Mapping the Customer Journey

Do you know how to properly map out your customer journey? A customer journey includes the interactions someone has with your organization while trying to accomplish something. That could mean understanding a problem, comparing options, making a purchase, requesting support, implementing a service, renewing a contract, or recommending your company.

While you may think you know how they get from A to B, mapping it out makes it much easier to optimize those pathways. On the other hand, you may find out that stops they take aren’t the stops you think they take.

Mapping the customer journey can help you answer questions such as:

• Where is my audience coming from?
• Where do they interact with my business?
• How do they interact with my business?
• Where do they convert?
• How can I optimize my touch points for better conversion rates?
• How do I keep them interested?

Who doesn’t want answers to those kinds of questions?

What is a customer journey map?

Within your business, whether off or online, there are multiple goals and actions. Those actions may be conversions (e.g. purchasing), micro-conversions (e.g. signing up for a newsletter), or indications that someone is making progress (e.g. following on social).

A journey map is a visual or structured representation of that experience. With a journey map, you’ll have a better understanding of the path your prospects take on the way to becoming buyers.

The map doesn’t have to end with a purchase. You can also map onboarding, implementation, customer support, renewal, retention, expansion, and advocacy. Nor does every person represented on the map have to become a customer. Understanding why people leave or choose another option can be just as useful.

Customer journey mapping is the process of taking your consumers’ steps and turning them into a visual representation. You want to see how the customer gets from point A to point B to point C, outlining key events, why they might take each step, and where they get stuck. The map connects what the person is trying to accomplish with the places they interact with your company, the questions they have, the content they encounter, and the obstacles that affect their experience.

As you create your journey map, you’ll start to notice how some steps might not be so clear. Some callouts look more like suggestions. Users might get confused, shown by pathways like About > Services > About.

Patterns like these could mean visitors are comparing information, struggling to locate something, or simply exploring. Analytics can reveal the behavior, but additional research may be needed to explain why it occurs.

The straight line to conversion is fully fiction

When you first think of your prospects converting to customers, you probably picture a straight line. They came to my home page, looked at my services, selected the service and contacted me.

It’s hardly ever that crystal clear and linear. In fact, most customer journeys are convoluted, involving multiple touchpoints, both on and off site. In today’s fully digital, yet oddly traditional, world, someone might see an ad on YouTube for your product, look your website up on their computer, look your address up on their phone, and buy from your brick and mortar store.

People may also enter the journey at different points, move backward while comparing options, leave and return through another channel, or involve other people in the decision. In B2B purchases, for example, the person conducting the research may not be the person approving the expense or using the product.

As well, the first visit recorded by analytics may not represent the beginning of the journey. The final website interaction might not represent the moment the decision was made.

With all those many touchpoints, how can one keep track? You guessed it. With a customer journey map.

Documenting every possible click or forcing people into a predetermined funnel isn’t the actual goal, however. Its to create a useful model of the journey, supported by enough evidence to help you make better decisions.

Building your customer journey map

Do you know what a prospect looks like? What about a lead? How would they find you at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel? Do you know?

1. Create your goal statement

Decide why you’re creating a customer journey map. What are you trying to achieve, and in which area? “Map the customer journey” is too broad to be a useful goal. Narrow the map to a particular audience, situation, and outcome.

You might map the journey of:

• A first-time visitor trying to understand a problem
• A prospective client comparing service providers
• A software buyer moving from demonstration to internal approval
• A new customer implementing a service
• An existing client deciding whether to renew
• A customer trying to resolve a support problem

Journey mapping can help with:

• Finding inconsistencies: Compare the experience you intended to create with the paths people actually take. You can’t guess how your customers came to be; you need to know. Rather than assuming that they’re doing what you expect them to do in order to get from A to Z, use journey mapping to know for sure.
• Better personalization: Identify materially different needs that may justify separate content, messages, or experiences. Understanding the customer journey allows you to improve on it.
• Achieving goals: Examine how people reach an important action and what happens before and after it. How are they signing up for that newsletter? Which referring site brings the most conversions? You need to know. Mapping the customer journey can be used at the macro or micro level.
• Finding friction: Identify the places where people encounter confusion, uncertainty, technical problems, or missing information. Prospects already have a problem they need solving, which is why they’re looking at you. Your job is to make sure that the path from Awareness to Action is seamless. Mapping helps you fine tune each step along the way to do just that.
• Improving relevance: Determine whether the content, offer, and next step make sense for that person at that point. For example, someone just learning there is an answer to their question is going to need different support than someone who wants to purchase your product or service.

Define the business objective, but also define the customer’s objective. You may want a consultation request while the visitor simply wants to determine whether your company has relevant experience. Those goals can support one another, but they aren’t identical.

2. Create your profiles

It’s been awhile, but we’ve written about buyer personas before. Buyer personas help you to segment your target market, so you can develop better, more personalized marketing campaigns.

A full buyer persona is not required for every map. However, you should know which audience or customer situation the map represents. A generic map for “everyone” usually becomes a map for no one in particular.

Consider:

• What prompted this person to begin the journey?
• What are they trying to accomplish?
• What do they probably know already?
• What questions are they likely to have?
• What role do they play in the decision?
• What risks or constraints affect them?
• What would a successful outcome look like from their perspective?

Most organizations serve multiple audiences. A first-time buyer, existing customer, technical evaluator, executive approver, and procurement representative may interact with the same business for very different reasons.

3. Highlight Their Touchpoints

Out of the buyer personas you created, decide which one you want to target with your first customer journey map. I say “which one”, because different people take different paths to get here.

Now, a touchpoint is any place that your customers and prospects can interact with your business. This could be your social media channels, contact forms, CTAs, email marketing, white paper downloads… if there’s a place online that has your signature, or if there’s an action they can do, these are touchpoints.

Narrow the list to include just those your current target customer should be using, versus the ones they are usuing.

4. What Are They Feeling?

Why would they be at that specific touchpoint, and what would motivate them to click through? What are you doing to motivate them to perform the final act of contacting you, or filling out the newsletter subscription, or whatever it is that you chose as a goal?

5. What Are Their Obstacles?

Obviously, some of them aren’t doing what you want them to do, or you wouldn’t be here trying to figure out how to fix it. Somewhere, there’s an obstacle that is directly in the way of your customer making the sale. What is it?

For some, it’s cost. For others, it’s not quite trusting you to do what you say you’ll do. Data can help you see where you have abandonment issues. When you find out where the abandonment happens, you can optimize that particular touchpoint for better results and user experience.

6. Make Changes – But Not All At Once

Now that you know what’s getting in the way of your customers, you can update your site. However, take that with a bit of caution. Never make a bunch of updates all at once, unless you’re doing a full remake of the site. As you make changes, start with A/B testing to see which version performs better.

Just because you’ve done the research and customer mapping doesn’t mean you’re 100% correct. “Better safe than sorry,” should be your thought process. It’s prudent to take your time and make sure each step is done correctly.

Conclusion

Customer journey maps should be ongoing – kind of a constant work in progress. Review your map on a set schedule to make sure you can quickly identify any gaps or issues and fill them in as they happen.