The customer journey mapping
I am not selling enough while there are a lot of visitor in my shop; It is difficult to convince people to buy my product…Are you familiar with those situation ? If yes, it probably means that you still don’t know what is the purchase trigger for your business and thus you are not understanding your customers.
“Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.”
Now is your chance to increase your sales more by connecting with your target audience. We will help you understand step-by-step how your customers could be interacting with a service.
Selling means understand the customers
Here are companies that got it right: Baubax and EA Sport (Fifa 18):
Do you know what those ads had in common? The solution offered by the product and the users’s feeling were displayed. That is how we manage to convince customers. Sales managers ultimate goal is : show the product, sell it and get referrals and recurring sales.
To achieve that, you need to understand the emotion felts by customers. Never forget that the perception of your brand is related to what they hear, see and hear about it. In reality, managing all that might seem overwhelming, but mapping your customer’s journey can help. It can give you and your team a greater understanding of how your customers are currently interacting and engaging with your products, and how they fit into their lives, schedules, goals, and aspirations.
You can mirror the success of Go-pro
A bungee jumping fan is exposed to an advertisement for Go-pro cameras on YouTube. His interest is aroused and he goes to Google to search. Among the first results is a sponsored announcement from the manufacturer. The product information that the user finds on the manufacturer’s official website convinces them and the product appears to meet their expectations. But what do users say about this Go-pro camera? Are there any cheaper good alternatives on the market? His research leads him to a user forum where reviews are positive and that ultimately decides. The user returns to the manufacturer’s website, on which the product is being promoted, and the user ends up buying the product they’ve seen advertised.
Yes, you need to map your customer experience
The customer journey mapping illustrates the experience of customers and their journeys, from the first contact with a company to conversion, while taking into account the different points of contact. This process aims to analyze the motivations of customers and their emotions during interaction with the company. The central questions are:
What are the expectations of potential customers?
Why is the client interacting with the company?
What is his feeling?
How-to map your customer’s journey
1. You sell when your customers buy
When you chose to become and entrepreneur, you wanted to achieve something wonderful. But, most oft he time it is wonderful according to you. That’s to become successful, you should find how to create interest for stockholders and shareholders. To do so, you are probably developing marketing and sales strategies.
Let’s say you would like to sell clothes made in Africa, this is your goal. Meanwhile your customer want to buy clothes that fit their style. Having an African touch in their clothes can be the least of their priority. Most of the time, your customers goals are not exactly yours. It is important to acknowledge that before developing any communication or marketing strategies to reach your customers. Never forget that you and your customer are in a win-win relationship. List their goals and yours and see how they can meet.
Here are some companies that are doing it right:
2. Identify the communication touch-points in your customer’s journey
This one is easy : do you remember during your latest when you customer came in touch with you ? Ho did it happen ? Where did they see that you will be able to sell what they need? Did someone made a referral ? Whatever your business size is, the process shall be grouped into 3 stages : pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase.
Online communication touch-points
Again let’s say that you are selling clothes online. You can notice that people buy on your website after seing a product on your Facebook page. Someone can even buy only after seeing related products or after receiving a notice prompting them that they forgot an item in their shopping cart. The touch-points are all those time when your leads received information before buying.
Offline communication touch-points
The example we are taking this time is « buying foods ». When buying foods, we have the choice between going to a supermarket or to a traditionnel market. Either way, as a customer, you can see the products and pricing. The face that you are choosing to buy something, you are doing so because something or someone gave you reassuring information. It can be a family member, a colleague, a friend, the sellers onsite or even advertisement on mass media.
3. Mesure what is happening at the touch-points
To truly understand what happens at each touch-points, you have to track your results thanks to a S.M.A.R.T. qualitative survey.
Understand the purchase trigger: pains & pay
Do you know your customers’ pains and why they spend their money to solve a problem? If the answer is not clear, then you need a refreshing explanation.
Pains are negative aspect and difficulties customers would like to avoid. In other words things that annoy them before, during and after paying for something. It could range from a disrespectful cashier / salesperson, intrusive buying stages, confusing process to a website that take too much time to load.
People become customers when they are OK to spend in order to solve a problem or satisfy a need. The amount they are ready to spend is related to the tasks they are trying to perform and complete, the problems they are trying to solve, or the needs they are trying to satisfy.
Use survey data to find out what is happening at each touch point.
Engage with your customers and delight them. Say a customer likes how your Facebook page describes your product. But when they go to your store, the salesperson is disrespectful. It is not likely that they are going to buy your product. That’s an opportunity for you to better align your team.
4. Experience your business customer journey
If you are working with a team, it will be valuable to put yourself in your customers shoes. By experiencing your own customer journey, it is your way of doing a retrospective. Some business managers even ask to trustful person to acta s customers. There’s even a TV program about it. It it not only fun to watch, it is insightful.
If you find potential points of contact there but it is impossible to analyze them from the customers' point of view, it can be achieved by questioning in detail the heads of the department in question. The goal is to get an objective overview of customer experiences on the main interactions and not embellish the results, to avoid distorting them and not hampering the optimization of areas for improvement later.
5. Visualize your customer journey map
Take a bird’s eye view of the entire customer journey
The usual tools you might need are a paper-sheet and a pen. You don’t need to something like a design from Pinterest. Jot down each of your touch-points down on your paper-sheets, then arrange them in orderly manner. Once the information has been collected, it remains to format it. For this, it is necessary to classify the different stages of the user journey. These steps are as follows:
Some wonderful software to design your customers journey map
A visual work-space that combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration to accelerate understanding and drive innovation.
Enables companies to capture and analyze customer experience of a brand, product, or service. Known for being simple yet fast, it is a comprehensive customer journey mapping tool ideal for researching the customer experience.
A visual marketing automation tool for sending email, SMS, in-app messages, and postcards throughout the customer journey. It also enable companies to easily map the customer journey with their CJM software.
This tool that enables teams to brainstorm and work together. the tool covers all stages of the customer journey, from pre-service to post-service.
A web-based software solution for quickly mapping service systems and work in service design projects. Marketers use it to create journey maps and visualize the customer experience quickly and easily.
Customer experience journey : best practice
The starting point for creating an experience card is based on so-called personas.
Make sure to create hypotheses around why new communication touch-points will improve the customer journey, then implement and test them. If your hypotheses are wrong, go back to your journey map, reassess, tweak, and improve.
That’s why it shouldn’t be just a one-time event. Customer taste can shift, new technology can become available, and your brand itself might evolve. So it’s important to do journey mapping at least once a year and evaluate what communication touch points are still working and what needs to be revisited.
it is recommended to analyze the purchasing decision process from a concrete interactive scenario. For this, the use of target groups and use cases is necessary.
Understanding this journey is important for businesses of all shapes and sizes because it reveals the steps a buyer takes before committing to spending any money.