What is Customer Journey Mapping & Why is it Important?

What is Customer Journey Mapping & Why is it Important?

A customer journey map is a visual depiction of a consumer’s path (also known as the buyer journey or user experience). It aids in telling the tale of your consumers’ experiences with your company across all touchpoints. Mapping the customer journey out visually helps guarantee that no customers are missed.

By conducting content research and testing, you can discover what B2B company executives should be focusing on to improve their customer experience. This method aids B2B business leaders in gaining insights into common client pain areas that may help them optimize and personalize the consumer experience.

How Do We Define Customer Journey Mapping?

The goal of customer journey mapping (also known as user journey mapping) is to create a visual narrative of your consumers’ interactions with your brand. This allows businesses to empathize with their customers and look at their brand from their perspective. It helps you determine where your consumers are experiencing pain and how you can fix it.

To begin, all possible customer touchpoints are identified, such as a website, social networks, interactions with marketing and sales personnel.

Various touchpoints are linked together to create buyer personas’ journeys. For example, a millennial buyer persona may discover a product on social media, research the mobile version of your site, and purchase a desktop computer.

A customer journey map should include information on the customer’s experience at each touchpoint. This may cover what action the consumer must perform and how your company responds.

Why Is It Essential To Map The Customer Journey?

Customer journey mapping is essential since it’s a strategic technique to better comprehend consumer demands and improve the customer experience.

Small and medium-sized enterprises require the same level of customer journey mapping as larger corporations. Regardless of size, all businesses must provide an omnichannel approach to customer service, marketing, and sales to remain competitive.

Personalization is one of the most essential aspects of customer experience. According to recent research, 84 percent of customers think being treated as a person rather than a number is crucial to securing their business. Customer journey mapping allows small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) to provide personalized experiences across all touchpoints for each individual, on every channel.

Mapping the customer journey may provide you with several advantages, including:

  • Optimizing the customer onboarding process by allowing you to adjust it as needed.
  • Benchmarking the customer experience you want to provide versus what your consumers receive.
  • Understanding the many buyer personas that exist throughout the buying funnel and how they differ from one another.
  • Organizing your buyer journey in a logical sequence.

However, the most significant advantage is gaining a deeper understanding of your consumers. The greater you understand your clients’ needs, the better able you are to meet them.

What Are Omnichannel Marketing And Customer Service, And How Does Customer Journey Mapping Contribute To It?

Consumers today demand a highly personalized experience, which includes your marketing and customer service efforts. Omnichannel marketing and customer service are terms that describe this integrated approach.

Customer journey mapping is also an effective technique of interacting with customers. Customer journey mapping allows marketers to target one prospect across many touchpoints, including for example a customer who looks at a product on a website and is subsequently retargeted with a social media ad.

Omnichannel marketing, which aims to provide the greatest possible customer experience, is frequently complemented by omnichannel customer service. This is where a client can get support from across any channel, such as via social media or messaging apps, as well as live chat. Customer journey mapping might help your Customer Service staff better understand and resolve concerns by allowing them to track down the client’s whole journey.

A Customer Journey Map Includes The Following;

  • Stages of Customer Journey. Identifying phases in a customer journey is one of the initial steps in developing a customer journey map. A consumer’s journey consists of at least four stages: inquiry, comparison, purchase, and installation. These stages may be referred to by different names; for example, awareness is sometimes known as an inquiry. Loyalty or advocacy is frequently considered the fifth stage.
  • Customer personas. Your Customer Persona is the realistic representation of your ideal target audience. CX teams may more accurately predict those consumers’ actions and feelings using personas, which makes them an important tool for developing journey maps.
  • Buyer touchpoints. Touchpoints that a consumer is likely to utilize throughout the journey should be included in every customer journey map. A customer may use phone calls or chatbots to talk with a company during the installation or service stage, for example.
  • Buyer feelings. One of the major objectives of creating a customer journey map is to anticipate customers’ feelings and sentiments. As a result, a company may identify potential sources of pain and pleasure.

Typical Issues in Mapping Customer Journey

It might not be simple to create a customer journey map. Some typical issues that people face include:

  • Not consulting appropriate departments. Customer journey mapping requires the involvement of a wide range of roles and departments, especially those that are customer-facing. Companies should seek input from their employees while creating a customer journey map, as well as distribute the maps and educate client experience, marketing, and sales teams on how to utilize them to market to target audiences.
  • Unavailability of customer data. Customer journey maps are difficult to produce without using data to determine customers’ behaviors, preferred touchpoints, and customer satisfaction levels along the way. Companies may collect consumer information by developing voice-of-the-customer programs, conducting surveys, and monitoring social media sites.
  • Looking at the client journey map as a fixed entity. Customers, markets, and products evolve, which necessitates that firms update customer journey maps regularly to reflect these changes. Customer journey maps may get out of date or incorrect if they aren’t updated regularly.

Bottomline: Optimising Customer Journey Map

It might be time-consuming to map out several distinct consumer journeys for many different buyer personas. And, even after you’ve created a map, you’ll need a method to deliver an individualized omnichannel customer experience based on it.

So, if you want to do customer journey mapping correctly, then you’ll need tools that can make the process more convenient. Customer journey mapping tools can easily be found included in various marketing automation platforms. They let you quickly develop customized customer journeys and automate marketing activities. This takes your campaign to the next level with marketing automation.

Want To Optimize Customer Journey For Your E-commerce Brand’s Growth? 

Tap into the marketing automation and intelligent customer data superpowers with Wigzo! Map every customer, engage them contextually, and retain them for maximum lifetime value. Start your FREE trial for Wigzo now and experience high-performance conversion!

Kaberi Gogoi

Kaberi Gogoi

Kaberi is currently working with Wigzo and has a 6+ years of expertise in devising result-focused digital strategies and campaigns. During her leisure time, she enjoys shopping for plants and pottery. Linkedin

Related Blogs