Creating a customer journey map is a fantastic way of getting a greater picture of how your customers engage with your brand/services. Businesses often neglect the fact that customer success does not end or start at a certain point of sale.

In this article, you will find out what is customer journey map, how to create one, why it is important, and how it affects the overall customer success!

Ready to find out? Let’s get into action right away!

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a simple diagram that illustrates how your customers behave and engage with your company throughout the buyer journey. What isn’t simple is the fact that the customer lifecycle, as a whole, is very complex.

Chances are great that you may not know everything about your customers. By creating this map, businesses will have a better insight into all the steps that customers take to achieve their goals.

This map illustrates what your customers want, what they don’t, and what are their concerts and hesitations. Once you have the insight, you won’t have trouble maintaining positive relationships with them.

What Are The Benefits?

One thing is certain – the benefits are numerous. But, in order to be more specific, we have to name them, right?

Well, the benefits include:

• Improved customer conversion rates
• Minimized negative customer experience
• Decrease customer churn rates
• Increased customer retention
• Allows businesses to prioritize
• More throughout strategies
• Identifying potential gaps between departments

… and these are only a few!

Is your business ready to have these insights, or do you prefer challenges?

How To Create an Efficient Journey Map?

To begin with, you would need to take a few things into consideration, since there are numerous ways to create one. Nevertheless, focus on the following things:

1) Buyer persona

Defining the buyer persona is an incredibly important part when creating the journey map. Why? Because it helps you define your target audience.

Even though the buyer persona is fictional, in the long run, you may have a truly realistic representation of your ideal customers and audience.

So, start by filling in the necessary information like the demographics of your target audience, the income level, and occupation, and do not neglect the psychographic part like their daily challenges, problems, fears, interests, etc.

2) Highlight the target customer’s personas

Do you know why customers engage with your brand? Why do they like/dislike your services/products? If not, take this part into consideration while creating a customer journey map. A great way to gather this information is to use questionnaires or surveys. Do not hesitate to use questions like “What made you choose our products”? “How did you find out about us”?

A huge percentage of your customers will surely respond since they already have a bond with your brand. After that, highlight their goals and keep an eye on them because they are constantly changing.

The point is to have an up-to-date journey map. Lastly, focus on the most important ones

3) Identify your customers` goals

Do your customers prefer to purchase online, or at your store?

If it’s through your website, do they have trouble with the navigation? Is your website responsive? Or, think of whether they are satisfied with the price. Maybe you’re overcharging for the same product that they can find elsewhere?

The point is to identify each and every step that your customer takes in order to accomplish their goals. Once you succeed, implement them into your map.

4) Find out the obstacles and pain points

What’s stopping your customer from making their purchase? What are the motives behind their decision? Do you know why they leave the product in the shopping cart instead of clicking the purchase button?

Understanding the obstacles and the challenges that your customers deal with can help you a ton in making a better strategy! Once you gather the data, highlight it and insert it into your map.

5) Visualize

Once you choose your ideal template, visualize the necessary data. Be sure that everything is organized a lot better in comparison to writing all these things on a list of paper.

At the end of the day, we are creating a customer journey map, right?

6) Test, update and review

Check the final map, consider making a few changes here and there, and then use it as a map. Never stop updating it once you get new data.

What happens is that you may be left wondering why things don’t work even though the map was made a few months ago.

Conclusion

By now, you already know what is customer journey map, and even know how to create one! So, why wait? Use this information and create the perfect customer roadmap!