Growing the customer base for a small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) requires a lot of strategy, planning and tools. As your business grows, a deep understanding of how your customers move throughout your business platform is important. This is customer journey mapping.
The customer journey is very important for businesses. It allows businesses to understand where friction may come from, where customers spend most of their time, and what products or services are most popular.
For SMEs, understanding the customer journey is key to unlocking more customers. A business that improves in tandem with customer demands will always be ahead of its competition in customer numbers and, of course, profits.
In this article, we look at what customer journey mapping is, how it works, and what SMEs need to do their own customer journey mapping.
What is Customer Journey Mapping?
A customer journey map is a visual representation of every experience that a customer has with a brand, product or service. Ideally, a customer journey map captures the customer experience from the consumer perspective, visualising the touchpoints, emotions and potential pain points they encounter during their relationship with a brand.
Businesses use customer journey maps to identify areas for improvement, optimise processes and create seamless customer-centric experiences. A customer journey map captures the entire customer experience through the stages of awareness, research, purchase and post-purchase. Other maps might focus on specific aspects of the customer-company interaction, such as the research phase or the customer journey toward purchasing a specific product.
Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey maps, whether they focus on a single set of interactions or visualise the entire brand-to-consumer relationship, can provide actionable insights about an organisation’s sales funnel and customer support practices.
Some of the major benefits of a customer-focused map include:
- Improving customer experience: A customer journey map helps brands discover where the customer experience might be optimised. This reduces friction, enhances consumer satisfaction and increases brand loyalty.
- Increasing customer retention: Identifying pain points in the post-purchase or support phase of the customer journey allows businesses to identify problems that might otherwise lead to customer churn, increasing customer retention.
- Better alignment between teams: Visualisations of the customer journey can act as a unifying tool for various departments, providing a precise and clear collective understanding of the customer experience.
- Iteration and enhanced product development: Insights from customer journeys can inform new product features and improvements, making them more aligned with customer needs.
- More effective marketing: By better understanding the customer journey, businesses can create targeted campaigns that meet customers where they are, increasing engagement and conversion from marketing efforts.
- Understanding customer psychology: A customer journey map provides deeper insight into how customers think, feel and behave throughout their journey with a brand. By mapping emotional responses, businesses can better understand consumer motivations, pain points and decision-making processes. These insights enable companies to create more empathetic and targeted experiences that resonate with customers.
- Identifying important touchpoints: A customer journey map helps businesses identify which touchpoints have the most significant impact on customer decisions and satisfaction. This process helps them to prioritise resources, eliminate unnecessary steps and optimise high-impact touchpoints to improve the overall customer experience.
- Increased competitive advantage: A well-organised customer journey map has the potential to give businesses a strategic edge by facilitating better customer experiences. An organisation might use a customer journey map to identify where competitors fall short, create less generic customer journey experiences, or design targeted communications specific to their ideal customer base.
Types of Customer Journey Maps
There are various ways to map the customer journey. The five main customer journey maps are the following:
1. Current State
The current state map follows the experience as it is today. It is the most common type of journey map, although not considered the most strategic from a return on investment (ROI) perspective. The current state map details how a customer interacts with the service, product or experience. This illuminates areas of need, strength and opportunity.
2. Future State
Future state journey maps document a user’s ideal scenario. They build on current state maps but with a higher level of innovation opportunity since they are free of existing constraints. It’s recommended that you do future state maps with current state maps or leverage existing knowledge from journey mapping efforts. Future state journey maps are critical in user experience/customer experience (UX/CX) efforts in the rapidly changing world you and your customers live in.
3. Strategic Situation
Strategic journey maps show you the ‘big picture’ of a customer’s goals, experience, and dreams. It provides agile teams with context for where the UX/CX is moving directionally. In Agile terms, this represents a Saga (epics and user stories can be defined based on saga views). Sagas are important for context. Sometimes, user stories (usage scenarios) have too much detail or lose focus on the overall mission of a user’s journey with the product, service, or experience.
4. Tactical Situation
Tactical journey maps provide the Agile collection of story (epic) level views. This day-in-the-life type of journey map can zoom in on a particular aspect of an experience, such as user registration for a service, mobile app onboarding, or unboxing (the out-of-the-box experience).
5. Persona-based
Persona journey maps show a journey map with the presence of the persona. Which user role is struggling most with this breakpoint in this channel? You can make persona journey maps for each persona to represent their individual journeys.
Creating a Customer Journey Map
While customer journey maps differ depending on an organisation’s specific needs and business goals, common steps in the customer journey mapping process include:
1. Set Clear Objectives
Before creating a map, a business typically establishes precisely what it hopes to achieve. Sales, marketing and product leaders might initially brainstorm which processes they would like to improve. Areas of focus might include optimising the purchasing process, understanding why customers abandon a service or creating better onboarding processes to improve customer loyalty. During this phase, a business might introduce specific key performance indicators (KPIs) it is hoping to improve.
2. Gather Customer Data
To build an accurate map, businesses collect data from various sources. This includes customer feedback, surveys, interviews, chat transcripts, support logs, and web analytics. It enables the brand to see the decision-making process from the customers’ point of view.
3. Create Customer Personas
Buyer personas are fictional, yet data-driven, representations of different types of customers. They outline customer demographics, motivations, and behaviours to provide context for the customer journey. With advanced customer analytics and automation, customer personas have become more precise, allowing organisations to segment customers based on more granular behaviours and locations. Using these personas, a brand might choose to focus a customer journey map on a specific target audience it hopes to capture.
4. Identify Key Stages
During this stage, a business defines the critical stages in its customer journey. This process can span from awareness to post-purchase, focusing solely on the post-purchase follow-up stage, or include any journey specific to a product or feature.
5. Determine Touchpoints and Channels
During this phase, an organisation identifies where and how customers interact with its brand. It might include advertisements, email campaigns, social media, customer support or a mobile app.
6. Highlight Emotions and Pain Points
In this step, a business analyses customer data to understand the emotional highs and lows customers experience at each stage. For example, frustration during onboarding or satisfaction after resolving an issue can provide valuable insights.
7. Validate the Journey
Once you have created the map, you must validate it with real-life customers or through testing. This step confirms whether the customer experience map accurately represents the customer experience.
8. Act on Insights
Once a map is validated, you can use it to drive improvements. At this stage, a brand might opt to enhance communication at critical touchpoints, shift resources to post-purchase experiences or invest in new technology to make the journey smoother.
If you are not mapping your customer journey, it’s good to start now. Although it might seem like a time-consuming and complex task, it can help you eliminate friction, protect repeat customers and revenue, and help you practise more targeted marketing.
