If you take care of your customers, your business will nurture itself. Today, the success of any business significantly depends on its customer experience. If customers have an unsatisfactory experience with a business, 50% of them will switch to its competitors. Moreover, companies focusing on user experience witness a revenue boost of 80%.

Customer journey mapping plays a vital role in improving businesses. In this process, a business monitors its customers' movements to learn about their pain points and expectations.

This oversight of the customer journey helps the brand refine its services, onboarding process, marketing efforts, and website experience, among other things, to improve brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Let’s understand how customer journey mapping can enhance your business.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

Customer journey mapping involves identifying customers' experiences and pain points as they progress through different sales funnel stages. This approach is widely used across industries to enhance user experiences, streamline operations, and improve customer loyalty.

There are two crucial aspects of customer journey mapping.

Pain points

A key factor a brand or business needs to understand about its customers is the pain point. A pain point is the user's issue, such as confusing navigation on a website, long wait times for the website onboarding, a lengthy checkout process, or poor product quality. These issues can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction, affecting the overall customer experience.

Touchpoints

These are the points or moments where customers interact with the brand, directly or indirectly. They are essential in customer journey mapping and have several. The touchstones of the customers who choose to contact the brand are phone calls, visits to the website, conversations with chatbots, in-store purchases, online reviews, and emails. 

Micro-moments—those instant decisions when customers turn to a brand for quick solutions—are critical touchpoints influencing purchasing behavior. Understanding these moments can help businesses create more seamless and engaging customer experiences.

Do you Use Customer Journey Maps For Your Business?

A customer journey map is a blueprint for success that targets the core of the business: its customers. Businesses that use customer journey maps witness a 10-15% increase in customer satisfaction. It helps brands build better websites, products, and services, boosting user experience and satisfaction and getting new clients for your business.

1. It helps you walk in the customer’s shoes.

Using a customer journey map lets you know how to use your product and service or browse your website from the customer's perspective. For example, session replays can help you find out what led the customer to drop off from the website.

It helps you analyze the website's architecture and make changes to it, such as changing the position of the CTA, redoing the top menu, or adding a search bar.

2. Identify customer needs

If a customer fails to buy a product or find something on your website, you must know about it. A customer journey map makes this easy.

“Heatmaps are a valuable tool in customer journey mapping. They allow you to see where the user scrolls, taps, clicks, etc. Based on their website activity, you can pinpoint issues and improve on them. For example, you could add a pop-up how-to video on using the product,” said David Muñoz, Founder of Mission Personal Injury Lawyers.

3. You can visualize user emotions.

With customer journey mapping, you can visualize user emotions and see user actions. Understanding how the user feels while interacting with your business is crucial. Aspects like rage clicks, API errors, and slow page responses indicate user frustrations. These can help visualize emotions and fix friction points on your website.

Aspects like rage clicks, API errors, and slow page responses indicate user frustrations. They can help visualize emotions and help fix the friction points on your website.

Presenting the Customer Journey Effectively

Once you've created a detailed customer journey map, it's essential to communicate your findings clearly, especially when sharing insights with stakeholders, marketers, or your team. A well-structured customer journey presentation can bring the customer journey to life, helping your audience visualize key touchpoints, emotions, and improvement opportunities.

Business Success Stories With Customer Journey Mapping

Several businesses are using customer journey mapping to make the most of it.

Starbucks

Starbucks's customers abandoned the app before making purchases. The company discovered this issue through customer journey mapping and introduced a loyalty program to retain its customers.

The addition of the loyalty program increased mobile payments by 17% for the brand, helping it drive revenue and customer loyalty.

Netflix

Personalization is one of the best benefits of creating and using a customer journey map. It is directly linked to customer experience, as 81% of customers prefer companies that offer a personalized experience. Netflix is the master of personalization.

Its intricate customer journey mapping helps analyze user behavior at every customer journey stage, leading to accurate personalization. It has also led to up to 80% of content streamed on the platform because of personalized recommendations.

How to Improve a Customer Journey Map

A well-analyzed customer journey is the key to improving your business and safeguarding your business against losses. To make the most of your customer journey mapping, follow these steps:

1. Outline Your Goals and Customer Personas

All departments must work together to improve your business. Hence, you must set goals while keeping all departments in the loop. Your goals must be clear, whether about boosting conversions or improving a touchpoint like the website.

Creating comprehensive customer personas for different customer segments of your customer base is also crucial. For an accurate mapping, you must integrate all the necessary information about each customer in these personas, such as demographics, pain points, needs, behavior, etc.

2. Combine Data from Different Sources

A customer journey map has several touchpoints, each of which can provide you with different data. When you gather data, it can be solicited or unsolicited data. Solicited data is the direct data you capture from surveys, online feedback forms, email reviews, QR code for Google form, etc.

On the other hand, unsolicited data includes indirect data that you can gather from customer call transcripts, social media, chats, websites, frontline employees, etc. Brands can use social media listening to capture real-time customer sentiment data, which can help them understand emotions and intent.

“Getting customer feedback without asking gives you more insight than direct comments. You can better grasp your customers' behaviors using real-time feedback and models that understand emotions and intentions,” said Mark Roman, Founder of Roman Austin Personal Injury Lawyers. “This type of unsolicited feedback provides a complete response rate, helping you learn what your customers think about each stage of their journey.”

While you cannot completely understand the customer's mind, these data elements can help you create accurate customer journey maps and refine personas.

3. Use AI Customer Journey Insights

AI customer journey insights are a game-changer in understanding and improving the customer experience. By using AI to find hidden patterns in customer journey data, businesses can gain a comprehensive view of the customer experience and proactively respond to customer needs.

These sources include user surveys, reviews, support tickets, and customer data. Businesses can proactively respond to customer needs and streamline processes by analyzing customer data from these sources.

4. Engage Frontline Employees

When creating a customer journey map, involving all relevant parties, including frontline employees, is essential. Their unique perspective, gained from dealing with customers face-to-face, can provide invaluable insights into the customer experience. 

While online sources and support teams may provide relevant data, frontline employees deal with customers face-to-face. Therefore, it is wise to seek the perspective of frontline employees regarding customer experience when creating a customer journey map.

5. Implement the Omni-Channel Approach

The omnichannel approach aims to provide a more cohesive and consistent experience across all platforms. This approach can be beneficial when creating a customer journey map, as it makes understanding and visualizing the customer's journey easy.

For example, if a customer searches for a product online and adds it to their cart, they receive an email with an offer. The customer buys the product and gets an email with the order shipped. They may also seek assistance via phone or chat support if there is an issue with the product being delivered. The way the user is engaged across all the touchpoints describes the omnichannel approach, and its visualization is the customer journey map.

6. Continuously Monitor Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is a more direct way to learn about the customer's pain points, preferences, and motivations. Businesses can use surveys, online reviews, user interviews, and focus groups to learn about their high-performing touchpoints, touchpoint issues, etc.

Depending on the insights, you can make relevant changes to the customer journey stages and touchpoints for maximum engagement. For example, you can increase order volume by changing the website or the order checkout process. The overall impact is a more accurate and comprehensive representation of the customer’s experiences.

7. Test and Evaluate Any Changes

Once you have changed the touchpoints to resolve customer pain points, you must test them in real-time. The testing process should involve analyzing how accurately the customer journey map reflects the customer's behaviors, experiences, and pain points. According to a study, only 43% of respondents have validated the accuracy of their customer journey map through comparisons to actual marketing. If the testing process results are reasonable, you can refine it further for better results.

Conclusion

An accurate customer journey map is essential for every business. Whether your goals are to boost leads, increase orders, attract website traffic, or something else, a customer journey map can provide a transparent view of customer activities and improve the overall experience. This approach is widely used across industries to solve touchpoint issues, organizational inefficiencies, and churn with a clear customer journey map.