How to Map your Customer Journey

An effective Customer Journey Map gives you a clear and detailed picture of how your customer uses your product or services, and how customers and potential customers go through the buying process. It gives you and your team an overview of your customers’ experience and shows how they move through your sales funnel, which in turn helps you to identify opportunities to improve their experience. 

To make it effective, you need to rethink what you believe you know, and fully understand every touch point a customer has with your business. There’s no one template that fits all businesses when it comes to mapping your customer journey, but there is a system, what a surprise! So here it is.

Get started.

If this is your first attempt at mapping, then the most important thing is to keep it as simple as possible, but make sure it gives you all the vital information that you need. Remember that to make it effective you need to step out of your own shoes, and into your customers’ shoes. Take off those rose-tinted specs and see your operation as the customer sees it… as it is, not as you want it to be, or as it should be.

When you have your mindset right, follow these 6 steps…

STEP 1
Make sure that you know your customers intimately 
You may have been told about the importance of building your customer avatars (a picture of your ideal customer). For customer journey mapping, these avatars are essential, giving you insights into your customers’ motivations, their buying habits, what they think, how they make buying decisions, what they want to achieve and so on. To get the best possible results, you’ll create a customer journey map for each avatar. 

STEP 2
Work out the phases in your customer journey 
How do potential customers hear about you? What are their first interactions with you? 
What is their step by step experience with you? Your customer phases may include things like:  Research, Purchase, Discovery, Recommend, Choice. For your first map, keep it simple and don’t over-think things. 

STEP 3
Know what your customers want to achieve 
In customer journey mapping, it’s crucial to keep in mind that this is not about you, it’s all about your customers. It’s all about what they need, what they want, their pain, their goals. 
Go through each phase of your map and think about what your customer wants and needs when they’re in this phase, so that you can give them what they are looking for. 

For example, if they are looking to put a toe in the water and try your products out before they commit to a purchase, but you don’t have any free resources, then you are not helping them to accomplish their goal. Or if they are trying to find you online, but your website is not ranked on Google, then again you have stopped them from accomplishing their goal. You have put an insurmountable hurdle in their way. 

List your customers’ goals clearly under each of the phases in the journey map, because you can only accomplish your goals if your customers accomplish theirs. 

STEP 4
Identify the touch-points and Moments of Truth on your customer journey. 
For each phase, identify the interaction points between you and your customer, and the opportunities you have to connect and engage with your them as they try to reach their goals. These will include interactions that you have off site and onsite, through marketing, in person, and over the phone. 

Some of these touch-points are more critical than others, e.g. when they try to call you does someone answer the phone, and how do they answer the phone? 

These are your Moments of Truth. Map them out too as you will need to pay particular attention to them when you come to take action. 

STEP 5
Understand your time-frames 
Work out the time it takes for a customer to move through each phase of their journey with you. Is there more that you could do to help your customer achieve their goal for that phase, or speed up their journey? 

STEP 6
Assess the team members/external support involved in each interaction
Look at who you have involved in supporting the customer journey. Do you have ‘aces in their places’? Are your best people looking after and monitoring the Moments of Truth? Do they have the support they need? 

Are they following simple, logical and repeatable systems to get the job done? Have they had enough training? The right training? 

For your customers to accomplish their goals in each phase of their journey through your business, there must be effective systems in place, and well-trained people owning and running those systems. 

Walk through every step of the customer journey with your team, and at each step ask ‘Why? Why do we have this step, do we really need it, does it add value for our customers? Why do we do it this way, could we make it easier?’

As it sounds, the customer journey is the route your customer takes through your business from first deciding that they want what you have, to choosing to buy what they want from you, through every step of your sales process, to receiving and paying for their goods or services, and hopefully leaving you good feedback. It’s well worth the investment.
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