Think back to the last time you went on a trip.
How was the experience? Did you have a good flight? Was it easy to find delicious food and comfortable lodging? Maybe you got lost along the way, found yourself stuck in bad weather, or had unexpected delays.
Customer journeys are like any trip—they can be marked by positive experiences and interactions or riddled with bad service, frustrating wait times, or confusing directions.
The goal is to understand and optimize your customers’ journeys with your brand so that they want to make a return trip and tell all their friends about their experience.
Enter: The customer journey map.
What is the customer journey and why is it important?
Have you ever wondered what your customers are thinking?
Chances are, customers and prospective clients have left you scratching your head at their behavior more than once. When you don’t know how your customers engage with your brand or why they make certain decisions, you’re often flying blind. And that isn’t good for making strategic decisions in sales, marketing, or product and UX design.
But you might be surprised just how much you can anticipate and understand your customers’ needs and motivations (no mind-reading required).
That’s where creating a customer journey map comes in.
Benefits of customer journey mapping
A customer journey map helps you put yourself in your customers’ shoes and get a sense of what their motivations, needs, and experiences are with your brand.
When you know what they want, and what’s stopping them from getting it, you can tailor their experience, remove obstacles, and create solutions that speak directly to their needs.
A customer journey map helps you:
- Understand and improve the customer experience
- Identify gaps in communication and messaging
- Reveal customer pain points or friction
- Increase customer retention
- Optimize customer onboarding
- Highlight key differences between buyer personas throughout your sales pipeline
- Align marketing, sales, UX, and other teams
What is customer journey mapping?
Customer journey mapping is the process of outlining and visualizing the customer’s experience with your brand. You can use multiple types of customer journey maps depending on your goals and the specific buyer persona you’re focused on. For example, you could create a customer journey map focused on current and future states to compare and contrast where you are now and where you want to end up with your customer experience.
Whatever your focus, you will typically want to outline several common customer journey stages within your map.
Customer journey stages
If you’re mapping a typical buyer’s journey, you’ll want to include the following stages:
- Awareness: The prospect identifies their problem or pain point.
- Consideration: The prospect researches options to solve their problem.
- Decision: The prospect chooses a solution.
- Retention: Once the customer has purchased, they need a good experience with your brand and solution to stick around.
- Advocacy: The happiest customers will turn into brand advocates, promoting your solution to others.
These stages are the typical progression a customer goes through when deciding to make a purchase (and thus interact with your brand).
For each stage you should consider:
- What is the customer thinking or feeling?
- Why do they feel this way?
- What action is the customer taking? Or what is the customer’s touchpoint with the business?
- How will you move the customer along to the next stage?
Who uses customer journey maps?
Hint: They’re not just for sales.
Customer journey maps are powerful tools that multiple teams can use to gain insight into their core customers.
If you do happen to work in sales, customer journey mapping helps you understand how customers progress through the buying process, what pain points keep them from purchasing, and when those obstacles arise. This makes it easier for sales reps to address customer needs and help them reach their goal.
Marketing can use customer journey maps to understand the questions customers have and how they feel at different stages and touchpoints. This makes it easier to craft compelling copy and provide the right content at the right time.
Additionally, customer journey maps can help UX designers put the customer experience into context. When you understand what actions customers are taking and why, you can design better experiences that meet customer needs directly.
In other words, creating customer journey maps help teams across the organization make strategic decisions and align projects and initiatives for a more effective and cohesive customer experience.
