much more, and break the conventional business silos.
2. Analyze customer behaviors and data.
After mapping your customers’ journeys and gathering relevant data, you can relate specific behaviors, social media comments, survey results, and many more.
You need smart customer service performance analytics tools to link all these data to relevant metrics efficiently.
3. Implement actions informed by data-based insights.
Effective customer journey mapping and analysis give you the ability to see causes and effects, as well as relevant solutions to make everything right in the whole customer journey or specific areas in the process.
When people react badly to a given interaction or process, you can use A/B testing customer service to see how different changes can affect your future decisions.
Also, you can coordinate everyone across your business departments to work towards customer satisfaction using their experience based on the data analyzed.
Conclusion.
Customer journey mapping is the primary step business need to do to gauge the level of customer experience and satisfaction they are offering their clients.
However, after mapping the journey, you need to do an in-depth analysis of the map to get the exact areas you need to simplify and streamline for a positive customer experience that facilitates loyalty and boosts business income.
Follow the steps discussed in this post to help you understand the benefits of customer journey mapping and how you can successfully do it.
Success.
