Customer journey mapping helps businesses visualize and track the path a customer takes from first discovering your brand to making a purchase (and beyond). By mapping out each touchpoint, you gain valuable insights into what your customers experience, where they might be facing obstacles, and how to enhance their overall journey.
The urgency of journey mapping is even more crucial when looking at customer engagement across channels. We often see them zigzagging their way to making a purchase. They’re expecting seamless interactions, personalised experiences, and won’t hesitate to switch brands if their needs aren’t met.
Based on the urgency, it is important for you to know what customer journey mapping is. As we will discuss it here.
What is Customer Journey Mapping?
Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a diagram that illustrates the full story of someone’s experience with your brand. That diagram we call a customer journey map or user journey map.
This user journey map covers every single customer step, from the moment they first hear about you until well after they’ve made a purchase.
Now, how’s this different from a sales funnel? The traditional sales funnel is mostly business-centric, focused on pushing leads toward a sale. Meanwhile, journey mapping flips the script. It puts you in your customer’s shoes to see what they do, think, and feel at each interaction with your business. Both are related but definitely not the same. The benefits of mapping out the buyer journey are huge.
The customer map gives you how to:
- Know your customers better
- Level up your customer experience
- Turn more browsers into buyers
- Keep customers coming back
- Streamline your operations
- Cut costs
- Break down department silos
Stages of the Customer Journey
While everyone’s path is unique, the stages of the customer journey help tailor your approach. So, here are the typical phases of customer experiences.
- Awareness: This is where it starts. Someone realizes they have a problem or need but might not know your solution exists yet. They’re doing broad research, maybe Googling symptoms or asking around. In this phase, you must be visible and helpful in building initial trust.
- Consideration: Now, the audience knows their problem and is actively looking at options. Here, they evaluate specific solutions, products, or brands. Your business needs to provide compelling and detailed information. All to show why you made the right choice.
- Decision (Purchase): They’re almost there, ready to pick someone and buy. They might need a final nudge. So, give clear pricing, an easy demo, and quick answers to specific questions.
- Retention: The sale is complete, but the journey continues. Customers using your product and their experience now shapes their long-term view. Your focus shifts to nurturing the relationship to ensure customer satisfaction, encourage repeat business, and build long-term loyalty. Consider exploring proven customer retention strategies that align with your goals.
- Advocacy: Happy customers recommend your brand. They voluntarily recommend your product or service to friends, family, and colleagues. Recognize and empower these advocates. Implement referral programs, actively encourage reviews and testimonials, and consider creating exclusive communities.
How to Create a Customer Journey Map?
Creating a customer journey map starts by clearly defining your objectives. Define the specific goal for the map. Make sure this goal ties back to wider business objectives. Maybe it’s fixing a tricky checkout process, improving how new customers get started, or just understanding why people drop off at a certain point.
Next, you’ve got to know who you’re mapping for. This means creating detailed customer personas based on real research. Dig into their goals, their challenges, and especially their pain points. Dive deep into analytics, customer interviews, and feedback surveys to craft detailed profiles.
Then, build customer personas based on solid data you already have. From here, you’ll outline your customer’s goals at every stage of the journey. Find what kind of expectation the customer is trying to achieve at each stage. Combine quantitative data (like clicks) with qualitative insights (like feedback).
For example, are they looking to understand their problems during the awareness stage? Or seeking detailed comparisons during the consideration?
Then, map out every single interaction point, or touchpoint. Website visits, emails, ads seen, support calls, using the product, everything across all channels. These approaches help you get a complete view of the customer experience, which is directly influencing your insights into areas of friction or opportunities.
Once you have the stages and touchpoints, dive into what the customer is doing, thinking, and feeling at each step. Use real customer feedback and data here, not just guesswork. Look closely for the rough spots; where do they get stuck, frustrated, or confused? These are your critical pain points. Also, spot the opportunities; where can you make things surprisingly better or smoother?
Then, pull all this information together into a visual format. The goal is to make everyone easy to see and easy to understand. But remember, continuously validate your map with real customer feedback and update it regularly. We encourage our clients to revisit and refine their journey maps at least semi-annually. These regular periodic approaches ensure the insights remain fresh, actionable, and impactful.
Tools Recommendation for Customer Journey Mapping
- Miro: A flexible online whiteboard for real-time collaboration. Packed with templates for customer journey maps, personas, etc. Plays nice with tools like Slack. Best for cross-functional workshops and brainstorming sessions
- FigJam (by Figma): If your team already uses Figma for design thinking or product design, this is a natural fit. Intuitive for brainstorming and mapping collaboratively. Best for design-focused teams and collaborative mapping.
- Lucidchart: Robust diagramming with data linking capabilities and smooth integration with platforms like Google Workspace and Microsoft Teams. Best for creating detailed, data-driven journey maps and business diagrams.
- UXPressia: A specialized tool focused purely on customer experience management. Great for detailed user journey map creation, personas, and analytics integration. Best for CX teams needing journey map hierarchies for organizing complex maps
- Smaply: A dedicated customer journey map tool. It’s strong on centralizing CX insights, persona building, and collaboration features. Best for visualizing multiple journeys side-by-side.
- Custellence: Known for its flexible, non-grid mapping structure. Great for complex journeys and sharing insights with stakeholders. Best for handling large, complex maps and presenting insights to stakeholders
Remember, these tools are only as good as the data you feed them. That’s why Nexalab’s CRM integration has become an umbrella tool. We help you integrate all the tools above into one single CRM dashboard.
How Nexalab Can Help with Customer Journey Mapping
Nexalab focuses on the efforts of our client journey mapping through CRM integration. Our goal is simple: make your systems talk to each other seamlessly. We connect your central CRM with your marketing tools, e-commerce platforms, support desks, and almost every kind of tool you use.
By connecting these systems seamlessly, we create a single, coherent source of truth for your customer data. This clarity empowers you to map client journeys accurately, identify genuine pain points, and craft highly personalised experiences. In the end, your business gains the capability to make informed, data-driven decisions, enhancing both customer experience and business efficiency.
And if this kind of approach you need, let’s talk. We can discuss how to build an integrated, customer-centric future for your business.
Your Next Steps
Customer journey mapping is your lens for seeing your business through your customers’ eyes. But it takes commitment and good data. So, if you know the problem and are ready to take your customer experience to the next level, we’re here to help. Remember, in a marketplace where experience often trumps product, understanding and optimizing the customer journey is good business.
