Consumer journey map: Strategic methods to create it effectively with examples
Understanding the customer’s mind is really hard. But it is not impossible. And the consumer journey map can support you to complete that mission. Today we will learn more about this map such as its benefits, how it’s working and how to create a consumer journey…
1. What is a consumer journey map?
A consumer journey map represents a consumer’s experience with a company. It provides an understanding of the demands and concerns which directly motivate or inhibit potential customer actions. This information allows companies to upgrade customer experience leading to higher conversion rates and increased customer retention.
The customer journey is the progress of interactions of customers with a store in order to achieve a goal. It is not something easy to assume or predict based on your personal opinion. A customer journey is very specific because it is based on the physical experiences of your customers.
2. Why is a consumer journey map important?
The customer journey seems very simple: companies offer a product or service, and customers buy it. In fact, the journey is more complex than that. Following the Salesforce report, 80% of customers believe their experience with a company to be as important as its products. From the time a customer is introduced to a product to purchase it, they go through the buyer’s journey.
In this buying process, customers might see ads, speak to a customer service representative, or attempt to check out. These are stages along the journey that related their actions. Understanding the process and customer interactions allows a business to drive customers towards a sale plan.
However, only understanding this progress is not enough. It is much better to convert this knowledge to a diagram that you and other employees can refer to. This is when we should design a consumer journey map.
3. The Consumer Journey Mapping Process
3.1 What is included in the consumer journey Mapping Process?
3.1.1 The Buying Process
A consumer journey map includes milestones. These milestones are created by your company, this can be a progress that you’d like to your customers experience. You should list down by the horizontal.
3.1.2 User actions
This component of the customer journey map details what a customer does in each part of the buying process. For example: a customer might speak with friends and family about his needs and possible ways to complete the order. They can use many payment methods on your website. From there, you can get other information for your consumer journey map.
3.1.3 Emotions
Customer emotion has a big effect on their shopping process. If your process is long or complicated then you might feel uncomfortable when ordering. With a high demand customer, you are at the risk of losing the customer.
3.1.4 Pain Points
The pain points were born from a negative emotion. Adding pain points to your customer journey map can help you verify which stage your customer is experiencing negative emotions and find out the reason why.
3.1.5 Solutions
As the final component in your customer journey map, solutions are where you and your team will find potential solutions to improve your buying process so that customers reduce the times they have negative emotion and increase positive emotion.
3.2 How to create a Consumer Journey Map?
3.2.1 Create Buyer Personas
Buyer personas help discover customer goals, providing a deeper understanding of their needs and topics of interest. This thing will help create a visual appearance which means you need to do more market research.
Let’s start by creating a rough outline of your customer with age, gender, occupation, education, income and geography. This kind of information may be harder to collect compared to demographic data, but it is worthwhile to understand customer preferences, needs and wants.
Beside that, it needs to collect psychographic data, this thing may be much harder to collect but it’s worth it to get consumer behavior.
3.2.2 Select Your Target Customer
It’s time to do a look into each to build a more accurate reflection of their experience. Let’s start by analyzing your customer 1st action with your store.
3.2.3 List Customer Touchpoints
Touchpoints are all reactions from customers with the site. List all touchpoints on consumer journey, consider everything from website, social network to advertisement and third-party review or mention.
3.2.4 Define Customer Actions
After getting touchpoints, you can define the popular action of customers. By dividing the journey into individual actions, you can easily improve the corresponding actions and move them forward along.
Checking how many steps a customer needs to complete before the end of their journey. Think about how to reduce the total of steps and your customer can get their aim sooner. One way to do this is by identifying obstacles or pain points in the process and creating solutions that remove them.
Understanding what consumers want is one of the most important things if you would like to create a better journey and bring the best experience to your customer.
3.2.5 Understand Your Available Resources
You need to check again your company resources, use that one to assess which touchpoints need more support. Define if these resources are enough to give the best experience for customers.
3.2.6 Analytic Consumer Journey
One of the main parts in “Consumer Journey” is analytic results. Let’s proceed the journey by yourself if you’re still missing something or have anything that needs to improve. Checking carefully if there are any touchpoints can cause customers to leave, and comparing your journey with other customer
3.2.7 Take Business Action
Having a visualization of what the journey looks like makes sure that you continuously meet customer needs at all points while giving your business a clear direction for the changes they will respond to best. The last step you need to do is take business action and you also need to re-check the result after proceeding with any action.
4. Types of Customer Journey Maps Templates
4.1 Current stage
These customer journey maps are the most common type. They outline the actions, thoughts, and emotions of your customers currently experience while interacting with your company. They are best used for improving the customer experience.
4.2 Day in the Life
These customer journey maps give a general view through the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience daily, whether or not that includes your company. This type gives a wider view into your customer’s life and what their pain points are in real life. They are best used for addressing unsatisfied customers before customers know they exist. Applying this type of customer journey map when exploring new market development strategies is highly recommended.
4.3 Future State
Different from “Day in the Life”, this map will show what actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers will experience in future interactions with your company. Based on their current experience, you’ll clearly see where your business fits in.
4.4 Service Blueprint
This map will arrange the elements responsible for delivering that experience such as people, policies, technologies, and processes. They are completely suited for identifying the root causes of current customer journeys.
5. Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping
5.1 Sympathize with your customers and understand their pain points
A customer journey map shows you comparing the actual customer journey. You can understand the customer’s viewpoint better; you also know the challenges and pain points that forced clients to take a different buying path than the one you’d planned. You can then use this data to improve the customer experience and advance your sales and marketing plans.
5.2 Get a uniform view of the customer journey
You might have met this situation, the knowledge of the sales team about your consumer is not what your marketing or product team thinks about them. This thing leads to inconsistencies in the experience your customers receive. But if you use a customer journey map, all departments get a consistent view when interacting with your business. This makes sure all teams follow a common goal.
5.3 Detect and cover the gap in your process
This map can help you define the gap in your process, you may haven’t noticed. For example, you may realize that your website doesn’t have the extant chat, then you only have to install this plugin.
5.4 Predict customer behavior
Consumer journey maps help predict buyer’s behavior as they move through the sales channels. You can discover their behavioral patterns and predict which ones are more likely to convert. Then you can consider and provide potential customers what they need.
5.5 Improve the consumer journey
This is absolutely true, when you know everything about a customer’s behavior, even predict their actions. Then what can prevent you from reaching your potential clients? From collecting the interaction of buyers, you can improve your consumer journey map and upgrade your quality services.
6. Customer Journey Mapping Examples
6.1 HubSpot’s Customer Journey Map Templates
HubSpot’s free Customer Journey Map Templates provide an outline for companies to investigate their customers experience
6.2 B2B Customer Journey Map Example
An example that you may know is Dapper Apps. It is a combination between the initial research and post-purchase needs. This map is effective because it helps get into the mind of the consumer by predicting the normal questions they have and the emotions they’re feeling.
6.3 Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example
This map is an outstanding example of a day in the life map. Not only focusing on the actions and emotions of the customer’s interaction with the company, but also all the actions and emotions the customers have on a normal day.
6.4 Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example
This map designed for Carnegie Mellon University, describes a future state customer journey map. It shows you the thoughts, feelings, and actions the university wants its students to be having and the touchpoints, devices, people, and environments students to be interacting with. After that, It’s apply widely used for many companies to get data from their buyers.
6.5 Retail Customer Journey Map Example
This map shows an in-depth customer journey map of a customer interacting with an imaginary restaurant. It’s clear that this style of map is more overall than the others. Because it includes the front of stage (direct) and back of stage (non-direct or invisible) interactions a customer has with the company, as well as the support processes.
Conclusion
Consumer journey maps have many types and many examples. After this article, I hope that you can choose the one that suits your company. If you still have some questions or confusion, just contact us and we will support you. With more than 10-years of experience, thousands of projects delivered to the clients ONEXT DEGITAL believe that can give you the best price and most time saver.
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