Customer Journey Map: What It Is and How to Create One

By attracting the attention of a potential client and arousing his interest in the company's product, you invite him to further interaction, creating a kind of relationship. From this moment your joint journey begins. In business, as in everyday life, to form long-term relationships, you need to work on them.

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Back in the 1980s, Chip Bell, a consultant on customer service and loyalty innovation, said: "to understand what to offer a customer, you need to get inside their head, understand their experience, and customize the service based on their needs." 

Today we will talk about how to develop a customer journey map and how it can affect your future customer relationships. 

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey is a unique scenario of customer interaction, from brand discovery to product purchase and post-sale marketing interactions. It can be a table or infographic that displays the points of contact with the company and the stages of customer maturation.

The customer journey map makes it possible to anticipate each step, understand the client's thoughts, emotions, problems, and see what is missing in the decision-making process. 

Customer Journey Map can be complex and confusing, as there are many scenarios of human behavior. Having learned about a product in one place, a person can get additional information in another, and buy in a third, because they like the price there. Then they can change their mind altogether and exchange the product for a similar one. And then, depending on the purchase experience, recommend the brand to their friends, come back for a new purchase themselves, or not come back and do not recommend. 

For example, the IKEA customer journey looks like this. 

What is customer experience?

Customer experience is the personal story of a customer’s interaction with a company. A positive customer experience helps to maintain contact with the customer long after the purchase. Forward-thinking business owners continue to communicate with their customers by offering them new products, marketing promotions, and exclusive offers.

Data obtained from customers through feedback allows us to draw conclusions about how the customer feels before, during and after the purchase. The consumer experience is analyzed and based on it, a customer journey map is created.

Five stages of a typical customer journey

Each person is unique and the customer experience cannot be completely universal, but there are stages of typical customer actions:

1. Search – obtaining information about the existence of a brand or product.

2. Choice – studying the product, comparing it with other offers.

3. Decision-making – final choice, purchase of goods.

4. Retention - completion of the transaction, transition to client status, meeting expectations.

5. Loyalty – continued communication with the brand, further purchases, informing other interested consumers personally through product feedback, comments, and reviews.

Why is a customer journey map important?

A customer journey map gives businesses insight into the customer’s experience at every stage of their interaction with the company. Your vision of the buying process may be significantly different from the buyer’s. By creating a customer journey map, you can put yourself in their shoes and see all the nuances of the buying process.

How to create a customer journey map?

To get the most out of your customer journey map, here are a few simple tips:

Set a clear goal

You can't get to your goal if you don't have one. So always start by setting a goal. For example, do you want to improve the quality of service, create conditions for sales growth, or eliminate shortcomings in your work? Knowing what you want to get out of it, you can accurately prescribe the necessary steps.

Find customer touchpoints

Think about how a potential customer will find out about your business. This could be a radio or television spot, a billboard, a social media post, a link towebsitecompanies on search engine results pages. Consider the fact that a potential customer may have to go through several touchpoints before they pay attention to the brand or product.

Draw a portrait of the client

To get an effective result, a good solution would be to create a customer portrait. Gender, age, education, interests, places where a potential customer goes and can see your advertising. This allows you to personalize a set of actions for different types of target audience.

Take care of the quality of customer service

In communicating with a client, equally important questions are “what?” and “how?”. High quality service plays an important role. This shapes the image of the business and influences the client’s subsequent desire to return to you again. It is very important to consider the possible emotions of your consumer at each stage of the journey.

To improve the quality of customer service, you should pay attention to the following points:

elimination of technical problems:adaptation of the site for mobiledevices, reducing site page loading time, high-qualityhosting, troubleshooting problems during customer communication with technical support, etc.

determining the client's motivation - personal, professional, social.

tracking the emotional component – ​​eliminating negative emotions (excitement, disappointment) and enhancing positive ones (curiosity, joy, satisfaction).

improving the level of education of personnel - trainings, seminars, lectures.

Where to start working on a customer journey map?

There are many free customer journey map templates available online. Using templates saves time, and you can make the necessary changes, additions, and refinements to suit your business. 

A key aspect of a Customer Journey Map is determining how to measure each step of the journey. Understanding what the outcome should be and interpreting the data correctly are key components to tracking the experience and emotions a customer experiences when interacting with your product and company.

The customer journey should be reviewed at least once a year. This allows you to track down broken mechanisms, identify problems, and find new opportunities for business development.