How do you figure out what your customers really want or expect from your company? What happens when you offer the best product or service, and they still buy from your competitors? The truth is, the answer (and solution) lies in mapping and understanding the customer journey .
With this tool, you create a visual representation of every experience your customers have with your company, from initial engagement to the final stage.
To create an effective customer journey, it's essential to see yourself through your customer's eyes and take the same steps they do to fully understand their challenges.
Without further ado, let's understand what a customer journey is, and why you need to create yours.
What is the customer journey?
The customer journey is a tool used by managers to understand the steps their customers go through to achieve a goal with their product or service. Mapping this journey helps companies put themselves in the customer's shoes and see the business from their perspective.
Additionally, this tool helps companies gain insights into customer pain points, how they can improve this experience, and define what customers need to achieve this goal.
Another essential factor is transforming it into something practical, simple, and visual. This means you can ignore the details that are initially exceptional and focus on the clearest patterns of behavior to act on them effectively.
It is also important to remember that the customer journey cannot be confused with the company's internal processes.
The focus of the activity is to understand the steps the customer takes with your company, and not how your employee should act or do in this situation.
What do I need to know before mapping the customer journey?
A customer journey map takes many forms, but it typically appears as some sort of infographic for easy visualization.
Furthermore, the map focuses on telling the user's story, from the motivation that led them to find your product, their first contact with it, the trial period, feedback collection, and what encourages them to continue using and paying for the service or product you offer.
As you can imagine, this story may have longer and more delicate stages than the others—which is why it's so important to understand it fully. Whatever its form, the goal is the same: to bring clarity to your team about your customers' experiences.
Essentially, the customer journey should be:
- Simple and visual;
- Functional;
- Have up to 15 steps;
- Tell a story;
- Approved and developed by different departments of the company;
- Have a beginning, middle and end;
user experience management plan .
This allows companies to understand customer behavior and predict their actions before even acquiring leads and future customers.
What is the customer journey for?
Journey mapping helps you and your team put yourself in the customer's shoes and understand how you position yourself from their perspective. After mapping, you'll be able to identify:
- Valuable insights into the touchpoints you have with your customer – highlighting those that require the most attention;
- Possible gaps in your current operation;
- How your customer relates to your company;
- Variations in the sentiment curve (expectation vs reality);
- Opportunities and pain points.
This allows you to improve your customer's experience and identify the most and least difficult steps they face when using your product or service.
In other words, with the customer journey map in hand, you and your team will:
- Notice how and where your customers interact with your brand;
- Focus the business on specific customer needs at different stages of the purchase funnel;
- Understand whether the customer journey is following a logical order and without deviations;
- Get an outside perspective on your sales process;
- See the gaps between expectation and reality;
- Understand development and improvement priorities;
- Focus efforts on what is most important to your customer.
The 4 Stages of the Customer Journey Buying Process
Understanding what your customer feels or expects from your brand is crucial for your company to offer them something personalized and meaningful at each stage of their decision-making journey. Check out the four stages of the customer journey :
#1 Learning and discovery
In this first stage of the journey, your potential customer is not yet aware of the problem, so it is unlikely that they will look for solutions at this point.
The discovery phase isn't the ideal time to talk about your brand or product, but rather to educate your potential customer about the benefits and advantages of your product line. At this stage, it's time to showcase your brand's value proposition and how you can help this potential customer make the best decision.
#2 Consideration of the decision
In the consideration stage, your potential customer already knows they have a problem, and your focus is on understanding that problem in its entirety and ways to solve it.
But your potential customer isn't yet at the buying stage; they're just wondering how to solve their problem. The best thing to do at this stage is to address the various questions they likely have. In other words, the focus of your actions remains education.
#3 Purchase decision
Your potential customer has already come a long way, learned a lot from the materials you provided, and has certainly already formed an understanding of your company.
Note that up to this stage, your brand is being recognized in the market, your business has gained authority, and your audience is engaged.
So this is the time to reveal the details of your product or service and make it clear to this potential customer why your solution is best for them.
📌Check out our article: What is the feedback economy and what has changed in your consumer's purchasing journey?
#4 Loyalty
Your potential customer chose your company and closed the sale. Mission accomplished, right? Not yet.
If your brand has remained attentive and present throughout the customer journey, the biggest mistake you could make is to simply disappear after the purchase. This attitude not only arouses distrust but also wastes all the relationship building you've built previously.
When loyal, your customers can become strong advocates and promoters of your brand – a fundamental strategy for your company to remain competitive for many years.
📌Read our article: Customer Journey: Learn about the 4 stages of decision-making
What are the steps to map the customer journey?
Are you ready to start mapping your user journey? Like any other strategy or action plan, planning is required.
#1 Define the stages
The first step in creating a customer journey is to align the goals and stages you want to understand. At this stage, it's important to ask yourself some questions, such as:
- What is the main challenge I currently have with my clients?
- What do I want to identify when mapping my customer journey?
- What is my goal in understanding my customer's journey?
These questions will bring you greater clarity about the journey, as well as prevent you from wasting time focusing on one or more less important parts of the process.
#2 Select your touchpoints
Touchpoints are all the channels through which your customers interact with your company. Therefore, in this step, you should list all the touchpoints through which your customers reach you.
This is an important step in creating a customer journey map, as it provides insight into your customer's interactions with you. Online, some of the first interactions typically involve:
- Social media;
- Public review and feedback sites;
- Your own website;
- Chat;
- E-mail; and
- Telephone
A good tip is to do a Google search for your brand to see all the pages that mention you. It's also important to have a close relationship with your Google Analytics—through it, you'll be able to identify where most of your website visitors come from.
After becoming your customer, the points of contact may be different, such as:
- FAQ page;
- Skype;
- Chat;
- Your app (if you have one); and
- Representative.
#3 Map the journey (finally)
It's time to put everything you know about your customer journey on paper! A great tip to make your journey even richer is to bring together different departments within the company to get a 360-degree view of what the customer expects versus what they receive .
It's recommended that the journey be structured in columns, so at each stage, include the touchpoint, what the customer expects, what they receive, and the sentiment curve. There are some uncertainties in the sentiment curve stage, but you basically need to align how the customer feels after that stage. To clarify, check out some examples that may leave your customer dissatisfied:
- Does the step require a lot of effort?
- Are customer expectations too high for what they receive?
- What he gets, is it what he expects?
These are some examples that can leave your customer dissatisfied after a certain stage. And as I said before, there's no right or wrong way to create a customer journey map; the fields are fully customizable to suit your business.
Typically, the end result will be some form of infographic with a timeline of the user experience. But start with a team brainstorming session post-its on a large sheet of paper.
#4 Custom Fields
Because the customer journey is a flexible tool, it can include additional fields depending on your company's needs. We've compiled some examples of commonly used customer journeys.
#5 Turn insights into actions!
After mapping your customer journey, it's common for several ideas for new projects and improvements to emerge. To help you take all the necessary actions, I suggest a simple prioritization method:
- Select the point that needs to be improved as a priority – this will be your initial focus;
- Break this action down into smaller activities;
- Determine those responsible for each activity;
- Set a deadline to apply these improvements;
- Apply the action within the deadline and move on to the next priority action.
It seems basic, but selecting one improvement action at a time is one of the best ways to avoid getting lost in a sea of demands.
Above all, remember that the customer journey is not a final work , but rather a tool to help you understand and improve your customer and user experience .
As I mentioned before, it's important to keep in mind that the customer journey doesn't end after the purchase.
Your customers may share opinions and reviews about your company or product on specialized websites and communities. This requires careful social media monitoring, but the effort is worth it, as user feedback is valuable to your company.
Check out our article : Buying Journey and Customer Attraction: 3 Fundamental Principles for Success
3 Customer Journey Examples
Do you have any questions about how to create a customer journey? Check out the examples below of companies that use this strategy in their businesses:
Yahoo Customer Journey:
Yahoo's customer journey map is structured more like a flowchart, making it easy to track customer progress. They provide a simple breakdown of the customer who needs to recover their account. The process is straightforward and visual.
Did you like this example from Yahoo? There's more!
Starbucks Customer Journey:
Starbucks' customer journey map follows a timeline layout, mapping the journey from arrival to departure. It also allows you to understand customer expectations and sentiment at each stage.
Deepening the Customer Journey
Of course, this topic is a recurring one here at Harmo. We often receive questions about the Customer Journey and also delve into some more specific details.
To help you better understand how it all works, we invited Monise Tonoli, Customer Experience Manager at Peixe Urbano , to share her own experience measuring, gaining insights, and creating actions based on the Customer Journey in an interactive Webinar!
📌[webinar – Immediate Access]: Simplifying the Customer Journey
Webinar Topics:
- What is the Customer Journey and what is it for?
- How it should look visually;
- How to share the Journey with the company;
- Relating the Journey to the NPS;
- How to separate the journey into team tasks;
- How long does a Customer Journey last;
- Practical tips on the Customer Journey;
- And much more!
📌[webinar – Immediate Access]: Customer Journey in 2021: How to Plan to Deliver What Customers Need and Want Post-Pandemic?
Webinar Topics:
- How to plan for the start of a new year and not get caught with your pants down;
- Remapping the new journey (persona and new consumer behaviors;
- What are the most critical points of this new journey that we should pay more attention to?
- Rethinking the way we relate to the “new” customer;
- Global market data and upcoming CX trends for 2021;
- and much more!
How to Measure Customer Experience Through Customer Journey
This is a delicate step and depends largely on your customer journey goals. It's time to launch a survey to measure and track customer journey indicators .
To ensure you're able to capture the best insights from your customers in a subtle way, it's essential to apply your existing knowledge of customer profiles when creating your survey. But what type of survey should you use to obtain these indicators? Here are the most commonly used:
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS , or Net Promoter Score, is a customer loyalty metric . Its goal is to determine a consistent, easily interpretable score that can be compared over time or across industries.
The metric is designed to assess customer loyalty over a period of time, not over short periods of time.
If you're looking to measure steps more frequently, NPS isn't the best option. In this case, it's best to use CES or CSAT , depending on your goal.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
The Customer Effort Score is a metric used to measure the level of effort a customer put into resolving a specific issue with your company.
In addition to being the most predictive metric when it comes to customer experience , it is recommended for transactional research, that is, at shorter intervals.
This way, it can be applied after each stage of your journey, if your goal is to discover the customer's effort to take an action with your company.
The faster a customer can resolve their issue, the better off you are and the greater your customer's satisfaction!
But the truth is that the coolest thing is being able to use this tool to identify the details that can be improved within the Customer Journey.
For example, if the effort level is high: it indicates a process gap or a point in the journey where the customer simply doesn't know where to go.
You can recognize this issue and take corrective action to improve your relationship with the customer. There's always room for improvement, so identifying this is a huge advantage!
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
The Satisfaction Score is a metric that directly measures customer satisfaction levels in specific interactions with your company.
This is also a transactional metric, allowing you to measure each step of the journey if your goal is to discover customer satisfaction levels.
Which metric should I use to map the customer journey?
Before concluding, the goal is to help you understand the best time to apply the right metric . For example, NPS isn't recommended for short-term use; in this case, there are other metrics like CES and CSAT.
That's why choosing one survey at a time and timing it correctly is crucial. Only by wisely choosing the right survey to measure what you want will you be able to find the insights you seek!
Check out our webinar! Measuring Customer Experience: The 4 Key Metrics and Which to Use for Each Stage of the Journey
Conclusion
The customer journey is an incredibly powerful business tool. Besides being a very healthy practice for the company, it allows you to identify operational gaps
To ensure you have a 360-degree view of your customer, it's recommended to practice with different departments within the company, integrating teams and seeking solutions together to benefit the consumer.
So remember, the purpose of the map is to make the entire journey that the customer takes with your company visual , having a beginning, middle and end.
Another very important point before finalizing this topic is that you validate the journey with the actual customer. There's no point in creating multiple hypotheses and assuming that's exactly what the customer does, right?
Therefore, the customer journey must be as close to reality as possible, with as little “guesswork” as possible.
And to validate the journey, it's a good idea to monitor your customers' expectations/delivery levels. This way, you can identify their feelings and goals for your company.
Interested in mapping and improving your customer experience? Meet Harmo – the first and only platform that integrates online reputation management with NPS®, CES, and CSAT surveys.
