By Colton Eva
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the entire customer experience. It helps you understand how your customers interact with your business and what they expect from it. A customer journey map is especially important for B2B companies since the relationship between buyer and seller is typically longer-term than those in B2C scenarios.
Customer journey maps
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the experiences your customers have had with your company, from the very first interaction to their most recent. It’s an organized diagram that shows how they arrived at their current state and what they need to reach their desired end state.
It helps you understand how people feel about every aspect of interacting with your business, from finding out about you for the first time to becoming a repeat customer or devotee of your brand. Once you know where customers are currently in their journey, it’s easy to see where there might be gaps that need addressing. Creating this map can help you create strategies for improving each step of your experience from awareness-building tactics like social media advertising or search engine optimization.
Why is a customer journey map important?
A customer journey map allows you to see how your customers are interacting with your business. By identifying the different touchpoints, phases, and paths that make up their experience with your brand, you can learn more about where their attention lies at any given time.
It helps businesses understand where they need improvement for customers to have a better experience overall. By seeing everything from start to finish, companies can identify opportunities for improvement at every stage of their relationship with customers.
How to create a customer journey map
To create a customer journey map, it’s important to set the stage for your mapping session. First, define the problem you are trying to solve by asking yourself what needs to be improved for customers to get more value out of their interactions with your company.
Then identify which aspects of this problem could be addressed through an improved customer experience—for example, how can you make your website easier for customers to use? Or how can you make it easier for your employees to find the information they need while they are on the phone with customers?
Next time you’re talking about customer journeys from start to finish at your company, keep these questions in mind so that everyone has shared context about what exactly is being mapped out.
The framework for creating a customer journey map
If you’re looking to create a customer journey map, this framework will help you get started. To create a customer journey map, follow these steps:
- Develop your definition of what a customer journey is.
- Create the basic structure of your map.
- Add information to each stage of the process and come up with solutions for each problem at each stage.
Conclusion
Customer journey maps are an effective way of thinking about your business and its customers, and the best part is that they can be used for so many purposes. Whether you’re looking for ways to improve your marketing or sales strategies or just want to understand what makes people tick, a customer journey map will help guide you through the process of finding answers and hopefully some solutions.
