What is Customer Journey Map

What is Customer Journey Map?

10-12 minutes

You want to create memorable first impressions and deliver differentiated buying experiences to your customer? You want to find out how your customers shop in today’s digital world? What are the most influential channels and touch points in their customer journey and how can you impact these? How does this work for the new product category you wish to enter?

Customer Journey Map is a powerful technique for understanding what motivates your customers – what their needs are, their hesitations, and concerns. Although most organizations are reasonably good at gathering data about their customers, data alone fails to communicate the frustrations and experiences the customer experienced. A story can do that, and one of the best storytelling tools in business is the customer journey map.

Customer journey map uses storytelling and visuals to illustrate the relationship a customer has with a business over a period of time. The story is being told from the perspective of customer, which provides insight into the total experience of the customer. It helps your team better understand and address customer needs and pain points as they experience your product or service. In other words, mapping out the customer journey offers your business the chance to see how your brand first engages a potential customer, and then moves through the touchpoints of the entire sales process.

Why Customer Journey Map?

The purpose of customer journey mapping is to understand what customers go through and improve the quality of your customer experience, ensuring consistency and a seamless experience at all touchpoints and across all channels. There is no substitution for listening to your customers about how the steps in the journey are working out for them. Having built an understanding of the customer journeys with your business you are now in a position to improve the customer experience enables:

• Provides a bird’s eye view of the entire customer journey
• Bring teams together to resolve specific customer hurdles for understanding core customer journey paths, where additional development will provide biggest impact.
• Build faster and higher customer conversion rates by minimizing negative customer experiences, through identification of key steps and decision points.
• Improved customer retention, through understanding how they transit through, say, each stage of a procurement cycle to ensure the correct information is available and accessible to all stakeholders.
• Allows a business to zoom-in a single customer journey in a specific channel.
• Understanding of required metrics to identify customer’s progress and fall outpoints, providing opportunities to bring customers back on board.
• Allows businesses to prioritize actions in their customer experience strategy
• Reveals the gaps between various channels and departments

Basic Concepts of CJM

Customer journey is a journey of a potential customer about different points of contact with a product, a brand or (touchpoints) of a company via all available channels until he performs a desired target action. A customer journey can extend over several hours or days.

• Major target actions are purchases, orders or inquiries.
• Touchpoints are any kind of contact points between customer and your business, from classical advertising (ads, TV or radio spot, etc.) through online marketing activities through to the opinion of a friend or information on review sites.
• Available channels such as telephone, web, branch, marketing communications and service interactions.