Inbound Marketing Insights

Customer Journey Mapping has become an indispensable part of work for customer experience professionals, market researchers, and marketers. Customer journey mapping is the basis of a good customer experience because it deepens the knowledge about customer needs, their biggest issues, sales opportunities, and much more.

Today, when competition in every industry is very strong, it has become crucial to know exactly why and how customers come into contact with your brand, become a prospect, and ultimately become a customer. Here are 4 ways to incorporate customer journey mapping in your marketing strategy.

Detect Key Customers

Creating customer personas is a great way to focus on a particular, ideal type of a client. The best way to start is to craft a realistic portrait of an ideal client based on research and internal data. When you have precise analytics, the customer journey will be targeted and tailored to that type of a client. More often than not, organizations try to focus on everyone. Customer journey mapping and buyer persona development helps to eliminate this bad habit of thinking that "everyone" is your potential customer.

Change the Mindset

Our internal decisions within companies and brands indirectly affect the customer experience every day. Remember that everyone within an organization touches the customer in some way. Make the customer experience and customer journey part of everyone's role in some way. Mapping can help change this mindset from the “what’s important to me” perspective to “what’s important to my customer” perspective within teams, which will help employees truly to start to think of the customer first.

When organizations become aware of their customers’ needs and emotions, they will start seeing the big picture of what customers go through when they do business with them. In other words, customer journey mapping will humanize your customers.

Adopt a Holistic Way of Operating

Clients are not interested in your organizational structures and who’s working on what within a company. Customers perceive their experience of doing business with a company in a holistic way.

Let’s take a well-known example from the telecommunications industry. If your Wi-Fi is not working as it should or you have been sent a wrong receipt with services that you did not order, you become an unhappy customer. For you, the frustrated customer, it’s all part of the same experience...the same journey. The telecom company will not look at your problems as a unit. As a matter of fact, you can be pretty sure that the problem-solvers for these issues are not even in the same building. That is where the customer journey starts to deteriorate.

Organizations need to start to look at this holistically. Customer journey mapping results in a holistic, comprehensive overview of the customer journey and interaction. 

Assign Tasks to Teams

Part of the problem also is that no one is directly in charge of particular customer problems. There may be many departments and silos that are managing customer interactions, and that causes customer journey issues.

Let’s go back to the telecom example. After experiencing your issues, you get a call from their center in which they offer you a new service that’s on a discount “you shouldn’t miss out on”. When you ask who’s going to take care of your wrong receipt, the staff member says “now, that’s a whole different department, we’re in sales”. Of course, neither the sales staff member or the telecom’s sales strategy are to blame, but it’s fairly obvious that no one’s looking out for you as a “total” client, because that kind of a call would never happen if that was the case.

Customer journey mapping can detect key issues in the customer journey and address adequate teams for their solutions.

There are many more ways to incorporate customer journey mapping in your marketing efforts. Investing your time and resources into customer journey mapping will always be worth it in the long run. It can bring your organization one step closer to the experience your customers are expecting, while you continue to optimize the holistic customer experience.

If you're interested in discussing your current customer experience strategy and how you can start to improve your customer journey, we invite you to schedule an inbound consultation with our team.

If it's helpful, here are some of the tools that you can use to create personas: UXPressia (a platform for creating free customer journey maps and personas), Topessaywriting (a writing service that can help you find the words to describe your ideal customer), Smaply (free web-based tool for creating CJM personas), Alltopreviews (a database of reviews where you can compare different services).

Guest blog contributor: Daniela McVicker is a blogger with rich experience writing about UX design, content planning, and digital marketing. Currently, she is the content editor for TopWritersReview where she helps individuals and organizations improve their web content writing, design, and planning skills.