Becoming customer-centric through journey mapping
Customer-centric.
This term is key to running a business, because there is no business without its customers. How do you become a customer-centric company? The first step is to build customer journey maps, which we dive into in today’s post!
A customer journey map in simple terms is a way to understand who your customer is, and how they interact with your brand. This map takes what you know in your mind about your consumer and puts it on paper, one that can be used in the future to determine new products or any innovation.
If you have many products that you sell or different types of people who purchase your product, it is key to start by defining the scope of the customer journey. You cannot create one for every customer, product and journey possible, so let’s begin by choosing one.
Prepare to map the journey
The first step in preparing to map the journey is defining the scope of the journey:
What product or service is the most straightforward (this is the one you will be focusing on for this map)?
What is the goal of this journey? Make sure to get clear on the end result for customer and the company.
The next step is defining the customer:
You can do this by building a customer persona. There are 2 ways to do this based on the data you have available:
Have no data? You can create a customer persona by building an ideal customer profile.
Have some data? Use it to define who the customer is.
You want to get specific and build a story around the person, not just have facts or statistics. Putting a name and a story to the persona allows you to have empathy for the customer when you start mapping their interactions with your company.
Example: “Marie is a 34 year old marketing executive who is married with 2 young boys who are active. She values items that work with her lifestyle. Her kids are continuously growing, so she needs high-quality, but budget friendly products because her sons will grow out of everything all the time. She is also career oriented and has to balance her work with family, as both are important to her.”
In order to define the customer better, make sure you step into their shoes. A trick for this is to use “I” statements when writing the persona. It helps to say “I need xyz..” rather than “the customer needs xyz..” because it allows you take on the profile and understand your customer as a real person. This individual needs your product to help them in their overall life, so it is helpful to know their world better and gain an understanding beyond just the use of your product.
You can find existing customer information either from existing survey responses or by looking at various digital channels to check out live comments. If you are still starting out, ensure that you put in collecting customer feedback into your process.
Building your journey map
The first thing to keep in mind once you start building your map is that there are typically 3 main phases in a customer journey with sub-phases:
Pre-sale
Awareness
Consideration
Sale
Evaluation
Purchase
Being a customer
Satisfaction
Loyalty
Advocacy
Logistically to create a map, it helps to take up a lot of space, put up big sheets of paper that have each phase from above (or just the one you are focusing on written down). Then have rows beneath each phase to outline: Customer-desired actions, and Thinking/Feeling/Doing.
Using post-its, you can start brainstorming for each section. For desired actions, these are the actions you can the customer to take in each phase. For example, during the evaluation phase, the action you want might be to ask for a free sample of your product.
Then underneath this action, you will write down what you believe the customer is thinking/feeling/doing at this time. For both of these parts of the exercise, it is helpful to again use “I” statements to bring forth empathy. In customer actions, write “I signed up to receive a free sample” instead of “the customer…” The same goes for the thinking/feeling/doing section.
How do I use this in my business?
Creating a customer journey map is part of the strategy call I have with all my clients. It is important to remember that a website is just part of the process, we need to understand how they find you, what they look for on the website, and where they go after. Remember, you want to keep visitors on your site as long as possible, even after they complete the goal (ex: even after someone signs up for a call with me, I want to direct them to the blog posts). Having this conversation ensures your website is built with your customer in mind, not just a website that’s pretty to look at.
