The ultimate guide to customer journey mapping

 This article first appeared on Feefo, April 2021.  

 

What is a customer journey map? 

A customer journey map visually brings your customers’ journeys to life, making it much easier to see how their experiences flow across your brands’ touchpoints. It’s a strategic approach to optimising your customer experiences – far more effective than trying to understand and improve individual touchpoints at a tactical level. 

Your customers don’t see your touchpoints as separate entities – for them, their experience with you should be seamless. The only way you’ll truly understand your business from the perspective of your customers is to take a step back and review their journey from end to end. Armadillo Innovation Director, Rob Pellow, spoke with Feefo about customer journey mapping and why it’s key:

 

“The key is to understand what to do when you have the information, especially around personalisation. The journey needs to be holistically joined up. It’s good to know that your customer is moving from email X to website Y and then seeing social post Z, but the real key is making those journeys as consistent as possible.

In our CRM-focussed world, this is always the most important thing to us – someone who has identified themselves by hard data gathering or observed behaviour will always have that reflected back to them. This regularly presents tech challenges as very few brands have the oft-sought after single customer view powering every bit of their tech stack. So, while you are creating these user journey maps, you should also have an eye on optimising your data flows so that at worst, customers aren’t seeing conflicting messages and, at best, you use every touchpoint to leverage relevance and engagement. 

Quite often, that means we build connectors – ways for us to gather the data and then distribute that to wherever it’s needed in order to deliver the best possible ROI on all campaigns, short and long term.” 

 

When and why is a customer journey map used? 

Customer journey maps can be used to meet many objectives. It’s a good idea to have a clear set of goals for your mapping project before you begin, to make sure that you maintain focus and mine the most relevant data. Some of the most popular examples of when and why a customer journey map might be used include:  

• To help your business better understand your customers. 
• To identify gaps in the customer experience 
• To improve your products and processes 
• To deliver relevant, meaningful and impactful communications 
• To prevent churn 
• To close the deal 

 

How to create a customer journey map 

Now you know what a customer journey map is, why it’s important and how it can help your business, it’s time to create your own.  

• List the touchpoints. 
• Identify your customer personas. 
• Gather research. 
• Identify which elements to include in your customer journey map. 

 

To see the full article and hear from other experts go to Feefo.