Meeting the needs of an online consumer has become non-negotiable. The need for exemplary customer experience is vital to the growth of any business nowadays, especially in the growing digital world.
Customer experience is set to be the next big thing in digital marketing. In fact, UX (user experience) is quickly becoming a vital part of the mix of digital marketing. With so many brands boosting their online presence, consumers are spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing a company to interact with, make a purchase with or to simply follow online.
With this in mind, it’s become imperative that a customer’s journey throughout their online engagement with a brand be absolutely first class, with zero room for any dissatisfaction. Today’s savvy online consumers demand an enjoyable, effortless and efficient customer journey.
Let’s take a closer look at a customer journey road map
With the importance of a customer journey road map taking a major role in digital marketing, let’s get straight into exactly what this map entails.
Essentially, a customer journey road map is a visual depiction that includes every experience your customers have with your organisation. This map typically includes all of your customer’s experience from initial interest, more engagement, transactions, relationship building, after-sales service and hopefully further purchases.
Benefits of creating a customer journey road map
A customer journey map aids businesses to view all interactions from their customer’s point of view. It gives a business an inside view and what it’s like to engage with their business. This is valuable information and gives insight into how organisations can improve their customer’s overall experience.
There’s no doubt of the importance of understanding your customer’s journey with your business, so let’s take a look at some of the benefits of developing a customer journey road map.
- Establishing the different stages of the sales funnel
- Recognising where customers interact more with your business
- Gaining valuable insight from your customer’s point of view
- Identifying gaps or shortfalls in your customer’s journey
- Ensuring customer experience is a satisfying journey
- Understanding what makes a customer return
- Knowing the expectations of your customer
- Picking up on any inter-departmental shortfalls
- Understanding your customer’s pain points
Why is a customer journey road map important
The chances of you experiencing your business as a customer are slim so the ability to take a walk through your customer’s journey is invaluable. Understanding your customer’s pain points and how they really feel about your brand is crucial. How can you fix a problem if you don’t know that it exists?
Knowing and understanding your customer digital behaviour patterns opens up great opportunities and establishes a desire for customer service improvement.
Customer journey road map best practices
Just like each business is different so too is their customer journey road map. However, the best way to streamline yours is to create an infographic – it’s straightforward and easy to understand at a glance.
The main point is to capture your customer’s complete journey and experiences. Taking this into consideration, let’s look at some of the features your customer journey map should include.
- Brand awareness – It all starts with a potential customer noticing your brand, whether online or not. Increasing brand awareness is the starting point of a customer’s journey and it has to be impressive, otherwise a potential customer will move on. Remember, first impressions really do count. Investing in a strong social media brand campaign is one way to do this.
- Interaction count – Understanding where your customer starts and finishes their interaction with your business is key. Collecting data simply isn’t enough, you need to be able to track and understand all their interactions as they move along the sales funnel. Do you know the usual interactions within your business that a customer is likely to have?
- Ease of progression – Take a serious look at the ease with which your customers progress to the next level of their journey with your business. See it from their point of view. Are they experiencing difficulty moving forward? If so, ensure progress is an easy procedure for your customers.
- Breaking barriers – Do you know of any barriers that your customer may be facing when interacting with your business? There must be zero barriers for a potential customer, especially when they’re motivated to make a purchase.
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