Journey mapping

A user journey map usually starts by adding customer actions into a timeline. Each sequence of events serves as a touchpoint. You can do this according to your buyer persona. It will help you get the most accurate results. Once your timeline is complete, you need to take into account user experience, feelings, and emotions through each stage of the journey.

What is a touchpoint?

Customer journey touchpoints are the key interactions when a customer comes in contact with your brand. It can happen either directly, or indirectly. You can identify key touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey.

Examples of these customer stages include seeing an advertisement on TV, reading a blog post, visiting a brick-and-mortar store, making a purchase, and receiving a thank you email.

What is the purpose of journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping provides valuable insights into clients’ entire experience. It helps you identify customer pain points, and get a deeper insight into your sales process.

Visualization of an average consumer journey helps you create a smooth and enjoyable path toward conversion. Understanding every touchpoint is vital to improving the customer experience in the age of ever-changing customer expectations. Moreover, it allows you to identify issues from the customers’ point of view.

On top of that, customer journey and experience mapping help your team see where there might be issues. It helps prevent a fragmented understanding of the problem and leads to a quicker resolution. Imagine you spot a trend of frequent cart abandonment. Rather than brainstorming what precisely the problem might be, you can focus on analyzing and improving the touchpoints leading up to the checkout. Maybe you didn’t offer enough payment methods. Or your checkout process is too confusing.

How do I make a journey map?

Different businesses will come up with various customer journey maps. A car dealership’s customers will have different touchpoints than a software developer’s clients. However, it is still possible to outline your customer experience maps by following a few general steps.

Features like website visitors tracking can help you create your journey map. Combined with other tools, you can get a holistic view of your customer’s lifecycle with its various touchpoints.

How can a journey mapping help with your customer service?

Understanding your customers’ emotional highs and lows throughout their journey is essential for creating the best customer experience possible. Without gathering data about each customer touchpoint, improving your customer service relies on anecdotal evidence. Study the data available to improve your customer support and overall sales process.

Moreover, if you understand the feelings and motivations of your clients, you can improve the process of engagement by adding more personalized service. You will not only increase your conversion rate but also build long-term relationships with your customers.

Let’s take a look at an example.

Your customer is unable to find specific information on your website. It turns out the touchpoints were not properly defined. Thus, the customer experience is poor, and your support team receives customer inquiries regarding this issue. As a company, you want to avoid these unnecessary inquiries as much as possible. Creating a more thorough and accurate journey map will help your clients navigate the website better. Therefore, it lowers the number of tickets you receive regarding this issue.

You can reduce information-based queries by adding a self-service portal to your customer journey map. You can point your customers to easily accessible FAQs, helpful knowledge base articles, or community forums where they can find answers to their questions. Besides making customers feel empowered, it also significantly reduces the number of tickets the customer support team receives.

How can customer service software help with your customer journey mapping?

Although you may have a detailed and accurate customer journey map, it still may be difficult for clients to reach you. At this point, a customer service software solution comes in handy.

Help desk software like LiveAgent is a digital product that helps you keep up with all your customer interactions and provide the best customer service possible. Following are some examples of how it can help you with journey mapping and creating a seamless customer experience.