You might be asking why your business needs a customer journey map. Results from the 5th edition of the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report show that:
- 56% of consumers want a personalized experience
- 85% of consumers want consistent interactions across departments
How can a customer journey map help you? Your customers have thoughts, feelings, and needs while interacting with your brand. That is why they choose to engage with you and your brand in different ways. To understand what consumers want and how they experience your business, you need to understand the ways they engage with your company. By seeing things from the customer's shoes, you can give them what they need and improve their experience with your company.
What Is a Customer Journey Map, and What Can You Achieve With It?
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the steps a customer takes when interacting with your company’s brand, from the initial awareness stage to the point of purchase and beyond. It helps you understand the customer's experience by investigating specific behaviors, feelings, and intentions at every point with the assistance of a persona—a fictional representation of the type of customer who uses your services or products and engages with your brand.
There are several types of journey maps, but you can create a unique map to investigate a specific section of the customer experience or adapt it for your industry.
What will you learn from the different journey maps? Let’s discuss four types:
Current State. These maps visualize the emotions, thoughts, and actions your customers currently experience at each stage of the journey with your business. This type of journey map is ideal to improve the customer experience quickly.
Day in the Life. These journey maps provide a broader view of your customer’s daily lives and real-life pain points. It visualizes your consumers' thoughts, emotions, and actions, even when they don’t engage with your company. If you want to identify unmet customer needs and explore new market development strategies, this is the journey map you should use.
Future State. Want to visualize the actions, emotions, and thoughts customers will experience in future interactions with your company? This is the map you want. It is ideal when you want to clarify your vision and set strategic goals.
Service Blueprint. The biggest message from the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report is that customers want consistent interactions across a business's different departments. Whether they're dealing with support, sales, or management, they want to feel like they're talking to a single business voice.
How do you identify clients who need attention? Use a simplified version of one of the journey map types mentioned above, then add the departments that deliver the experience. This is a good choice when you want to identify the service challenges for current customer journeys or the steps you need to take to achieve the ideal future customer journey. By mapping out these interactions, you can ensure your content aligns with your customer’s needs, providing them with the right information at the right time.
What are the Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping?
Do you want to improve customer retention and grow brand loyalty, resulting in increased sales? Again, looking at Salesforce's State of the Connected Customer report, we know more than half of all consumers want a personalized experience. The understanding you gain through customer journey mapping can guide your content marketing strategy, including customizing a consumer experience or communications based on identified desires.
Some advantages include personalizing cross-channel marketing messages, meeting the customer where they are in the journey, and ensuring that your brand, service, or product will appear in front of your customers cohesively tailored to their needs.
How Often Should You Update Your Journey Maps?
Customer journey maps are a work in progress, and as a marketer, you should review them quarterly, depending on your business needs. Do new customer journey maps identify changes in the customer journey and what caused them? The new product you created after identifying an unmet need through the “Day in the Life” customer journey map might have changed the customer experience, for example. Remember to include all departments that impact the customer on their journey.
There is a reason why WSI is the world's largest and most experienced digital marketing agency network. We are experts at what we do. Do you want someone to help you with your content marketing strategy and customer journey maps? Contact a WSI Consultant today.
