What is journey mapping?
A journey map, also known as a customer experience map, visualizes the process a person goes through to reach their goal. In sales and customer service, journey mapping is an analytical process that requires the owner or the manager to scrutinize all the customer touchpoints.
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.
- Set the business goal you want to achieve
- Outline your buyer persona and identify their goals
- Select your target persona
- List all your customer touchpoints
- Define and set up all the channels customers can use to reach you
- Gather customer feedback
- Identify points of friction
- Create a customer journey map
- Take the customer journey
- Validate and refine your customer journey map
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.
- Providing omnichannel support – Companies can guide customers through significant touchpoints more effectively when they can reach customer service via multiple channels.
- Gathering customer feedback – Customer service software like LiveAgent helps you collect, store, and study customer feedback like customer interviews, reviews, and customer surveys. All this data will help you improve your journey mapping.
- Generating reports and customer journey analytics – Help desk software solutions can generate robust reports for you to study to better understand customers’ journeys and various points of friction. On top of that, it can help you to spot trends and predict future behaviors.
- Building knowledge base – An extensive and accessible knowledge base is a must throughout many touchpoints in customers’ journeys. Customer service software solutions like LiveAgent offer a knowledge base builder that makes it easy to create and maintain a robust and helpful knowledge base.
- Tracking and measuring KPIs – To improve your journey mapping and customer support overall, you must have KPIs and other metrics covered. From user engagement to the first contact resolution metric, it plays a crucial role in the overall customer experience.
- Offering automation options – To avoid overwhelming your customer service team and sales reps with menial tasks, setting up automation rules is a great option. This way, staff can focus on guiding customers down the sales funnel and providing support without the distraction of small everyday tasks that are easy to automate.
Improve the entire customer journey with LiveAgent
Get the right tools for the job with LiveAgent and its amazing wide feature set that supports every important customer communication channel you need.
Frequently asked questions
What does journey mapping mean?
Journey mapping is a visualization of the process a person goes through to achieve a specific goal. It begins with a juxtaposition of the user's thoughts and emotions on a timeline. These actions create a narrative, which gives an overall visualization of the process. In other words, customer journey mapping is a visual presentation of the purchasing process that a customer goes through.
What is the goal of journey mapping?
Journey maps allow businesses to develop the best strategy to achieve specific goals. It helps determine priorities and the most important tasks you must perform to achieve the goal.
What are the benefits of journey mapping?
The benefits of journey mapping is it allows you to predict customer behavior and boost customer retention.
The article discusses the importance of customer service and how it can be achieved through understanding the client, building an emotional bond, collecting feedback, developing employees, and automating tasks. It also provides related resources and information about the LiveAgent platform. The article ends with a message about the website's use of cookies.
Customer service is the part of an organization that handles customer inquiries and concerns. Poor customer service can result in businesses losing more than $75 billion annually. Customer service is critical in customer loyalty and has become a key brand differentiator. Companies can improve their customer service by using software that collects data and ensures all requests are answered. There are four types of customer service software, with ticket-based software being the most common. Quality ticket-based software features include customer insights, automation of processes, integration with marketing/sales software, call recordings, and 24/7 support.
The text discusses the four stages of a conversion funnel: consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase. Analyzing the funnel can help with improving the conversion process by identifying weak phases. To increase funnel conversion rates, marketers suggest creating data-driven funnels and personalized campaigns, among other things. The marketing funnel stages include awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase. Analyzing the conversion funnel involves KPI monitoring, user behavior analysis, and identifying bottlenecks. Creating a powerful conversion funnel requires a strategic approach considering the business model and goal at every stage. It is essential to maintain positive customer experience throughout the funnel.
A ticket system is a common inbox for all customer tasks, with messages automatically converted into tickets. Key features include multi-channel availability, personalization, automation, personalized ticket pages, categories and tags, and the ability to build a knowledge base. LiveAgent is a ticketing system that automatically tracks and converts all customer problems into tickets. Ticket management systems streamline customer messages from multiple channels and must have features such as centralized inbox, ticket routing, and data analytics. Ticketing systems help improve response times, reduce churn, and increase productivity and satisfaction. An open source ticketing system is cost-effective compared to proprietary systems.
