About the Customer Journey Map Template
What is a Customer Journey Map
Gone are the days when the only channel you have to track your customer's point of view is through reviews. While these are useful, some companies rely on other processes to assess customer behaviors. They use a customer journey map. It is a diagram depicting customers' phases as they interact with a specific company. This can include purchasing products online, contacting customer service on the phone, and giving reviews on social networking sites.
Why use a Customer Journey Map Template
Using a customer journey map template allows companies to understand their customers better. As you know the patterns of your customers, you can better address their expectations. Customer journey mapping is essential to all businesses, regardless of age and size. After all, every company aims to provide better products and services for its target market.
Purpose of Writing
With customer journey mapping, your business can visualize the target customer experience as they interact with your brand and products. It is a data-driven approach allowing you to look at how your target market experiences the brand against how your company thinks they do. Since you focus your approach on customer behaviors, they will feel more valued than just treating them as part of the numbers.
Benefits of using Customer Journey Map
Better Understanding of Customer Needs
While companies analyze customer behavior through the different sales funnel phases, there will be a clearer vision of what customers need. Knowing your audience helps you decide the initiatives your company can do along the sales process. Some want to speak directly to a representative, while others prefer indirect approaches like blog posts or newsletters.
Clearer Picture of Customer Experience
It is not only about clearer visuals of the customer experience but also a uniform picture. There will be instances when one department has different customer information. However, a customer journey map can provide centralized information about the customers' journey with your business. Additionally, the map helps your team understand whether the target market is having a pleasant experience interacting with your company.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Besides the aspects customers like about your business, the customer journey map also lets you discover the processes that need improvements to make the experience more enjoyable. Recognizing these insights allows your team to positively modify the customer's journey and make brand engagement easier. Along the way, you can map out the progress of every customer's journey resulting in a more enhanced content marketing strategy.
Key Elements of Customer Journey Map
Customer Persona
A company must know who its customer is. The customer persona refers to the composite representation of a market segment. This is where customer experience teams can predict customer feelings and behaviors. You can create a customer persona but ensure they are brief. It pays to include only the essential points.
Touchpoints
Customers' interaction with your brand throughout the buying process is a touchpoint. The touchpoints of a customer's journey will depend on the marketing approach, product, sales, and customer service. Touchpoints can include social media channels, websites, TV ads, or brand experiences like Amazon reviews and social media comments.
Customer Emotions
This is where companies find the customer journey map template very helpful, as it tracks how a customer feels during the experience. As the company recognizes the customer's emotional journey, it can identify potential pain points and successes, creating a clearer vision of where you will focus your energy and how to achieve it.
Actions and Behaviors
Generally, customer actions and behaviors refer to what they do or ought to do at every touchpoint. This can include clicking on a link in an email to track packages or searching for service and product reviews.
Steps to Create Customer Journey Map
Define Objectives and Goals
Your team must be clear on what metrics or aspects to measure. It is essential to set your goals so you would know what to look for while plotting the customer journey map template. Brainstorming can also happen here, involving all ideas and suggestions from the members. However, ensure to come up with a unified approach at the end.
Identify Customer Personas
Companies must also identify the specific buyer they want to focus on, on the journey map. Ensure to include the needs and wants of your customer personas. Remember that the improvements and initiatives you will perform moving forward will depend on the customer personas, so you must identify them as clearly as possible.
Map Touchpoints
This is where you will identify which stage in the buying process customers interact with your brand. Like any other step, it is best to clearly identify the specific touchpoints to maximize the marketing initiatives in those areas and whether these customers have the best experience. There can be several touchpoints for every customer. While you can list all of them, choosing the points aligned with your goal is also necessary. Otherwise, they will not be helpful in the process.
Analyze Customer Emotions
Remember to input customer emotions, actions, and thoughts while filling in the customer journey map template. This phase will also be one of your bases on what marketing approaches you can apply to improve customer experience. The more specific the inputs here, the better your resolutions will be.
Identify Opportunities to Improve Customer Experience
This is the final and most significant step in your customer journey map template. Looking at your goals and the aspects you discovered while plotting the map, identify the possible changes you can make on every touchpoint or within every stage of the mapping process to enhance customer experience. There is no specific way to design the customer journey map, as it depends on the goals you identify and the types of customers you choose.
Tips for Using Customer Journey Map Template
Iterate and Update Regularly
Emotions and behaviors can change over time, so updating your map regularly is essential. In some cases, you might expand your customer persona and add more market segments. Ultimately, customer patterns can also change, so updating the map allows your brand to cater to customer needs when necessary. After all, you only want these customers to use your brand for a long time.
Collaborate with Other Departments
The success of your customer journey map template also lies in collaboration. Besides the marketing team, who are usually part of the creation process, it also pays to get inputs and insights from the sales department, the design team to effectively create a visually-appealing template, and the IT team who can cover some data collection from your target customers. Of course, if the information from other departments is too much, you can always filter those that will help your cause as you create the map.
Keep it Simple
As has been previously said, you need not have overwhelming maps to develop better initiatives to improve customer experience. The simpler the map is, the better it would be visually. It is easier to understand every stage of your customer journey map template if you keep the words straightforward. Of course, there might be sections on the map in which you must provide explanations but ensure to keep them at a minimum.
Use Visuals
The exciting thing about this template is that you can provide photos, stickers, and objects to represent your points. Remember to give legends to make sure everything is clear. Overall, having more visuals on the map will seem easy to the eyes. In short, you can be playful with your map but remember not to forget your goal, which is to understand your target customers better and develop practices to serve them better with your products and services.
Conclusion
There are several ways to determine a customer's behavior. However, using a customer journey map template allows businesses to have a personalized record of every target customer they have. Since the map includes recording customer emotions, actions, and personas, it can generate a clear and concise marketing approach so companies can service these customers better and keep them for long. Meanwhile, they can also make better marketing initiatives if they discover discrepancies after creating the map.
While the main goal is to generate a better customer experience, every company has a different definition of what is better and various approaches to achieving it. This is why one needs to specify the goals during the first stage of creating the customer journey map template.
