In the past, a great customer journey meant little more than making sure your website worked and phone lines were active. But now, customers expect more — which means that if you aren’t providing it, you’re actively falling behind.
You can’t optimize a journey that you know nothing about, so one of the first steps of providing a great customer journey is to map it out. Let’s talk about customer journey mapping — what it means, how you can get started on your own journey map and why it all matters to your business.
Understanding customer journey mapping
What is customer journey mapping, and how does it fit into your overall customer engagement strategy? Understanding this is critical to getting the process right; doing so means you’ll have a map that not only makes sense but is helpful to your customer service teams.
Defining customer journey mapping and its significance
Customer journey mapping is the process of visually defining and depicting the actions and perceptions of customers as they move through a relationship with your company. A customer journey map is a visual representation of all of the paths customers take from brand touchpoint to brand touchpoint across channels and over time as they interact with your business.
A journey map helps anyone who participates in the customer journey, from the executive level all the way to individual customer service agents. Journey mapping helps cross-functional teams align on orchestrating smooth end-to-end journeys that improve the customer’s experience and build customer trust and loyalty by providing a holistic view of all touchpoints, allowing teams to identify sticking points and ideal paths.
The evolution of customer journey mapping in business strategy
In times of less sophisticated marketing and customer service abilities, the customer journey wasn’t necessarily built into customer experience strategies. Companies often focused more on things like name recognition, figuring that just getting someone in the door was the end of the process.
But in today’s more complex and competitive marketplace, getting a customer’s attention and progressing through the awareness stage is just the beginning. Customers expect a seamless and personalized journey from acquisition to purchase to any necessary later service. And to provide that kind of service, companies need a thorough understanding of the customer journey.
The anatomy of a customer journey map
Mapping is an important step in gaining that thorough understanding of your customers’ journeys with your business. But what does that map look like? What needs to be mapped, and how?
Here’s how we start to identify and visualize your customer journey stages.
Key components: Touchpoints, emotions and pain points
The most important thing that your customer journey map should include is your brand touchpoints. That means anywhere that customers interact with your brand should be mapped out — from your website to your social media to customer service interactions.
Just knowing where you interact with customers is helpful, but to create the kind of personalized and seamless journeys customers expect, you’ll need more than that. Mapping these touchpoints means more than simply listing them — it’s important to see how they fit together in a sequence or sequences, as customers move through their journeys.
As you lay out your customer journey map’s stages, you should also note the intangibles that you can draw from the data you have available. How are your customers feeling at each point in their journey? Are they happy here (perhaps at the moment of purchase) and upset here (say, when they initiate a customer service inquiry)?
This is important information as you begin to optimize a journey. And it’s true for two reasons.
First, there are times where customers are likely going to feel a certain way and there’s not a lot you can do about that. No matter how pleasant your customer experience may be overall, if your product’s stopped working and a customer needs to call to get it replaced, they’re not likely to be very happy. Knowing this can help you navigate the tough moments as soon as possible so that you don’t add a poor experience on top of the negativity a customer might already be feeling.
Secondly, there may be points in your customer journey where there’s unexpected negativity — spots where something doesn’t work the way that it should. Identifying these pain points is one of the most useful things that a customer journey map can do for you. It’s the only way that you can fix them and reduce the negative experiences that customers have with your brand as much as possible.
Visualizing the path: From awareness to advocacy
As we noted above, once you know your brand touchpoints you need to collate them into a cohesive journey, a path that a customer follows from setting a goal to achieving it. That goal could be anything that a customer can do — of course it could mean buying from you, but there are plenty of other options as well. A repeat customer might follow a very different path than a first-time buyer, for instance. There are a number of different customer service journeys a customer might need to take, from a person who’s having trouble ordering online to someone whose product has stopped working altogether.
In other words, your customer journey map isn’t linear from start to finish. It will likely consist of several journeys — from research to purchase to social interaction to post-purchase journeys like service. Depending on your situation, there might even be disengagement journeys that you want to map and optimize in the hopes that a positive experience might at least help word of mouth. This might even prompt a customer to try you again in the future even if the first go-round didn’t go perfectly.
Setting the stage for successful mapping
Pre-work is important, as you aren’t just going to want to plunge blindly into an attempt to map out every brand touchpoint you have. You’ll need first to understand who exactly your customers are, and also to be able to gather and analyze good customer data.
Identifying your buyer persona
Customer personas are an important tool in any part of your marketing process, and the customer journey map is no exception. Knowing your target audiences allows you to understand their needs and wants — which not only allows you to identify the goals at the end of a journey, but can also help you to find potential pain points by identifying what a persona might be feeling at different stages of the customer journey.
There are a number of ways to identify customer personas; depending on how sophisticated your marketing department is, they may handle it or you may want to engage an outside brand firm. In its simplest form, the process involves gathering data on your customers and prospects and then grouping what you find into the most common similarities that you find. That might mean website data, it might mean interviews.
Gathering and analyzing customer data
The more data you have available, the better. Your website is an absolute treasure trove of potential data points, as are your other digital channels like social media. You should make sure to gather as much of that information as you possibly can at this point — and really, all points — in your customer journey mapping process so you’re certain you know your customer personas as well as is possible.
Step-by-step guide to creating your customer journey map
This can be a daunting task to tackle, so breaking down the mapping process into stages is a useful way to handle it. From defining goals to listing your touchpoints to actually mapping the customer journey, here’s where the rubber meets the road.
Step 1: Define objectives and goals
What are your business’ goals for customers? What are you aiming for people to be able to accomplish? Knowing this is important because you’re not just trying to determine what is happening now, but also the direction that you want your customers’ journeys to be moving in.
Step 2: Profile your target personas and their goals
We learned a bit about personas earlier, but here we really delve in and solidify them. Who are your ideal customers, and what are they trying to accomplish?
Step 3: List all possible customer touchpoints
Leave no stone unturned here. Missing touchpoints will leave you with an incomplete map, and that does you no good. It may be tedious, but you’ll be glad you were as thorough as possible in the end.
Step 4: Identify customer pain points an moments of delight
As you’re examining touchpoints, assess the quality of the experience right now for each of them. Are customers struggling at certain points? Are there places where they’re clearly succeeding? Your most positive and negative touchpoints are the places you’ll want to focus first once you start acting on what you learn.
Step 5: Map the actual customer journey
You have everything you need now to build your customer journey map. Remember that as you go, this map is not going to be a simple, single straight line. You should expect different journeys for different personas within the same touchpoints and goals, which can make things complicated. That’s a big part of the reason we’re doing this, though, so don’t fret.
Different types of customer journey maps
Let’s take a look at some options for how a customer journey map might look, based on the goals you’re trying to achieve and the personas you’re dealing with.
Current state vs. future state mapping
A current state customer map shows your customer journey as it exists today, warts and all. In fact, it’s best for identifying those warts — your map can show you the pain points customers are dealing with, and it can show you gaps in the journey. A future state map, on the other hand, shows your ideal journey as it “will” be. It’s aspirational, taking into account the gaps and pain points in your current state map and showing how they’ll be smoothed out and fixed.
Service blueprint and day-in-the-life maps
These maps go outside of your brand touchpoints alone to show how outside forces play into customer journeys. A service blueprint shows your own organizational processes and how they relate to your customers, where a day-in-the-life map envisions the things your customers are doing outside their interactions with your brand to show where you fit into their lives.
Leveraging technology in customer journey mapping
Mapping the customer journey requires the right tools to be sure you’re able to get the job done.
Tools and software for effective mapping
Technology can help quite a bit here, as a customer experience orchestration platform can gather this data for you from all of your channels and help you analyze it. With the sheer volume of what’s available, you’ll want the help. Make sure that the platform you choose is compatible with all the channels you’ll need, because you don’t want gaps to form in your data set.
Integrating customer feedback for continuous improvement
It’s easier than ever to get direct and rapid feedback from your customers on how their journey is going. Especially via social media, you’re constantly pulling in data on where pain points exist and moments of delight are occurring. Don’t ignore this critical information — when you are consistently told that something’s broken, fix it; and when you’re told something is working great, take a look at it and see how you might be able to leverage that in other places.
Best practices for customer journey mapping
Aside from the strict details of what needs to be done, here are some ideas on how to make your customer journey maps even better.
Keeping your maps updated and actionable
Journey mapping isn’t something you just do once and then set in stone. Things will change as your business and your customers do, and as that change happens drift will occur. Your current state map will become a past state map, in other words, and your future state map will become harder and harder to reach.
Conduct research over time to gather data on customers, touchpoints, and everything else that’s gone into your mapping exercise. When things change, update your maps.
Involve cross-functional teams in the mapping process
Mapping the customer journey isn’t a one-person job, either. The more information you can take in, the better, and different people are going to be expert in different parts of the journey. Talk to sales about the early stages of the journey. Talk to customer service about what their part of the journey looks like.
Involving more people will make the process a bit more complex. But it will lead to a better result, so it’s worth the extra effort.
The role of customer journey maps in enhancing customer experience
This is the real reason you’ve done all this work — so what do the effects of a good customer journey map look like? How does the mapping process actually help your business? How does this help you get and keep customers, and adjust your decisions about your business?
Improving customer retention and loyalty
Acquiring new customers is difficult, as we all know, so the goal of most smart businesses is to reduce churn and keep the customers you have as long as possible. A smooth, pleasant customer experience is a great way to make sure that once you have a customer, they stay a customer. And the process of customer journey mapping is all about improving the customer experience — locating the pain points that need to be fixed, and the moments of delight that need to be leveraged as much as possible.
Informing product and service design decisions
One of the major benefits of the customer journey map is seeing where things are working well and seeing where things are failing. That doesn’t just apply to the overarching concept of the journey map, either — you can see where things are sticking within your business, and even with your products and services. If customers are consistently transitioning to customer service at a certain point in their journey, that’s a major red flag that there’s an issue that needs to be dealt with.
Use your customer journey map to guide not only your strict customer service goals, but also your product and service design decisions. Find the pain points everywhere in your process, and iterate to try to eliminate them.
Common pitfalls in customer journey mapping
There are plenty of ways that you can get off track when mapping your customer journey, especially if this is your first time doing it. Here are a few issues that you should look out for, and some ways to avoid making critical mistakes.
Avoid making assumptions without data
As someone who’s deeply knowledgeable about your own business, it’s easy to get complacent and think you know everything already. You feel like you know your product or service, you know your customers — you might think you can draw out your customer journey map on your own, without having to do the legwork of gathering and analyzing the data. That’s a big mistake.
You never want to make assumptions about your customer journey without having the data to back those assumptions up. In fact, that’s kind of the whole point of this exercise — to take what you think you know, and get the information to build out the real picture. The data is one of the most important parts of the journey mapping process, which is why a good experience orchestration tool that can help you to manage that data is such an important part.
Align your maps with your business goals
Your current state customer journey map is obviously going to depict things as they are today, which means that there isn’t much that you can do to interpret it differently from that. But when you’re building out your other maps, from future state through your day-in-the-life and especially your service blueprint maps, remember that there are things at stake beyond just the goals and objectives of your customers.
You’re not just taking what the customer is giving you — the journey mapping process is part of a larger customer journey management ecosystem that should involve you guiding your customer on an ideal journey, not just for them but for your business as well.
This means that your journey maps shouldn’t just align with the goals of the customer, they should also align with the goals of your business. What are you trying to accomplish here? Where are you trying to sell, where are you trying to upsell, and where are you working to smooth out issues to retain existing customers?
These business goals are really the most important thing for your business. Aligning them with customer goals is a critical part of this process.
Know where your customers are and where they’re going
Your customers expect a smooth and seamless customer journey, and if you don’t even know what the current and ideal states of that journey look like, it’s almost impossible to provide them with what they’re looking for.
Customer journey mapping is the beginning of the solution to that problem, but it’s only the beginning. Don’t forget that once you have your maps — current, future, and more — they’re just a part of your larger customer journey management ecosystem.
Your map is not the end of anything, it’s the guide that helps you optimize a great customer experience for each and every person who interacts with your business.
Frequently asked questions
What is the first step in customer journey mapping?
The first step in the customer journey mapping process is setting the objectives and goals you need to achieve. This applies to yourself, as a part of the mapping process, and to your customers.
What do you need to achieve with your customer journey map? What are your customers trying to accomplish in each of their journeys? You need answers to questions like these before you do anything else.
How often should customer journey maps be updated?
There isn’t a set number of weeks or months you should wait to make updates — these maps are living documents, and should be updated regularly. At the very least, when things change in your business you should be making updates.
A large change like a new product or service is an obvious time to make an update, because entirely new journeys will be added. But smaller changes matter too, and should at the very least prompt data gathering to determine whether or not larger changes need to be made.
Can small businesses benefit from customer journey mapping?
Yes, all businesses can benefit from customer journey mapping. For small businesses it might be even more important, because of how critical customer retention is. The smaller the business, the more critical every customer is, and considering the higher cost of acquisition than retention, retention is all the more important. A positive customer experience can boost retention, and the customer journey map is an important tool for improving the customer experience.
What are the most common mistakes in customer journey mapping?
Two of the most common mistakes in the customer journey mapping process are making assumptions about the map without having the data to back them up, and failing to align the map with the goals of the business.
Data is critical in mapping, because it can reinforce beliefs while also revealing gaps in the process that you might not have known about. And your customer journeys aren’t pointed in the right direction if they aren’t meeting the goals of your business — so keep that in mind when creating future state maps.
How does customer journey mapping differ from user experience mapping?
There are many similarities between a user experience map and a customer journey map. Both are depictions of the ways in which your customers interact with your brand. The main difference is that user experience mapping focuses more on the customer’s experience within the product or service, where the customer journey map is more holistic.
What’s the impact of customer journey mapping on customer loyalty?
Customer journey mapping has a massive impact on customer loyalty, if done right. People simply will not stick around if they have a bad experience with your business, but good experiences can prompt multiple purchases and upsales — not to mention positive word of mouth.
Improving the customer experience is one of the most powerful tools you have for improving customer loyalty. And the customer journey map is not an option, but a requirement for truly optimizing the customer experience.
You need to know the gaps and pain points that exist in the experience to fix them, and you need to fix those gaps to retain customers. The journey map is a tool to achieve both.
