As the market space becomes increasingly mobile-focused and reliant on multi-screen marketing, it becomes more and more important to know your customer's journey and the touchpoints your brand needs to capture in order to influence it. Customer Journey mapping is the key to truly understanding it in a visual way; it allows you to see the story behind the process from initial contact to consideration and purchase from the customer's perspective. This blog post will inform you on how to map your customer's journey along with insights for the customer journey mapping process.

Why You Should Know Your Customer's Journey

Creating a customer journey map is a holistic way to examine the flow of experiences that a customer has with your brand. It should visually contain both major and minor moments that represent their interaction and relationship with your company, products, services, and communications, and it should present them as visual touch points that express what raw data cannot. It helps to breakdown complex processes into something that's easier to digest. More importantly, it contextualizes customer questions, concerns, reactions, and motivations as their decision process moves them through awareness, brand and product/service considerations, purchase, and post purchase engagement.

This helps to establish a few things for a number of departments in your business, from marketing and sales to customer service and more. By creating an overview of customer experiences, you can better identify gaps in your communication channels, as well as any breakdowns between departments. Just as importantly, you can identify new and existing opportunities to enhance the customer experience, better target audience segments, and differentiate your brand. That means you can continually improve your marketing strategy and sales process to improve ROI, no matter the size of your business or budget.

Steps for Customer Journey Mapping

Step 1: Research

Your map should be based on data, and it needs to utilize data specific to your potential and existing customer base. Market research will help you develop a snapshot of the intended buyer's journey before reaching out to new customers. Data gathered from your customers will give you a good look at what's actually occurring on their path to purchase. Be careful not to rely too heavily on analytics (which can be easy to misunderstand) or anecdotal evidence (which may not accurately represent the customer journey for a meaningful number of customers).

Additional considerations: Ask a few pertinent questions as you gather your research together:

• What kind of customer is this journey about, and what kind of experience are you attempting to share?
• Is there a particular business goal that this map will address? (Example: diagnosing issues with the current experience, designing a new experience)
• Who do you need to work with to best develop this journey map?
• What elements need to be included, including internal actions?
• What level of detail is actually required?

Step 2: Define Stages According to Customer Experience

It might seem easy to break down the journey map according to a marketing or sales funnel. While the buying/marketing funnel is a great starting point, it's important to take it further and map your customer journey. Identify the benchmark goals your customer has throughout their relationship with your brand in order to develop experience interlock, then identify the tasks required to achieve each goal. For a very detailed journey map, it will be easiest to align this to specific customer personas, as well. For example, the phases of a resort casino customer might look like this: Research gambling > Research Casinos > Research Brand > Identify locations > Book reservation > Pre-arrival > Checking in > Navigating: Entering room > Navigating: Finding casino floor > Experience: Selecting slots machine > Experience: Using slots machine.

Step 3: Define Touchpoints within Each Stage

There is often more than one path through each stage, especially as the customer journey fragments into micro-moments across channels. Map as many paths as are significant according to your data, including the points where customers stop their journey short, and identify the "intensity" (i.e., the level of influence) each touchpoint has. This can be critical to identifying attribution for the minor touchpoints that add up to a larger experience. Here again it’s important that these be developed from the perspective of the customer; internal functions that are siloed can create jarring disconnection between touchpoints, but your customer will view their experience with your brand holistically.

Step 4: Connect Touchpoints to Customer Evaluations and Emotions

Your customers will have expectations about your business, not only in terms of results (e.g., being satisfied that you've met their needs) but for each interaction they have along the way. How they expect to feel is just as important as how they actually end up feeling. For instance, if a customer is expecting a poor experience engaging with your customer service but they come away feeling happy or excited, that has very different implications for your brand than if a customer is expecting a positive engagement on Twitter but comes away feeling frustrated or disappointed.

Step 5: Align Off-Stage Processes or Resources to Touchpoints

While the off-stage activities of your brand (i.e., people, processes, and systems responsible for delivering a particular experience) are not the focus of a customer journey map, visually aligning them to the map can provide insights about what you're doing right or wrong. This is especially true of silo channels or departments where communication can break down. It can also help stakeholders understand their role within the context of the journey. When developing this part of your map, it's a good idea to look for new opportunities to grow and innovate.

Step 6: Develop the Map Infographic

There is no right or wrong way to format your customer journey map as long as it clearly expresses what needs to be shared. It's worth mentioning that having aesthetically pleasing graphics won't mean much if you haven't already put in the hard work developing the information you're trying to share. So if you have a very nuanced, potentially complicated journey map, cleaner visuals are preferred to avoid confusion. Remember that you'll probably have a lot more information than you need to include on any given journey map, so be judicious about what makes it into the infographic. You want to avoid overloading your audience with information and causing analysis paralysis.

Of course, it's not enough to simply know your customer's journey. When you take advantage of customer journey mapping, you reveal the best ways to connect with and influence your customers. The steps we've included for how to map your customer's journey will ready you to improve your strategy and improve your ROI across campaigns.