According to recent studies, companies that care about understanding how users interact with the buying process and why they buy one product and not another are more likely to succeed, for this there are several tools you can use. Today, we will show you the importance of making a Customer Journey Map in your business.
The Customer Journey Map is one of the most complete tools to evaluate and design the user experience. It is widely used by UX teams, customer success and marketing, in order to better understand customers and users, and today you will learn the basics to design it for your customers.
What is a Customer Journey Map
Before we start, it will be necessary to understand what a Customer Journey Map is. It is a Design Thinking tool, i.e. a method to generate innovative ideas to identify and provide solutions to real customer needs.
The most important thing about the Customer Journey Map is that it designs a methodology to develop innovation, where people are at the center. As with inbound marketing, the objective is to create a strategy around the customer, but this time we are not only going to plan advertising, but the entire buying process.
It is important that this strategy is embodied in a map, with each of the phases that a person goes through from the moment a need arises until it is solved thanks to your brand.
This map should also incorporate the description of channels, tools and elements that interact with customers in the phases of information, decision, purchase and, of course, after-sales service.
As you can imagine this map has to be adapted to the life cycle of a customer and each of the target audiences or products and services, remember that in the end this map details each phase of the process of resolving needs and therefore each case will be different. This does not mean that you are going to elaborate thousands of maps, but rather you will have to identify the types of customers to adapt it to their needs.
Designing this map correctly helps you to detect which stage of the process generates the most value for the customer experience, because the customer journey map takes into account the feelings, emotions and perception of the customer. Also, you will be able to identify the stages you need to improve, either because the customer feels frustrated or untrusting.
How to build a Customer Journey Map
Before starting to build this map, it should always be built from the customer’s experience and not from the company’s experience. If you do a general search on how to do it, you will probably find several designs and strategies in Google, this is normal because as we have seen, it depends on the customer and the product. However, there are some general basics that we will tell you below so that you have a basis for creating your own Journey Maps
Research and creation of your buyer
Actually, more than “creating” we have to answer the question: who is our consumer and collect all the information about him. This stage is the most important because we are going to investigate our customer from several perspectives. First we have to determine who our customer is, their age, gender, place of residence, then we would have to determine what their interests and needs are.
The other part of the research is focused on knowing their experience with the buying process. Here you have to inquire about their emotions and the feelings they experience while buying from us, if there is excitement, frustration or distrust. If we already have some customers it is easier to get this information you can get it from the customer service team, social networks, the same feedback from the employees of the company, especially from the employees who have a closer contact with the customers.
If you have not yet launched your product for sale, then you can do a dry run with your own employees or people you trust. Luckily, there are some applications that help you capture all the information related to customer service so that you can then evaluate it and include it in your Customer Journey Map.
Organize a Workshop
With this information, you have to put together your team with all your collaborators and employees who are or will be in contact with the customer, so that they can participate in the creation of the Journey Map. In this workshop, your team should focus on:
Define the scope, the first step to start with the design of this map is to define the objective, for example it is not the same if you want to position a new product or if you are only interested in building customer loyalty or improving the shopping experience.
Describe the buyer, this is where we will use the information gathered in the first point. It is very important that you pay special attention to identify and describe the needs of your customers because remember that your strategy is to help solve them.
Define the stages, here you have to describe what will be the main phases in the buying process, this should start from the moment the customer’s need arises and end until the customer has your product.
Define activities, in this part you detail each action or each activity that the user or customer has to do in the different stages. Concretely, the activities can be: waiting, entering the page, entering a store, selecting, writing data, among others that you identify.
These are the main elements, but you can add to this Customer Journey Map others that allow you to graphically capture the user experience you want for your customers. One of these elements is a Storyboard, which we regularly only used to make marketing videos, on this occasion we can use photos, videos or anything that helps us to visualize these actions that you expect the user or customer to perform.
Another tool that you can incorporate is a lane of emotions, which is nothing more than the graphic record of the emotions experienced by the customer throughout the buying process, you can represent it with a graph by placing the lowest number for negative feelings and the highest for positive feelings, for example 1 if you feel frustration or 3 if you feel excited.
Another graph you should attach is the channels, i.e. the online and offline media with which the user has contact throughout the buying process.
If you comply with these stages, you will be able to build a more pleasant experience for your customers, linking it with positive feelings, this can lead to a higher purchase volume. Achieving positive experiences is the most effective way to build customer loyalty in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Tools to create a Customer Journey Map
The development of the Customer Journey Map is an important step for your business to achieve more sales, luckily, although it seems a very complicated task there are digital tools that will help you throughout the process, even if your team works remotely.
The first of them is Smalpy, a web application that will help you create journey maps, as well as help you with the complicated process of creating your buyer. The most important thing about this tool is that it offers automatic feedback from other people.
This tool emerged with the objective of helping work teams that after a Workshop had to make deliverables in a short time and with little budget, because it helps you to organize all the information in clear sales strategies.
The second application is called Real Time Board, a collaborative whiteboard application that is a little more flexible than the previous one, as it allows multidisciplinary teams to work together even when working remotely. On this board you can place ideas and even design the storyboard.
Today, the most successful companies are those that put the customer at the center; designing a customer journey map is the best way to ensure satisfactory shopping experiences for them, this will help you achieve customers who complete the purchase process and become loyal consumers of your company. Tell us, how do you think a customer journey map can help your business?