Craft an Optimal Customer Experience Using a Customer Journey Map

One of the primary goals your business should always pursue is maintaining a satisfactory relationship with its customers. With the proliferation of mobile devices, social media, and the internet, brands receive more direct, immediate feedback. Taking advantage of these elements to improve a brand’s customer experience is a great opportunity. How can you seize it? You’ll need to create a customer journey map. 

It’s no surprise that customers come first for every senior-level manager of an enterprise. That’s why everything that can impact their business, from strategies and processes, has their customer at the forefront. However, taking an approach that strictly focuses on examining quantitative data from analytics dashboards, statistical models, and percentages is not enough. Observing user behavior, as well as their feelings, emotions, and reactions, is a fundamental pillar to every 360° marketing strategy since a brand’s success with customers can depend on how well it treats its customers 90% of the time. Customer journey analytics gives corporations the tools to develop the most dazzling experiences for their customers that ensure their success.  

The relationship consumers have with a brand comes from how the brand makes them feel. A clear example of this is those who adore Apple even though their products cost three times more than ones from their competitors. Apple has long worked on the customer experience journey, and as a result, consumers have rewarded them with their loyalty. Their focus on the customer journey is a crucial differentiating factor between them and similar firms, even more than the price, product, or the service they offer. 

According to Business Insider, consumers need 12 positive experiences to balance out a negative one. This effort is significant if we take into consideration that a study from Cisco found that the customer experience serves as the basis for 70% of all purchasing decisions. This reason is why a customer’s adverse experience with a brand can lead to a considerable loss in revenue. We can avoid these situations by knowing our customers and having the necessary customer journey mapping tools to map out their experience with our product or service. Our customer journey map is the answer to this question. 

What is the customer journey map?

When we talk about the customer journey map, we’re referring to a template that helps us illustrate and interpret all the relationships and experiences a user can have with a brand, service, or product in every step of their purchasing journey across every channel. The result is a customer-centric journey analysis that assists in better understanding consumers’ needs, wants, and intentions behind their purchasing behavior. In customer journey marketing, every customer experience journey should adapt to each of your organization’s buyer personas to determine what touchpoints and stages are the most valuable to their experience with your brand.

This Design Thinking focuses on satisfying their needs, but it also offers you other benefits. Customer journey analytics lets you achieve harmony with your company’s internal and external vision when it comes to evaluating emotional and rational questions on how to treat consumers in every stage of the journey. Plus, the time you take to craft your user experience is the perfect moment to detect the abandonment points for every buyer persona to focus efforts on avoiding them. 

How to create a customer journey map

Now that we’ve seen how crucial it is to take the customer experience into account when developing a marketing strategy, how do we put it into practice? Here’s how to create a customer journey map. 

A strong relationship with experiential or emotional marketing requires developing a customer journey map incorporating some neuromarketing techniques. Spanish organization Viaje del Cliente states there is an excellent opportunity to stand out from the crowd by incorporating emotional management of customer needs.

Agustín Villena, an expert in entrepreneurship methodologies, views the customer journey’s role as a chance to establish a long-term bond with a user that allows them to feel like a brand or corporation worries about making sure that their experience, even in the post-purchase stage, is a positive one. 

When creating your customer journey map, you have to take these elements into account and move onto the following steps: 

• Customers

• Timeline

• Touchpoints

• Channels

• Customer emotions in every interaction 

1. Identify the customer: First, develop a complete profile of your customer by developing your buyer personas to get an inside look into their daily life, preferences, pain points, and interests. 

2. Understand the perceived steps of the relationship on the part of the customer: Connect and attract them, guide them, interact with them, retain them, and make them recommend us to others. 

3. Identify their drivers and doubts: The behavior of a customer looking for something online is different from running a specific search for our product. Staying aware, as well as understanding what they need and are looking for at every stage, will help you better interpret their behavior.

4. Map out their touchpoints: Find out what channels they use to reach us and the feelings they cause: good, bad, or neutral.

5. Evaluate critical moments and their metrics: These are the instances where the customer relationship and the customer wave; analyze why and improve whatever’s needed to ensure they shoot up to the highest part of the table.

6. Add our firm’s internal processes: How do we react in every customer touchpoint? This step will help us improve these relationships and our weak points. 

7. Understand their pain points and detect opportunities: The customer’s most adverse parts of this relationship are there to help us recognize our weaknesses and threats to our business. 

We’ll succeed in knowing what our consumers want and boost our strategy if we carry out this detailed customer journey analysis. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos once said, “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” 

Customers seeking interaction from their favorite brands online lets companies that connect with them a step further than the traditional brand-consumer relationship. The first step is to understand the customer and guide them along in their customer journey.