A journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s interactions with a company, including their needs, actions and the processes in place to communicate and interact with them. Journey maps are used at any time in the customer engagement lifecycle and can be amended over time as their behaviors change or your company adapts to their critical decision points.
While every customer is different, businesses want each person to walk away with the same type of experience after they engage with your team: a positive one. One of the best ways to understand who your customers are, what drives their decisions and how they view their world — and your business — is done via construction of a customer journey map.
Why are journey maps important?
Once created, journey maps help a company to understand all of the touch points a customer has with your brand, the steps that they take to interact with it and what other factors or influences that they may have before and after each contact. It also attempts to collect their attitudes, behaviors, pain points and motivations.
Because there are a lot of different aspects that can be woven into a journey map, it is vital to include input and buy-in from all company business functions so each member of your team knows how they too can deliver for your customers and support an overall customer-centric culture.
Once completed, journey maps can be used to identify additional opportunities to enhance a customer’s journey, expand your product line or integrate new features that align with a customer’s experience, and align budgets and resources to seek an overall customer experience. Because of this, journey mapping can be an iterative process as your brand, product line and customer base grow and evolve.
How do I get started creating a journey map?
1. Document Customer Persona
A persona is a representation of your ideal customer based on your knowledge of them, which will help you to think about your brand and products from their perspective as well as align your staff from across your organization. For journey mapping, however, you will map how different personas move through a specific type of interaction with your company, such as the initial purchase or how to maintain long-term customer satisfaction.
2. Document Traits and Attitudes
Fill out your customer personas with key information, such as behaviors, expected user experiences, needs and attitudes that they may be experiencing while on the journey selected.
3. Create the Journey Map
Document all of the personal and technical, direct and indirect, and potential positive and negative touch points your customer will have along their journey toward their desired behavior, such as locking in their first services contract.
4. Measure and Evolve
Finally, utilize your journey map to develop metrics that can help to measure how well you are meeting your customer’s needs and responding to their requests. For each, consider:
- The timing and frequency of collecting these metrics
- How processes can be improved based on the results
- Why these metrics are important toward delivering the type of customer experience you want
- How your journey map can improve over time
- How the various members of your cross-functional team can help achieve the results you are targeting
Whether you have utilized journey mapping before or if this is your first time utilizing this approach, Gainsight CX has built-in analytical tools, dashboards and customer feedback templates designed specifically for your B2B business.
