The 5 Stages of Customer Experience Journey Mapping
Your customer journey canvas could be the key to unlocking significant cost savings, around 15-20% off your bottom line, according to McKinsey&Company. But here’s the catch, mapping alone isn’t enough. You need to weave customer experience (CX) into every step of your journey mapping process.
The numbers paint a compelling picture: 63% of CX decision-makers have noticed customer experience becoming increasingly crucial to their operations. Even more telling, 88% of business leaders consider it fundamental to their success. Yet despite recognizing its importance, many find themselves struggling to create effective digital journeys, often citing a lack of resources and expertise.
Defining the customer experience journey map
A customer journey map is a visual representation that illustrates the customer’s experience with a company across all touchpoints. It provides valuable insights into customer needs, motivations, and potential obstacles at each stage of their interaction with the brand.
According to a Gartner Customer Experience Management Survey, organizations that use customer journey maps are “twice as likely to outperform competitors.” That’s compared to businesses without such a map.
The buyer’s journey is often considered to be more complex than a business-to-consumer (B2C) buyer’s journey. However, this is not always the case. There are many factors at play when visualizing a buyer’s journey.
Although the target audience is the biggest differentiator between business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) buyers’ journeys, market size, product usage, among others also play a role.
Data collection for CX mapping
To map out a clear customer experience journey map, you need access to three types of data.
1- Customer surveys: These are surveys you conduct with customers and early adopters of your product
2- Customer interviews: Unlike surveys, customer interviews tend to have a more human and personal feel. Depending on the type of product you sell, you may conduct these interviews in person or online. Like the surveys, they should include a pre-determined set of questions, but they may offer more insights.
3- Unsolicited data: This is data you collect as a company from your customers, but it’s not information they provide first hand. For example, page views, click-through rate (CTR), number of email clicks, purchase history…etc. All of these fall under unsolicited data but can fill remaining gaps.
Create your customer experience journey map
Every customer journey includes the 5 stages: awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and loyalty.
That said, to create a CX journey map, you need to consider customer touchpoints across 5 main steps or stages.
1- The buying process
The first step in mapping the customer journey is understanding the buyer’s process. This involves analyzing data from various sources and touchpoints, including website visits, social media engagement, survey responses, customer service interactions, purchase history, among others.
The purpose is to gain valuable insights into how your customers are moving from awareness to consideration to decision-making.
This approach provides a clear picture of your customer’s behavior and their back-and-forth consideration.
Read Also: What to Do When Your Marketing Investment isn’t Paying Off
2- Customer emotions
This second stage involves understanding your customers’ emotional journey with your product or service. Businesses need to capture emotions such as relief, excitement, worry, at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
This stage helps to identify pain points, moments of relief, and areas of improvement.
Tools like Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, online reviews, social media monitoring, customer interviews, and support data can provide valuable insights into customer sentiment throughout their journey.
Read Also: Customer Retention Strategies
3- User actions
The next stage of the CX journey map is understanding customer actions in every stage of the journey. This often takes the form of a user signing up for a newsletter, registering for a webinar, downloading an ebook, among others.
Other data points to consider can include: page views, call-to-action button clicks, email opens, email clicks, email signups,…etc.
The purpose of this stage is to see how your customers behave at each stage of their journey.
4- Customer research
This stage involves reviewing what a customer does or searches for to make their buying decision. Or before taking a specific action.
For example, in the awareness stage a customer may google a question or search for a solution to a problem. On the other hand, in the consideration stage they may research competitors and features.
As a business, it’s an opportunity to offer answers to customers’ most pressing questions.
Read Also: 6 Steps to Ensure Product-Market Fit
5- Solutions and satisfaction
Create solutions that make the customer journey smoother. This can look like answering pressing questions, giving customers clarity on what to expect, what’s in it for them, to ultimately increase customer satisfaction.
This stage can involve reiterating and finding ways to help customers achieve their goals faster or more efficiently.
Read also: How Design Thinking Shapes Business Growth
Maps aren’t linear
To fully grasp the power of a customer journey map, you must create the map from the customer’s perspective.
Often companies will create a map based on what they think a customer does or acts. However, without putting oneself in the customer’s shoes, your customer journey mapping attempts will fall flat.
It’s worth remembering that customer journeys are rarely linear. Few customers, if any, wake up and buy a product. They likely have done their research over and over again.
Like various business strategies, customer journey mapping isn’t a one-and-done type of job. It’s a process that requires continuous improvement based on changing or evolving customer needs and pains, as well as market demand.