5 Tips for Customer Journey Mapping
Everything around us has been evolving at a rapid pace. Technologies that we thought would only exist in the future are already available at your nearest e-tailer. Unsurprisingly, the art of business has been evolving as well. Businesses today are a lot more customer-centric than before. Like UX refers to user experience, but for design, CX (customer experience) is the new metric for business engagement and productivity.
The customer is the fulcrum on which the entire business ecosystem balances itself. It has necessitated a system that tracks how a customer interacts with your brand from start to finish. This system is what is referred to as customer journey mapping.
The journey mapping system revamps the goals of traditional business practices and shifts the focus to the customer. Let’s understand how customer journey mapping can help businesses do better.
What Is A Customer Journey Map?
Customer Journey Mapping is a process that helps companies understand how they are meeting their customers’ needs. The idea behind this approach is to “map” customer journeys by looking at each singular touchpoint that the customer goes through with the business.
Today, every brand has touchpoints that exist beyond just the website. A customer can experience a brand’s impact through social media, eCommerce, emails, and other avenues. Businesses must optimize their customer journey mapping to improve brand awareness and perception.
The customer journey is often broken down into the following categories –
- Acquisition – The steps a typical online (or offline) visitor goes through before they become a customer. This includes marketing, awareness, interest, and research.
- Contact – The customer’s interactions with your brand, including on your social media pages.
- Conversion – The moments a customer takes affirmative action, such as purchasing, signing up, or calling for service. Customer onboarding can be done seamlessly with documently.
- Retention – The customer’s experience during the duration of their relationship.
- Service – How well your business can provide after-sales support and customer care.
If you can map out your customer journey, you will gain clarity on where you are on the customers’ list of brands and what they expect from you. This information can guide your marketing, product, and customer service strategies.
5 Ways To Improve Your Customer Journey
- Understand Different Customer Personas
We talked about evolution at the start of the article – this also applies to customers. The average customer today is a complex entity. They have a much stronger emotional response to a specific type of service.
From a business perspective, it is critical to understand how you can cater to these different personas. Create distinct and identifiable categories of people who are your customers.
Ensure that you work on creating a different experience for them which can help you identify with them easier.
A good example of this in action is Apple. Heading over to their website, you’ll find that their iPad normally caters to the business crowd, while their iPhones are aimed at a more casual audience.
- Experience And Identify Customer Touchpoints
We’ve touched (no pun intended!) on the importance of touchpoints for a business earlier. To add more detail to the subject – a customer touchpoint is a specific key interaction a customer has with your business.
You are better equipped to optimize your typical customer touchpoints when you have more knowledge about them. Studies have shown that it takes seven successful interactions with a brand before a purchase is made.
Here are the most common touchpoints that a user has with a brand –
- Website
- Live Chat
- Social Media
- Emails
- Website
- Live Chat
- Social Media
- Emails
- Newsletter
- Retail Store
- Surveys
- Phone Calls
The objective here is to optimize customer interactions across these touchpoints and streamline them to get the best results.
- Highlight “Moments of Truth” Of Customers
Another important part of the customer journey is to record the exact point in the journey where a user makes a purchase decision and becomes a customer. This is normally referred to as “Moments of Truth” (MoT) of a marketing campaign.
Analyzing this can improve your ability to increase conversions for your brand. As a business, if you find a specific touchpoint that is successful with most of your customers, you need to funnel them to it.
Brands have different parts of their pipelines which could be their MoTs. For a car manufacturer, the MoT could be the customer seeing the car on the showroom floor. This is why all automotive brands make a serious effort to present their product aesthetically. For a real estate agent, the MoT could be the client seeing the property. Real estate agents stage the home with amazing styling which is on trend and appease the customer.
- Separate Onstage And Offstage Actions
Another aspect that you need to focus on is where the touchpoint occurs. There are two areas where actions occur between a business and its customer. Actions that are visible to the customer are called onstage and those occurring behind the scenes that are not visible to the customer are called offstage.
Let’s take the earlier example of a customer experiencing their dream car in a showroom. Getting in, starting up the car, and talking to the salesperson are all onstage actions – they all happen with full knowledge of the customer.
Offstage actions are credit checks, financing, and pre-delivery inspections, which are not immediately apparent to the customer. It prevents information overload and ensures a frictionless customer experience. You’ll find that successful businesses ensure offstage actions are kept away from the customer.
- Focusing On Incorporating Imagery
A good part of branding is all about the visual impact a brand creates. Imagery has always been a reliable factor in improving brand reach and customer response. Visually impressive marketing collateral still elevates the brand, and businesses focus on creating enticing designs and user experiences.
When it comes to visual impact, Nike has always been at the forefront of marketing through imagery. Whether it was print ads and TV commercials back in the day or on their socials, they are killing it with their visuals. They’ve even won Emmy Awards (twice!) for their commercials – they’re just that good.
The point we’re trying to make is that a huge, intangible part of their success can be attributed to how they get their brand messages across through imagery. Visuals are a powerful force, and they can have a profound influence on your customer journey. Documently keeps the visual imagery incorporated for your customer onboarding, you can use your logo, and change app color to suit your branding styles and fonts.
To Summarize
Journey mapping has been a huge part of how businesses have adapted to a more discerning customer. The focus of businesses has been on the tangible benefits they can deliver to their customer base. An optimized customer journey mapping pipeline can help brands stand apart from a crowd of their competitors. It can give them the edge they need.
This is where we can help! With Documently, you can collect relevant documents across your customer mapping pipeline. Choose from our range of industry-standard document templates to find what you’re exactly looking for. You can build custom flows with your team with real-time tracking tools and powerful security features built into it.
Let’s talk shop! Drop us a line at (contact@documently.ai) to set up your appointment with us.
Sources
https://blog.bismart.com/en/5-tips-on-how-to-develop-an-effective-journey-map
https://www.storyboardthat.com/journey-map/effective-journey-mapping
Solomon Beneton
Digital Marketer
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