Mapping the Customer Journey: A Step-by-Step Guide

In a company that is selling a product or service, there can be infinitely many ways that a customer comes into the business and exits. That's why it is said that every customer has a unique journey. But not every single journey ends in a way that benefits the company's well-being.

From this statement, we can also conclude that there's a journey that can be referred to as the best one. Mapping this best journey or any other type of individual journey is called customer journey mapping. It helps improve business by fixing current issues in the organization or maintaining its current performance.

That's why we have created this guide for you, which will help you learn how to create a customer journey map. But before that, let's look at what CJM is.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

It refers to the process of visualizing your customers' journeys. It replicates the touchpoints and interactions of a customer with your brand to identify potential issues in your funnel or understand their needs, perceptions, and the effectiveness of your processes.

This visualization tool is very effective for organizations facing operational issues. However, it can also serve various other goals, such as identifying ways to secure the best deals with your customers. Moreover, it can significantly enhance the company's performance based on customer experience and tools like NPS.

Steps to Crafting an Effective Customer Journey Map

1. Developing a Detailed Customer Persona

To start with CJM, you should first know about your customers. Creating customer personas is an effective way to do this. What is a customer persona? A customer persona is like imagining an ideal customer who may shop from you. For instance, if you are running a toy store, you might imagine your customers as kids.

However, it's not that simple. You can't just generalize your customers based on a single factor. Instead, there are many factors to consider when creating a buyer persona, such as age, gender, demographics, goals, preferences, and sometimes even job roles.

But how do these personas help within CJM? They help you understand the type of customer you can expect and their common shopping habits.

2. Selecting the Right Customer Journey for Mapping

Now, it's time to choose an individual journey of a customer to map. In this step, you first have to understand the end goal of your exploration. What do you want to know from your CJM evaluation? It could be anything, like understanding what a perfect deal looks like, where you make the most profit, or identifying any issue within the buying process.

This means you can tweak your CJM according to your needs. If you want to know the best way to close your deals, you can analyze the touchpoints of that particular customer's journey.

3. Documenting Key Touchpoints in the Customer Journey

In the third step, you need to record all the touchpoints present in the journey you choose for documentation. But what is a touchpoint?

A touchpoint is any moment your customer interacts with your brand. For example, if a customer contacts your customer support team, that interaction is a touchpoint. There are multiple touchpoints in their journey, and they occur both before and after a sale. While you might think the journey of a customer only includes post-sale touchpoints, it actually begins much earlier.

In a Customer Journey Map, pre-sale touchpoints, including marketing efforts, are recorded. For instance, if a customer is at the very first stage of their journey, their interaction with your informational blog will be the first touchpoint where you are targeting them to make them knowledgeable about their problem and the available solutions. 

It's important to choose an individual journey for mapping. If you want to investigate why your marketing strategies are not working, you should map the journey that ends before the sale.

By following these steps, you can create a CJM for your organization, helping you tweak processes for the company's benefit. To illustrate how CJM can improve a company's current state, let us introduce you to a case study from one of our clients.

A Tale of Improving Customer Experience 

Let's get you through one of our case studies where we significantly increased the NPS of an organization organically by improving the overall customer experience. For your reference, when the client came to us, their NPS was -45 in Q1. 

Step 1 - Cause Identification

As the first step, we have to identify the problem. Now, there's no doubt that there are touchpoints a customer is going through and a problem with one or more of them. So, we have to know what touchpoints are there in a customer's journey while shopping from this store. 

We simply used CJM and took a journey to the map. While picking the journey to map, we made sure that it was a complete journey where the customer made it to the end. Now, we looked at each and every touchpoint in that journey and found all the expected touchpoints that most customers will go through. 

Once it was done, we moved ahead by using NPS surveys to get feedback from customers for every interaction they made. With this exercise, we soon identified the problems and the touchpoints where these problems are occurring. Here's the brief of the problems we identified:

Problem 1: High Waiting Times

Upon looking at the open-ended responses, it was found that the waiting time at the check-ins is very high. Hence, the customers were getting exhausted due to high waiting times. 

Problem 2: Poor Infrastructure

The second problem escalated the exhaustion of the customers even more. The store had poor infrastructure and no sitting space. So, while waiting to get in, they have to stand all the time.