Inbound Marketing Insights

Customer Journey Mapping has become indispensable 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 most significant issues, sales opportunities, and more.

Today, when competition in every industry is robust, it has become crucial to know precisely why and how customers come into contact with your brand, become a prospect, and ultimately become a customer. Here are four 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 client. The best way to start is to craft a realistic portrait of a perfect client based on research and internal data. When you have precise analytics, the customer journey will be targeted and tailored to that type of client. More often than not, organizations try to focus on everyone. Customer journey mapping and buyer persona development help 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 daily. Remember that everyone within an organization touches the customer in some way. Make the customer experience and journey part of everyone's role somehow. 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 genuinely 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 holistically.

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 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. 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 customer journey and interaction overview. 

Assign Tasks to Teams

Part of the problem 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 will 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 nor the telecom’s sales strategy is to blame, but it’s fairly evident that no one’s looking out for you as a “total” client, because that kind of a call would never happen if that were the case.

Customer journey mapping can detect key issues in the customer journey and assign 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 expect, while you optimize the holistic customer experience.

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