In today’s markets, a business is not only for the product but also for the experience. With globalization and technology, the modern consumer is empowered with several choices. In such a competitive environment, how does a business stand out? To win, businesses need to create differentiated value in the customer’s mind. If the customer sees you as different, competitive pressures decrease, and price elasticity increases.
Therefore, it becomes imperative to understand the customer and his experience with the brand. Recent studies by American Express found that 60% of consumers are prepared to pay more for a better experience. Similarly, research by the Temkin Group found that companies can increase their revenue by 70 percent in 3 years by investing in customer experience. And the logic behind it can’t be any clearer!
Hence there is a need to understand and develop a customer journey, which essentially means walking in your customer’s shoes.
Also Read: Best Collaboration Tools To Use For The Business
What Is Customer Journey?
The customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand. Instead of looking at just a part of a transaction or experience, the customer journey documents the full experience of being a customer.
Typically, the customer journey is subdivided into 5 steps: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, and Loyalty.
For example, to understand the customer journey on an online platform like Amazon, marketers would need to analyze the following:
- How did the customer become aware of Amazon? What was his first response to the brand?
- How were his experience and emotions associated with the usability of the website? For example, creating an account, logging in, browsing the website, etc.
- How did he experience the purchase process? His ease of experience using the search bar, selecting a product, saving to the cart or ordering right away?
- How did the post-purchase experience go? Did he repeat the order and refer to his friends?
When each of these steps is carefully studied from the consumer’s viewpoint, you will know what attracts and frustrates him. Overall, this journey and its steps decide the experience your consumer will have after using your service.
Mapping The Customer Journey
To understand the customer’s journey, we need to build a Customer Journey Map which documents insights derived from the buyer’s mind as they use your service. You can use free PowerPoint templates to showcase valuable insights to help you pinpoint customers’ pain points and build empathy for the customers by understanding what they want and how they feel. Follow these steps to create a comprehensive customer journey map template.
Learn About The Buyer’s Persona
To understand your customers, you need to really get into their shoes and understand what they want and how they want it. This includes likes and dislikes, financial profiles, interactions with your business, etc. Always keep in mind that there will be multiple personas for your typical buyer. People behave differently at different buying stages. A person just starting to research the market will behave differently than someone who has already been researching for weeks. Your buyer’s personas should encompass all such possibilities.
Understand Your Buyer’s Goals
Now is the time to dig deep and understand what each buyer hopes to achieve through this journey. The ultimate goals of a buyer should be well etched in your mind before you take further steps. These can be –
- Paying a fair price
- Knowing everything they need to know
- Assurance of the quality of the product
- Enough market research to compare all available options.
You can understand these goals by taking surveys, and feedback and analyzing your online platform data.
Identifying The Touchpoints
Touchpoint refers to any time a customer encounters your brand. It can be before or after a purchase and includes events online or offline. Some touchpoints affect the brand more than others. Once you have listed all the touchpoints, you must club them into phases such as awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and loyalty.
Identifying Customer Pain Points
Now that you have identified and clubbed all the touchpoints in phases, you can map them to your buyers’ journey. A perfect PowerPoint theme can help you identify customer pain points and work on them to improve your overall customer experience.
Also Read: Best Competitive Intelligence Tools to Use For Business
Different Ways Of Presenting Customer Journey Map Templates
In this section, we will discuss various ways to map your customer journey. Visually presenting this information is as important as conducting the analysis.
Below are some ways in which you can showcase your customer journey impactfully.
The above customer journey map template helps you to illustrate detailed information about the customer journey in an innovative manner in one shot.
The above customer journey map template represents what the customer thinks, feels, and experiences at each touchpoint with the brand.
The above customer journey mapping template can be used to demonstrate a customer’s journey right from their first interaction with your product or service to the end, i.e., feedback.
The above customer journey map template helps provide a better insight into a customer’s expectations of your product/service. It helps you identify the gaps and opportunities in providing a superior customer experience.
How To Improve Your Customer’s Journey
Improving your customer’s experience requires a lot of deliberate decisions, keeping in mind the long-term plan for your company. Here are some of the things that can help you improve your customer’s experience:
Have A Clear Vision
First, you must create a clear vision of the customer experience you want to provide and communicate it clearly within your organization.
Create An Emotional Connection With Your Customer
Building an emotional connection with the consumer can boost customer loyalty by a huge amount. This can be done through personalized suggestions, special services or offers, chat support, and individual attention to each consumer.
Ask For Real-Time Customer Feedback
You can only know how good an experience you deliver by directly asking your consumer. Ask customers to rate their experience and what they think you can improve on. Send follow-up emails, and if possible, try outbound calls. If you’re an e-commerce company, you can use QR Codes on your products to gather information on your customer’s experience. They are easy to create, and you can create a custom QR Code using any reputable QR Code generator.
Act Upon Feedback
Gather continuous customer feedback on what they think about the company and how they think improvements can be made in the business.
Conclusion
Mapping Customer Journey is an indispensable tool for modern businesses, which helps them keep track of their consumer’s needs and expectations from the business. Constantly evaluating your business w.r.t your customer satisfaction will ensure you always keep your customer happy and that your customer returns to your business and brings along more business for you.
