How to Make Your Own Customer Journey Map From Scratch
If you are an entrepreneur and you have an e-commerce business, the most logical thing is that you constantly ask yourself how you can improve your dealings with your customers. Knowing what they need and being able to offer it is important to achieve loyalty and, above all, to consolidate your brand. Here we tell you how to make a customer journey map. Keep reading!
What is the Customer Journey Map?
The Customer Journey Map or Customer Life Cycle Map is a diagram that shows what steps the customer follows to interact with the company and how they feel when they do so. It could be said that it is “the journey” that the user makes before knowing the product and until he buys it.
The Customer Journey Map is mainly used to understand our customers, to know what they think of us, and to try to make their experience positive. In addition, one of the important points is to know if you agree with the way we work because our long-term corporate reputation will depend on it. And as we know, a bad reputation can lead to poor performance of our business.
Types of Journey
The main difference is in the time it is recorded. We tell you the details of each type of Journey:
- AS-IS: Displays the current “snapshot” of the experience we are delivering to customers.
- TO BE: Shows the image of a future experience to deliver new products or services or the experience itself.
All this can be focused on a product, service, brand, or process. It depends on the objective, the Customer Journey will be one way or another and will have more or less information.
How to Design a Customer Journey Map
There is no established model to create our own Customer Journey Map since each company creates one to measure. Despite this, we recommend that you follow an order of priorities to analyze.
To know how to build a Customer Journey there are many technological tools but they are usually very quantitative. The important part is the emotional and the experience, something that is very difficult for a tool to pick up:
Target
You have to define what you are going to make the journey for. Is it because of a problem? Will you launch a new product? Do you want to see the phases of the purchase? Do you want to take initiative or opportunities? You have to be very clear about what information you want to find out.
Exploration
When you start collecting information. Here you will have to define the sample to be analyzed, the variables, and the hypotheses.
You must collect information from internal sources (employees, digital systems, internal documentation on processes and procedures associated with clients, satisfaction surveys, complaints, CRM …) and external sources (the clients themselves, qualitative and quantitative sources).
We define the customer
For any business, the most important thing is to know which clients we are targeting, although in this case, we have to go a step further: not only is it to know their age or education but also what their way of life is, what their tastes are and needs.
To better understand the customer, organizations must develop people. Put yourself in their shoes so you understand how they behave (including what they like and don’t like) and why they do what they do. Although all are unique, these customer profiles provide guidance and information for journey mapping.
When doing this, keep in mind that it is not enough to have a single buyer persona. Buyers, at different stages of buying, will behave differently and interact with the business differently, so it is worth distinguishing between someone who has been doing market research for a few months and is ready to go. purchase, and someone who has recently started thinking about solving their particular problem or need (by testing the product or service).
In the Customer Journey, the empathy map is used, a tool that helps us to put ourselves in the customer’s shoes and that shows us their motivations, needs, and why they do what they do. Thanks to him we can get very valuable information related to the attitude of the client and his behavior.
WHAT RELATIONSHIP DO WE HAVE WITH OUR CLIENTS
Our relationship with users has several stages: first, customers discover that we exist and the first contact is made; later, if you liked the service, you will use it again; Finally, if you have been enthusiastic about our product, you will recommend us to your friends.
WHAT MOTIVATES THEM AND WHAT MAKES THEM DOUBT
We always have to know if customers have doubts about us because otherwise, we will never be able to improve and make them feel satisfied by trusting us.
Think about what your client’s end goals are in each phase (and remember that they may change as the process unfolds).
A good way to do this is to first identify the paths that the visitor can take on your website. If the visitor is a member of a pre-existing customer, the first thing to do is log in. Other activities include browsing, searching for products, or comparing products; Once you have defined a complete list of these activities, you will be able to identify all of your touchpoints and the goals associated with each touchpoint.
Here are some ways to understand customer goals:
Learn to carry out a program focused on the client and with a focus on digital media
I want more information!
- Through a survey or interview with different groups of clients
- Through feedback on user testing
- Studying customer service emails and transcripts
- Identifying customer questions in each phase
- Using customer analysis tools like Hotjar to collect information
Stages of the Journey
The user, when he becomes aware that he wants something, looks for information and continues through the different stages of the Journey. In the image, you can see the example.
The important thing is that we do it from the client’s point of view, and what he sees is “the before,” “at the beginning,” “the during,” and “the after.” The best thing is to do the Customer Journey by empathizing with the customer, as we see in the example:
At what points are we going to interact with them?
The contact points are the interactions that a customer makes with our brand, product, or service and they are usually defined by a customer need or an objective that needs to be achieved.
We have to differentiate between two things: on the one hand, in what way customers interact with us (on the web, by phone, by email, in person, etc.) and the emotions they have during these interactions (are they happy, satisfied, angry, boring …).
WHICH INTERACTIONS ARE MOST IMPORTANT
If we already know how customers relate to us, we have to differentiate what interests us: if they have had a bad reaction we have to try to identify exactly where it has been to improve specific points. At this point, we can draw our own map to better illustrate the points that interest us. Normally the Customer Journey Map is represented by a dotted line (the path that our customers follow during the journey) indicating the data that most interests us. We leave you this example from the Service Design Tools web.
INTERNAL PROCESSES
Once we have a map with the interactions between our company and the client, we can point out right there what internal processes our company does. If we see it all together, it can help us to discern what mistakes we may be made if the customer is not satisfied at some point.
UNDERSTAND THE DEFICIENCIES THAT CUSTOMERS NOTICE IN OUR COMPANY
We have to understand how the client feels at all times. Every user headache is an opportunity we have to improve our treatment of them and also add improvements to the company. At this time we can also ask ourselves what our business would be like in the future.
OPPORTUNITIES
These are actions that we could take to improve the experience of our customers, but how do we discover them?
- Unmet needs or unmet goals.
- Existence of gaps between customer expectations and the experience we offer.
- Detection of overexertion in the actions carried out by the client.
- Obstacles that prevent progress on the journey.
- Detection of points of confusion, inefficiency, and negative emotions.
To discover all these opportunities, a Journey is developed.
Elements of the Customer Journey
Here is an outline of the different elements of a Customer Journey. The ideal would be to build it based on what the client tells us:
Why is it important to do a Customer Journey Map
In recent years, e-commerce business models have proliferated, where digital marketing is essential. For digital marketing to be really useful, we need to work on points such as SEO, blogging, social media marketing, and especially the subject that we have explained in this article. The importance of the customer is decisive in new business models, and making them feel satisfied and accompanied throughout the purchase process will be increasingly relevant.
Customer Journey Map Examples
The Dapper Apps Customer Journey Map has 5 main phases: Research, Compare, Workshop, Appointment, and Sign Out. This information helps to organize systematically how the customer interacts with the brand and to obtain information from the knowledge.
IdeaRocket has a customer journey that follows a mostly circular path, with 6 main phases: interests, consideration, evaluation, pre-production, production, and use of video. This model is simple and also clearly describes the process during each step of the customer journey. Based on the information obtained in the SEM lead generation, the company focuses its CTAs for each phase of the agreement and is appropriate for the circumstances of the visitor.
The customer journey map must be purposeful and actionable, measurable and dynamic, allowing the business to ensure effectiveness and determine its success. Additionally, including KPIs can help provide the assessment framework to make the customer journey viable.
For example, one of the main functions of a customer journey is to identify opportunities based on qualitative research of customer perceptions and experiences.
Many companies use travel maps to help obtain qualitative information about customer’s ups and downs. Indicators such as “meets / does not meet / exceeds expectations” are used to effectively visualize opportunities for improvement in the customer journey.
Other useful metrics that could be tracked include Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Measures, Quantitative Assessments of Customer Emotions, and Measures of the Importance / Usefulness of Specific TouchPoints.
Regardless of the metrics, you decide to use, having the KPIs defined will help you measure and improve your customer experience, now and in the future.
