Mapping Customer Journey: How to walk in their shoes?

Now how would you know what your clients actually want? And to find a perfect reply you’ll surely ponder around concepts like sales, warm customer services and quality products. But what if even after you believe you’ve offered your clients the moon, they still hang-out with your rivals!

The finest way to seek out which link you’re missing in the chain is to traverse through a complete transformation. To access your client’s mindset, you first need to get into their shoes. And though mostly all business organizations are quite good at collecting database on their users, such database often underestimates the experiences as well as the frustrations of their clients. The key here is to utilize a perfect tool called Storytelling.

A good story can definitely achieve what you’re seeking and one of the top storytelling tools of any business is called the Customer Journey Map. This particular tool is extremely useful to realize and improvise your customer experience.

There are no standards as such for a Customer Journey Map and one can craft it using top-quality design standards or using various smiley faces. You can even craft it as a work of art.

Nurturing the Customer Experience:

Quite often, when clients opt for any service or a product, they actually anticipate a pleasant feeling along with the purchase. And there’s a feeling of contentment which customers attain from buying something they fancy, experience the entire course of buying it and lastly – enjoy their buy. Now customers observe such experience (all its ease and hassles) and this is actually what you’re supposed to consciously map out.

An example of a Customer Journey:

While shopping around, your prospective customer looks at your storefront’s sign. He/she enters and looks at your store’s layout. One of your employees greets him/her and offers help. Your employee is quite friendly and possesses lot of knowledge. Your employee helps him/her pick out a shoe pair which is of excellent quality.

Your employee even assures your new customer that if he/she is not satisfied with the purchase, he/she can return the shoe pair. You get his/her email-Id for future endorsements. A day later, that very client of yours tweets pictures of his/her brand new shoes and even mentions the name of your store. He/she also proposes your store on Yelp. Some weeks later, you mail him/her a promotional email offering her a great discount and reminding him/her about your brand as well as its core standards.

Now that’s just one example. And, regrettably, in case you don’t pay any attention to recognize the customer mindset, your brand might be selling short. In case the client goes through an annoying experience in your store (for e.g. difficulty in finding a product or a rude staff), then it might cause a backfire and might severe their future association with your brand.

And whenever the client considers purchasing the product again, he/she might think about your rival’s store where the staff is friendly and the store is arranged in a better way. And he/she might spread negative words about your store or brand and recommend friends and families to shop elsewhere.

Now the key to take care of above things is to craft a Customer Journey Map.

How to Craft a Customer Journey Map?

You have to carve out a timeline or a map, which blueprints each and every stage of your client’s experience. Now each of these stages is your client’s touch points – essentially any point of time a customer comes in contact with your brand name.

During the way, clients will intermingle with these touch points via your website or an ad. And once you gain entry in their mindset, you could then map out all those touch points, which in all probability will include:

• Social Media Reviews.
• Customer Service Team.
• Website.
• Proper follow-up of Client Feedback Assessments.

And while analyzing the various stages and timeline which your clients traverse through along with a customer journey map, do check out for the following:

• Actions:

After structuring a lay out of your customer journey map stages, just question yourself – what your client is doing at each of these stages?

• Motivations:

Point out the things which will encourage your clients to move to or discourage them from moving to the subsequent stage. And ask yourself what sorts of sentiments they go through during each of these stages.

• Queries:

• Where and why do your clients get overanxious?
• Do they raise queries and feel hard time looking for answers?
• Could their doubts make them to switch over to another company?
• Could you perk up the client experience by proactively tackling queries which your clients might have while traversing through each of these stages?

• Obstacles:

• What types of barriers do clients face during each of these stages?
• The cost factor.
• Return policies.
• Think hard about things which may instigate your client to leave the sales cycle in the mid while traversing through the journey.

Using illustrations for setting up the Customer Journey Map:

• Map out the entire process of your client’s journey via diagrams, illustrations or by making a list of scenarios which your customers might encounter at each stage of their journey.
• Conduct client feedback analysis to identify with their experiences with your brand in a much better way.

Bear in mind that each journey would be, to some extent, differ from other and some clients might skip the journey stages altogether; that is why it’s so vital to generate as much scenarios as possible and interact with your clients to know about their journey experience while intermingling with your brand.

So devote your time to understand the Customer Journey and experience the procedure of mapping each time the client interact with your particular brand. This exercise would assist you to verify where you can improvise things and illustrate you how you can turn each client experience as an affirmative one.

Enjoy mapping!