What Is a Customer Journey Map? | C.C.S.

Great customer service is as important as high-quality products/services. That’s why businesses must continuously improve their customer engagement strategies. One way to do this is by investing in cloud call center software. This technology helps streamline your communications and offers valuable insights. You can boost this with professional Call Center Studio services.

Call Center Studio helps supercharge customer service through 24/7 Omni-channel support. The software and professional service can facilitate customer experience transformation. By using this, you can leverage the customer Journey map to understand how customers interact with your business. Herein, you’ll learn what the customer journey is and its importance. You’ll also learn how to create a customer journey map and some examples.

What Is the Customer Journey?

A customer journey represents a user’s journey as they engage with your business. It takes you through the experiences a customer undergoes across varying touchpoints. Customer journey mapping entails brands stepping into the customers’ shoes. This means you view the business from a customer’s perspective. The visual representation should cover interactions across all your touchpoints. The typical channels include live chats, email, social media and phone calls.

What Are the Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping?

Customer journey mapping provides insights into common pain points and potential solutions. It is a strategic approach, as businesses strive to understand customer experiences and expectations. The customer journey typically includes the following stages:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Purchase
• Post-purchase experience
• Advocacy

Mapping out these stages and viewing them from a customer perspective paints a better, bigger picture. This helps you optimize the customer experience and also has the following benefits:

Enhanced Customer Satisfaction

A customer journey map helps you establish customers’ pain points. This enables you to implement changes, improving products/services and processes. The customer-focused changes improve satisfaction rates, delivering better ROI (return on investment.)

Increases Customer Loyalty

Through the customer journey map, you can establish areas that cause friction. This helps you to improve these and offers a better customer experience. You also spot areas that contribute to a better customer experience. You can use this information to improve other areas. This makes it easier to transform customer experience across the board. Customer experience transformation helps create customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is a valuable asset that improves profitability and drives long-term success.

Improves Customer Advocacy

Loyal customers don’t just engage with your business repeatedly. They can easily be converted into business advocates. Customer journey mapping can help you further improve their experiences. Better experiences make the customers happier and more willing to advocate for your business.

Improves Productivity

As employees view the customer journey and their contributions, their engagement improves. They’ll be more motivated and productive to maintain and improve the customer experience. This translates to reduced operational costs.

Customer journey mapping delivers notable benefits that allow businesses to achieve their goals. Nonetheless, this is only true if the customer journey map is effectively created.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map is a multi-step process. This is only effective when guided by clearly defined goals and objectives. This typically means establishing the specific customer experience you intend to understand and/or improve. The next steps include:

Customer Segmentation

Each customer persona has a unique journey. Customer segmentation following your goals and objectives helps you to create an effective map. Once you segment the customers, the next step is data collection. You can collect relevant data from diverse sources as:

• Customer support interactions
• Feedback from customer satisfaction surveys
• Sales data
• Website analytics

Analyzing the data provides actionable information. This is what’s needed to create an accurate customer journey representation.

Map Out the Journey

What are the customer stages and touchpoints? Customize the customer stages from awareness to advocacy. This should align with your brand’s offering. From here, establish and map out all the touchpoints. These are the interaction points your target customers utilize, including in-person visits. From here, describe the customer’s actions and behavior at each touchpoint. This means establishing:

• What they ask and want to find out
• What they want to achieve
• The actions taken

Note the Customer Experience

What are the emotional aspects of the customer journey? You can now weigh the touchpoints and how they affect the customers. They could be excited, satisfied, confused, or frustrated. This experience dictates the next steps in a customer journey. Noting this allows you to highlight the main opportunities and customer pain points. This information is vital in your efforts to improve customer experience.

The Map

You now have enough information to create the customer journey map. Now, you can leverage tech tools like customer journey mapping software for visual representation. You can also use traditional tools like paper or a whiteboard. The primary point is to create a detailed visual representation of the customer journey. You can use features like different colors, icons, symbols, or elements. This ensures you differentiate between touchpoints, stages, actions and customer emotions.

Collaborate

Now that the customer journey is mapped, you should involve the relevant teams. The teams may include:

• Customer support
• Marketing department
• Sales team
• Product development

Sharing the customer journey facilitates collaboration. It is a chance to implement relevant changes geared toward customer experience improvements. Keep in mind that the customer journey map is not static. Customer preferences and expectations are ever-evolving. As such, you must keep updating the map and implementing relevant changes.

How to Use Customer Journey Maps

The customer journey map provides valuable information. This can be used to optimize your processes and offer a better customer experience. Among the ways you can use the customer journey maps include:

• Establish and eliminate pain points
• Personalize customer experiences
• Identify opportunities and optimize their potential
• Improve the customer onboarding process
• Customize employee training for better engagement and productivity

The bottom line is that customer journey maps help improve your business processes. Viewing your business from a customer’s standpoint provides valuable information. This enables your brand to make relevant and customer-centric changes. The changes offer better value, customer experience and satisfaction rates.

Examples of Customer Journey Maps

There’s no one-size-fits-all customer journey map example. The map forms vary, which can be as per your:

• Industry
• Customer personals
• Goals and objectives

Here are two examples:

E-commerce Store Customer Journey Map Example

The customer journey map focuses mainly on a customer’s online buying journey. The map can detail:

• Awareness – The customer usually uses search engines to find a product online. They can land on your brand either through organic search results or ads.
• Consideration – Customers may browse your product listings, comparing features and prices. They could also use price comparison engines to establish the value.
• Touchpoints – The customer can contact your business via email or live chat. They also interact with your website, this includes browsing through reviews and ratings. If they select your product, they proceed to the purchase.
• Purchase – Your online store may require a customer to sign up. The customer then adds the product to the cart. They proceed to check out. Here, they provide payment information and shipping address. They then place an order and wait for delivery.
• Post-purchase – After customers receive and use the product, they express emotions. This can be collected from reviews and ratings. The customers can express excitement and satisfaction with positive reviews. They could also poorly rate your products, expressing frustration and dissatisfaction.

B2B Customer Journey Map Example

The B2B customer journey slightly differs from that of final consumers. This is mainly at the discovery and interaction stages. The stages may include:

Awareness

The B2B customer researches and discovers your business. Touchpoints may include web content and sales calls. The engagement process often includes a quote or proposal, followed by negotiations. This adds more touchpoints, including emails.

Purchase

The purchase process depends on the nature of your products/services. For instance, for SAAS, this may include a free trial. At this point, the customer can express satisfaction and confidence in a brand. They commit to the product and keep the interactions going.

Post-purchase

Post-purchase also takes shape per the product/service. For the SaaS case, this may include onboarding. You provide training to help customers get the most out of your product. Product quality and onboarding determine if you’ll build long-lasting relationships. The ongoing support also counts in the long run.

Wrapping Up

Customer journey mapping is significant as you strive to build a successful business. The map can help you offer better products/services and customer experience. Call Center Studio solutions can help implement the noted changes. This includes using cloud call center software to streamline communications. You can also leverage other features to keep up with your customers and offer a better customer experience.

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