Customer experience mapping is the process of gathering information about how the people who buy from you interact with your business.
It helps you understand what their level of satisfaction with your company is, and to create a holistic view of their experiences. It allows you to identify opportunities to make changes that will improve customer retention and your company’s position in the marketplace.
Good customer experience is critical to build a customer’s loyalty and increase your revenue and growth.
The customer experience mapping process includes gathering information about every experience your customers have with you. Next, you lay it out in a format that’s easy to view, so you can find out what your target audience thinks of the dealings they have with your company. The map helps your company to tell the story of how clients experience your brand. This starts with the very first customer engagement and follows the course of the relationship until it ends.
A customer experience map will show you where there are problems in your process, based on the information you collect. This will help you find ways to solve them, which will improve the experience of your customers. The map also shows how people use the products or services they buy from you and breaks down the process of purchasing your products into bite-sized activities. This type of map is also called a customer journey map, and it is very useful for helping companies to succeed.
Marketing and sales is a crowded and difficult world now, because customers no longer simply see an advertisement, buy the product, and live happily ever after! Now, we have a wide variety of computer devices and channels they can use to research what they want, learn more about the product and even purchase without going to a store.
To stand out in the pack, it’s important for companies to be able to offer a consistent, positive customer experience from start to finish. Mapping the customer’s journey has become a way to identify any problems with the customer interactions with the company, so you can take steps to make these more positive events. The use of an experience map also allows you to provide more personalised messages to customers, based on the customer data produced by the map.
Other good reasons to use customer experience mapping are:
A customer experience map is a powerful tool that provides a visual representation of how customers interact with your business throughout the entire journey. It gives you a clear picture of where the user came from and what they want. You’ll discover what questions they have and how they feel, how they move through the sales funnel, and where there are opportunities to enhance the process. This puts you in a much better position all round to understand the customers’ expectations and improve the user experience.
The primary goal of mapping your customer’s journey is to understand all the ways users interact with your business. They could be trying to learn more about your product or service or to compare your performance with competitors before making a decision. Perhaps they are reaching out to your customer service department for support with a product issue. Whatever their purpose, it’s important to make sure their experience is the best it can be.
Other goals of mapping include:
Generally, the aim is to get a deeper understanding of the customer, their wants and needs, the ways you can increase their satisfaction, loyalty, and, of course, profits.
Throughout this post, we’ve talked about customer experience mapping as well as journey mapping. You might believe they are the same thing, but in fact, they aren’t. A customer journey map lists the touchpoints your customers go through during the journey, from their first point of contact to the purchase and immediately afterwards. An experience map, on the other hand, plots out the broader picture of the customer’s overall experience with your brand, which can encompass multiple purchase journeys.
So which one do you need? A customer journey map is best if you want to analyse the experience of a specific type of target customer buying a particular product or service. You will most likely use this if you know there is a problem and you want to find a way to fix it.
An experience map, however, is better if you know your customers are generally unhappy, you want to analyse the overall picture, and to find out where the problems lie. An experience map could include several maps of different customer journeys within its scope.
Before you dive into developing your customer experience map, it’s vital to define the reason why you are making one in the first place. What aspect of the customer experience are you focused on? If your objective is too broad, you’ll find yourself needing to map out every factor in the customer experience, which could end up with you needing several different customer journey maps. By working out exactly what you need to achieve, you will know which touchpoints you need to map.
There are a number of challenges you’re likely to come up against when you’re developing a customer experience map. Collecting the data can be difficult, especially if you need to combine input from a number of sources. Mapping the experiences of several customer personas is also challenging, and might require different customer journey maps for each buyer persona.
As with most business strategies, creating a customer journey map requires you to have certain things in place before you start. These include the key components of a journey map, which, according to the Nielsen Norman Group, are:
All of these can be used with a simple customer journey map such as a free download, or a customer journey map Visio template. For companies whose client base is mostly commercial, you’ll want to use a B2B customer journey map template. Businesses that are creating a customer journey or experience map for products or services that are not yet available can develop a future state map that guides the setup of their touchpoints and channels.
Start creating a customer journey map by identifying your buyer personas, or customer personas in the case of an experience map. These are fictitious descriptions of all aspects of the customers you commonly have. Make a complete inventory of all your customer touchpoints, such as your website, contact options, sales channels, technical support methods, and communications.
Identify the interactions customers have with the different touchpoints, whether these are digital/virtual or in real life, such as calling your customer support for help with a problem. Separate the touchpoint phases into categories of awareness, consideration, evaluation, purchase decision, and post-purchase experience.
Determine where the pain points exist, what causes them and brainstorm some ways in which you could resolve them. Are there processes that need to be developed, or is the problem caused by an existing process not being implemented properly?
Do you need to start over in a particular area, or can you fix things with a few simple changes?
For example, if your users often complain about how difficult it is to find what they want on your website, a few changes could make the world of difference. Part of the process to improve the customer experience is to make the shift to a digital design, which provides a lot of convenience and simplicity to customers.
After you’re done, your customer experience map shouldn’t be filed away and left to collect dust. For most companies, the customer base is continuously changing and that means the customer journey is, too.
Your experience map should be a living document that can grow and develop as you identify new aspects for it to cover.
To enjoy the fruits of your effort, you should ideally test and update your map documents every 6 months as well as any time you implement major changes to your products or services.