Creating Customer Journey Maps From Scratch – 4 Basic Types of Maps

Mapping out the customer journey is
something we all know we should do, but often we forget. If you're noticing
prospects losing interest in your product or service and customers dissatisfied,
it's time to work on your customer journey map.
It doesn't matter if your product is the best on the market.
If customers lose interest because of mapping issues, you won't get customers.
Hi, guys, is Geordie here from Neighbourhood, where we help brands find sell,
and keep their people. With the increasing number of resources at the fingertips
of consumers, people are becoming smarter and taking longer to purchase.
As well as rapidly growing social media, you'll find both the average sales cycle
and customer churn rate of many businesses are growing.
Unfortunately, you can't just assume or
predict customer behaviour based on your opinion.
Customer journey is based on specific
experiences, which is why the best way to understand
your consumers is to ask them. What is customer journey
mapping? A customer journey map is a visual representation of the process a customer
or prospect goes through to achieve a goal within your company.
A diagram usually works best to visualise this.
The three stages of the buyer journey, awareness,
consideration and decision - to get started with the development process,
you need to understand exactly how they are interacting with your business.
Using Excel to outline key events,
motivation and areas you can improve your user's experience. An effective journey
map pinpoints the current process in the first to the final touch point.
Define whether your customers are reaching
their goals and if not, how they can. Rather than a straight line from A to B,
the interaction between buyers and businesses often move back and forth,
making them cyclical, multichannel journeys.
Because of this, there are a few methods
used to represent this journey, no matter which method you choose
the most important thing is that it makes sense to whoever is using it.
I'm sure you're probably thinking that you
already know the needs and pain points of your customers.
However, nine times out of ten, this is only surface level.
If you aren't aligning each step you want your customers to take with a certain
goal, you aren't keeping customers satisfied in each phase.
This increases the chance for unhappy customers.
Everything you do must revolve around
solving customer problems and helping them achieve long term success with your
product or service. Firstly before laying out the groundwork for your map,
you need to know why you're making one.
What are you aiming to achieve? Who is it for?
What experiences is it based upon?
Based on this, you might want to create a buyer persona.
This is a fictional customer
with demographics and psychographics who represents your average customer.
Having a clear persona helps remind you
to direct every aspect of your customer journey map towards them.
Once you've built the base
for the personas, it's time to do some research.
Some ways to conduct research are questionnaires and user testing.
Both options can provide valuable customer feedback.
The aim is to reach out to current
and loyal customers as you want feedback from people who are interested
in purchasing your product. To ensure you're getting great guidance,
here are a few questions you should ask.
How did you hear about our company?
What first attracted you to our website?
What are the goals you want to achieve with our company?
In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
How long have you or do you typically spend on our website?
Have you ever purchased with us? If so,
what was your deciding factor? Have you ever interacted with our website
with the intent of making a purchase but decided not to?
If so, what led you to this decision? On a scale of one to ten, how easy is it
for you to navigate our website? Did you ever acquire customer support? On a scale
of one to ten, how helpful was it? And finally, is there any way that we can
further support you to make your process easier?
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During this process, you want to identify only a few key
personas as the customer journey map aims to track specific paths. Too many may mean
you won't accurately capture their experience, depending on whether this is
the second or tenth time you've been through this process,
start with the most common routes your target personas take.
Don't stress about all the ones you leave
out as they can always be included further down the track.
Now let's talk touch points.
Basically, they are the places your customers interact with your business.
These may include your website,
socials, paid ads, emails or third party
review sites or mentions during this step, you should start listing the touch
points to your customers and prospects are currently using and those you
believe they should if they aren't already included.
The number of touch points needed can
provide valuable information. If they are using fewer touch points than expected,
does this mean they are getting turned
away and leaving quickly? If they're using more than expected,
does this imply the website is complicated
and requires too many steps to get to their goal?
Whatever it is, understanding the touch points is a step toward better
understanding the ease and objectives of customer journeys.
Next is to list out the actions your
customers perform during these interactions per touchpoint.
This may include a Google search for your keywords or clicking on an email from you.
You may end up with a long list of actions, which is fine.
You'll get a chance to rationalise your
information later on. All in all, just take the time to recognise
when customers are being expected to take too many actions to achieve their goals.
Reducing the number of steps a customer
needs to take can feel risky, but it pays off in the end. Marketing is a result of cause and effect.
Likewise, a customer's action is motivated by emotion, emotions that will change
depending on which part of the journey they're at. A huge influence on
their emotion can be any pain points or problems.
Therefore, making sure you're providing the right content at the right time,
meaning a smoother customer, emotional journey through your brand.
Get to know what exactly these roadblocks
are, what's stopping your customers from making their desired action.
There are a heap of ways to address these,
such as changing the obstacle or providing information to reduce the intention.
When creating your map,
there are four basic types that each have their pros and cons.
Firstly, the current state.
These maps are the most common and visualise the actions,
thoughts and emotions your customers currently experience while interacting
with your company. If you're wanting to improve the customer journey,
this is the best format for you.
The idea is that it reflects the search, awareness, consideration of options,
purchasing decision and post purchase support processes.
Next up is a day in the life. These customer journey maps depict
the actions, thoughts and emotions your customers currently experience daily.
These include interactions with and without your products or service.
This method aims to give you a bigger
picture of the lives of your customers and what their pain points are day to day.
This is best used for addressing unmet
customer needs before customers even know they exist.
Since this template reflects all
the thoughts, feelings, actions, needs and pain points a customer has
in their daily routine, whether or not that includes your company,
you want to map out this template in a chronological structure.
This way you can highlight the times
of days which you can offer the best support. The future state.
This mapping structure examines the same things the actions, thoughts and emotions
your customers experience as the other two.
But in a future perspective.
Based on what the current experience is, you map out where you want to be with this style.
They are best used for illustrating your vision and setting
a clear objective similar to the current state template, these phases may also
reflect the future predicted or desired search, awareness,
consideration of options, purchasing decision and post purchasing
support processes. Since this takes place in the future,
you can tell these phases based on what you'd like the customer journey to look
like rather than what it currently looks like.
The final map works with a simplified version of one of the other map styles,
then layers on the factors responsible for delivering that experience,
including people, policies, technologies and processes.
This map is best used for identifying the root causes of current customer
journeys or identifying the steps needed to attain desired future outcomes.
Since this map is more in depth,
it doesn't follow the customer journey too closely.
Instead, it relies on the physical
evidence people, places or objects at a time.
Generally, they should be factors that can
create impressions about the quality and prices of the service or even simpler,
anything the customer comes in contact with within your control.
Your customer journey map intersects almost every part of your business.
As this process will show the relevant
resource involved in creating your desired customer experience,
you must take into account what you've got and what you need to acquire.
If flaws are discovered in the customer
experience, follow up on the tools required to mend these issues.
Chances are, your team may need to invest
in new and improved tools to manage better.
Applying these new tools to your map.
You can accurately predict how they'll
impact your business and drive outsized value, which makes it easier to convince
gatekeepers and decision-makers to invest in your proposals.
Just because you've designed your map doesn't mean the work is done yet.
this is the most important part of the process.
Analysing the results.
How many people are clicking on your
website but then closing out before making a purchase?
How can you better support your customers?
These are some of the questions you should
be able to answer within your finished map.
Analysing the results can show you where
your customers needs are being unmet. By approaching this,
you can show that you are providing a valuable experience and making it clear
that people can find solutions to their problems with your company's help.
Using this process, as well as some of the analysis
of the data, should provide you with enough information
to make the right changes to reach your goal.
No matter how big or small these changes are, they are calculated to provide
clarity around whether these decisions have been done with purpose.
Changes are to be made to improve the customer experience.
To the certainty of them, working is super important.
With the help of the visualised customer
journey maps, you can show those interacting with your brand are
met with only positive experiences.
Luckily, your map is a constant work in progress.
Reviewing it will help identify gaps and opportunities and provide chances
for you to identify any roadblocks that may arise.
As usual, don't simply use your intuition,
but your data and research to check. Throughout this whole process,
stay in close communication with any stakeholders involved as new products or
offerings can equally shift gaps and opportunities. All in all, customer journey
mapping gives you some perspective on your
customers so you can make sure your product is doing what it should be -
making people's lives easier and more enjoyable.
If you found this video helpful, then feel free to share it with someone
you know that needs a hand with customer journey mapping.
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That's it for me. Happy marketing!