Mapping your customer journey and why it is important

A customer journey map provides essential information for all businesses - as it maps the likely or average interaction that your customer will have with your business.

Taking the time to understand and analyse customer engagement from their perspective, allows you to make informed changes to operational processes to help add value to the customer journey. Customer satisfaction or goodwill within the business can be one of the most important commodity. By actively tracking, analysing and making improvements can have a positive effect on profits.

The benefits of customer journey maps

The goal is to minimise or eliminate the variables that can potentially cause or lead to negative customer interactions, experiences or dissatisfaction. Factors could be anything from a confusing store layout, excessive pricing to bad packaging as customer experience encompasses a wide variety of things, as such a customer journey map can be complex. 

Knowing exactly when engagement happens, when it should happen and managing them to ensure they are positive, can help increase loyalty in the long-run. Customers often value consistency, whether it is the quality of the product or service level, as an excellent customer experience isn't worth nothing if it's followed by a substandard one.

Customers attach emotion to your brand. Positive or negative customer experience(s) will shape the way they may portray you in their interactions with friends, family, or social media, and referrals are the best forms of promotion. That then gives those customers a pre-determined opinion of you before they've even experienced it first-hand.

How to map customer journeys

With a customer journey map, you may be able to pinpoint potential issues customers may face before it happens, which provides areas that you can work on to improve and offer a higher quality service. For the most comprehensive view of your customer journey possible, you need to analyse every single method of interaction and things that customers may encounter. From your social media accounts, the language you use on your welcome signs, website, product packaging or even staff appearances - everything matters.

The actual process of mapping a customer journey is an involved one. A number of factors need to be considered such as value perception, expectations, company processes etc. It starts with determining the key relationships and journey milestones. What do your customers do for you? What do you do for them? This helps you establish cross-influence and lays the foundation for the rest of the map.

Other elements to consider include the persona of your ideal customer. Consider things like spending habits, value perception, their wants and needs and what appeals to them and what doesn’t. It’s also important to have a realistic view of your service delivery if you're going to get the most use from the customer service map. Overestimating your ability in certain areas negates the map's usefulness.

How CRM software can help

Data is needed to build a true representation of your customer journey. CRM software can provide you with that data, as it allows you to develop an accurate representation of who your customers are and what they respond to. For example, you can use CRM to determine buying trends, successful promotions, customer issue resolution rates or even if, a lack of a certain stocked item has led to the fall in sales of other stock.

A CRM software can provide your business with accurate and usable data whether it is for building a customer journey map, managing the sales pipeline or even recording customer returns - having your customer data in one place without having to rely on employees’ memory can only be an advantage.