The Customer Journey 101

Businesses today realize the complexity involved in leading a customer to purchase their product. Analyzing all the steps it takes a customer to click the “Contact Us” button, or click the “Buy Now” button is no easy task. The challenge is to get a unified understanding of your customer’s experience.

A user in their customer journey might be interacting with your website from their laptop, and then later through their phone. They may provide signals through various touchpoints in their journey and every interaction provides you a sign of interest. It’s essential to optimize the user experience based on these interactions and understanding accordingly what motivates your customer, what their needs are, their hesitations and concerns.

It’s integral for all organizations to make customer centered decisions as every customer has a different persona. Mapping out paths of a customer from their very first interaction to the last will show if the existing process is optimal or not. To outline the customer’s interactions and behaviour, customer journey maps are drawn.

What are Customer Journey Maps?

Customer journey maps are a visual representation of the customer’s experience with your product. This technique usually comes into being when a product or service is being designed, redesigned or a problem has been diagnosed.

The key elements of journey maps are:

• Personas: Understanding the expectations and desires of each unique customer is integral. Remember, the exact journey won’t be the same for every customer. Some will be quick at making a decision and move from finding out to purchasing right away, while others may take more time to learn and research across several channels. It’s essential to understand that personas are unique and differ from customer to customer.
• Emotions: Look at the emotional satisfaction and triggers, and understand how customers feel throughout different steps during their journey. Emotions are critical to any customer experience and a great customer journey sheds light on these emotions.
• Channels: Go in depth to analyze how a customer interacts with your brand on different channels. The interaction observed on a website would differ from that on a mobile app. This makes it integral to analyze data across all channels.
• Touchpoints: Compared to channels, touchpoints are more precise and specific. For example, if a “website” is a channel, then a “chat feature” on the website would be a touchpoint. Information gathered here provides you with analytics on what points in your channels a customer interacts with during the decision making process.
• Pain points: These are the areas in the customer journey that can lead to a problem in the sale. They are often areas where the sales slow down due to friction; for example a mandatory sign-up form in order to continue the journey can be one of them. Pain points are integral because if they aren’t addressed, you start to lose customers. If you want happy customers, you need to minimize the pain points identified.

Wrap up

Figuring out what it’s like for customers to interact with your brand across different channels over time is what customer journey maps are all about. Analyzing customer journeys help us explore answers to the “what ifs” that arise during research and conceptual design. They should include personas; a timeline; the emotions; touchpoints and channels where interactions take place, as well as the pain points felt by customers. If you deliver a poor experience at any point during the customer journey, it will show in the results. But if you’re able to produce a stellar experience, you shall build lasting new customer relationships.

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