Comprehending the customer experience at every stage of their journey is crucial for the long-term sustainable growth strategies of a business. Developing a Customer Journey Map aids businesses in making the most effective improvements to elevate customer experience and successfully retain them.
What is Customer Journey?
The Customer Journey is the entirety of a customer’s experience with a brand. This journey encompasses all interactions that a customer has with a brand across various channels throughout the customer’s lifecycle.
Guidelines for developing a customer journey map for enterprises
Establishing clear objectives
Before embarking on the creation of a Customer Journey map, businesses must establish clear and specific objectives. Why should businesses create Customer Journey map? What is the business’s objective that this map is directed towards? Who is the target audience? On what data or foundation was this map created?
This aspect significantly contributes to the precise alignment of the Customer Journey map with the customer’s emotions, effectively converting them into purchasers, and fostering ongoing engagement with the brand.
Establish a comprehensive customer profile
To create a comprehensive customer profile, businesses can now employ automated data collection tools, such as GAPONE. This engine enables businesses to automatically gather customer data across multiple channels and meticulously track customer touch points with brands throughout their journey. With this information, businesses can construct a 360-degree customer profile, encompassing detailed demographic, psychological, and behavioral data.
Additionally, this toolset offers an intelligent customer classification feature that utilizes available properties, facilitating businesses in the seamless implementation of marketing and customer care strategies tailored to specific customer groups.
Select the prominent characteristics of the target audience
Once comprehensive customer information has been gathered, businesses should narrow their focus to one or two specific groups. It is important to recognize that the customer journey represents the experience of a distinct customer group with brands. If the business’s customer journey encompasses too many diverse groups, the map may not accurately reflect the true customer experience.
List all touch points
Touchpoints encompass all platforms, including Facebook, email, websites, Shopee,… which customers reach and engage with businesses. To accurately depict the customer journey map, businesses must enumerate all touchpoints accessible to customers for brand interaction.
If customers have fewer touchpoints with the brand than anticipated, it suggests that the information on the marketing channels of businesses is not sufficiently appealing, leading customers to quickly disengage. Conversely, if customers interact with the brand more frequently, it indicates that the business’s channels have complex navigation, requiring customers to exert more effort to successfully engage with the brand.
List the customer engagement at the touch points
In addition to enumerating the touchpoints, businesses must thoroughly understand customer actions and interactions at each touchpoint. For instance, customers may search for keywords on Google to access your website or click on a link from the business’s page to visit the website.
Subsequently, businesses can optimize the touchpoints to streamline the steps customers must take to accomplish their initial objectives when reaching the brand.
“Survey” customer emotions and motivations
Emotions and motivations are the driving forces behind a customer’s actions. Motivation aids in alleviating pain, while emotion is the result of the experience when interacting with the brand at touchpoints. Both emotion and motivation influence a customer’s actions throughout the purchasing journey.
To effectively influence customers to make final decisions, businesses must not only offer solutions that can alleviate their pain but also appeal to the emotions of the buyers.
List the obstacles or risks encountered by customers
Obstacles or risks are the primary factors that cause customers to disengage with the brand. Therefore, when constructing a customer journey map, businesses must enumerate all the obstacles customers face in the purchasing journey that prevent them from impeding the journey.
For instance, customers may have thoroughly researched a product and decided to add it to their cart. However, during the payment process, they may abandon the purchase due to high shipping costs and opt for a competitor’s product instead. Consequently, businesses must remove all obstacles that impede customers on their purchasing journey.
Determine the business’s resources
Your customer journey map will encompass nearly all departments of the business. This will highlight all resources for crafting the customer experience. Hence, it is crucial to inventory your resources and identify what you need to enhance the customer journey.
The customer journey map will encompass nearly all departments of the business, necessitating the management of all available resources and the provision of any missing resources to craft the most optimal experience throughout the customer journey.
Hopefully, this article has addressed your questions about the customer journey and how to establish a comprehensive customer journey map. In addition, you can read more useful articles about marketing and customer care at GAPIT Communications’s Blog.