Thinking of Mapping the Customer Journey? Don’t Miss this Key Step!

I’m sure you don’t intentionally set out to offer a lackluster brand experience. Generally, I’d say most businesses are very invested in providing the best experience possible, they just are buried under a mountain of marketing metrics that paralyze them from taking action to improve their customer experience or other things are viewed as a priority and marketing gets put on the back burner.

Clearly, every touchpoint with your customers matter and have a distinct effect on overall customer satisfaction, retention, and-of course-your bottom line. But where to begin?

‍

Creating a Customer Journey Map

One of my favorite exercises to do for businesses is creating a comprehensive customer journey map! While these journey maps are gaining in popularity, many businesses tend to miss out on a key step before they dive into tackling what the journey looks like.

‍The most important step is: identifying your main buyer. I recommend completing a ‘who’s the person’ exercise on your primary target! Devote time to this step, and involve people from across the organization. I recommend a blend of team members who currently interact with customers, and teams like IT or even operations who can shed light on the customer journey from a different perspective. It’s also helpful to include different levels of seniority and tenure at the organization.  

‍

Who's my Target Market?

Here are the main questions to open the discussion of the ‘Who’s the Person’ exercise:

• What is the customer’s name?
• What age group are they in?
• Are they male or female?
• What’s their backstory? Where are they from? Do they have a family? Are they single? What are their interest (aside from your business)?
• What are the 2 main reasons they choose to buy from you?

‍

Write it all down! This will personify who you’re in business for and why they need your product/service. Once your buyer has a name and you have an idea of what that buyer personality looks like, you can then start the process of plotting out your Customer Journey Map, also referred to as an Experience Map.

‍

Customer Experience Mapping

The end goal is to visually draw out your persons’ current and ideal path to show the best openings for action to strengthen those important relationships. It’s important to not just focus on the future of your customer experience, because you can miss out on some real opportunity in the current experience that can be handled now rather than some mysterious date in the future.

Experience maps can take days to create and should be periodically revamped to change the ideal path as the customer’s expectations and the industry advances. You’ll want to repeat the process for each market segment your brand has so you can map the appropriate strategy for each type of client.

Once the ideal customer experience journey is mapped, make sure that everyone on your team knows it exists, and set the intention of how their department will be involved in providing and maintaining the customer journey. That way, everyone stays in the loop and you can create a customer-centric culture!

‍

Create an Experience Clients Love

Charisma Communications is your partner to help you curate a journey that blends your vision with your customer’s expectations. Charisma can also help with creating key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success along the way, and benchmark the overall experience process.  

The marketing team at Charisma will help prioritize the touchpoints on your ideal journey map and make strategic recommendations on what actions will make the most difference for your buyers. Contact us today to learn more!