The Importance of Creating a Customer Journey Map

 Determine objectives

What is the purpose of your customer journey map? What are you trying to determine by using this map? How will these results change your customer journey?

These are all questions that you need to ask yourself when you’re building a customer journey map. The answers to these questions will help to plot the rest of your map.

Create customer personas

You can’t follow a customer through their customer journey if you don’t know who they are. Customer personas are created through surveying what your actual customers experienced by interacting and engaging with your brand. Ask them how questions about how they came to find your brand, whether they have made a purchase or not, what the customer service experience has been like, and anything else that will help you to mold and shape specific personas for your customer journey. 

Identify all touchpoints

Touchpoints are all the places online that your customers can interact with your brand. This could range anywhere from adding a product to their online shopping cart, engaging with a post on one of your social media channels, opening an email, or interacting with the customer service chatbot on your website. Once you identify these touchpoints, you’ll get some immediate insight into what the customer experience is. Are there too many? Maybe your company website is too complicated, requiring too many steps to get to a purchase or a download. If you find that there are fewer touchpoints than you realized, it’s time to create some new touchpoints on your website. It’s all about balance and making sure that the right pieces are in the right place.

Plot the customer journey

After you identify your customer persona and narrow your touchpoint focus, you need to map out where the customer journey will go. Map out the actions that you want your customers to perform, and in which stage you want these actions performed. The important thing about mapping out the journey is to make sure that your customers aren’t getting anything they aren’t ready for. Each step in the journey should come with new information, but there shouldn’t be an overwhelming amount of information at each step. Don’t jump the gun on giving your customers information that isn’t relevant to their position in the journey.

Take the customer journey

The most important part of mapping out a customer journey is to take the journey yourself. How will you ever know the obstacles, challenges, and pain points that your customers are experiencing just by interacting with your brand? Engaging with your brand should never be difficult. Take notes on what works and what doesn’t to make a richer experience for your customers going forward.