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How to Develop A Customer Journey Map in 5 Easy Steps

Successful businesses know that customers are the heartbeat of their success. It is important to understand who your customer is, what they want, and what it will take to get them to do things of value to your business. The better a company understands the customer journey, the better equipped they are to identify and adapt to potential pain points. For all businesses attempting to gain greater insight concerning the motivation of their customers, a Customer Journey Map is a simple yet effective tool. 

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a visual map that reflects all possible ways a customer develops a relationship with your brand. It details customer needs, hesitations, and concerns across all touch points via storytelling and visuals. It helps highlight a customer’s needs and pain points as they interact with the products and services your business provides. Using journey mapping, businesses can effectively optimize their sales funnel to nurture more leads and generate more conversions.

Creating a customer journey map provides valuable insights into the motivations which ultimately guide purchasing decisions. Some of the benefits of customer journey mapping include:

  • Visualizing the customer experience through your customer’s eyes
  • Identifying holes in your process and filling them with effective touch points
  • Personalizing the experience your leads and customers have with your brands based on both their needs and their actions
  • Breaking down any internal departmental silos for a more collaborative approach
  • Driving sales with more effective lead nurturing strategies

For business owners looking to boost customer satisfaction by optimizing personal experiences with your brand via the creation of a customer journey map, here is a 'how-to' guide, broken into five easy steps.

Developing a Customer Journey Map in 5 Easy Steps

Step 1: Determine the goal of your customer journeys. Before creating your customer journey map, ensure you have a clearly defined goal in place. This goal can be specific to a certain campaign or for the entire customer life cycle. It is important that every step of your game plan works towards achieving your overall objective. Examples of goals for the customer journey to achieve include requesting demos, booking meetings, purchasing products, renewing subscriptions, etc. 

Step 2: Determine your touch points. A touch point refers to customer interactions with your business. Any form of communication a customer may have with your business falls under the umbrella of a touch point. Determining your touch points is important because it provides valuable information such as how and when you are engaging with customers, the types of emails you are sending, and if/how your sales teams are following up. Once this information has been examined, you can use it to fine-tune your business processes to boost sales and increase retention. Examples of touch points include visiting a webpage, clicking a link in an email, or having a phone conversation with your representative.

Step 3: Decide what happens at each stage. Understanding what happens at each stage of the customer journey is vital to enhancing interactions with customers. If a consumer opens/clicks on an email, doesn't click or read, or downloads an ebook, what should happen? For example, if a prospect does not open an email, maybe send an alert to your sales team to call the lead. Figuring out the answers to these questions will help you understand what steps need to be taken to persuade customers to take the actions that help you achieve your business objectives.

Remember to use best practices when making these determinations: 

  • Build from a customer’s point of view NOT from your internal POV
  • Look at the experience as a whole NOT just one touch point
  • Use a step-by-step approach to help you lay out your customer journeys. 
  • Identify the different journeys your customers currently experience 

Step 4: Map it out with JourneyFlow. JourneyFlow is an innovative, free tool designed to help businesses understand and optimize the customer experience. Using this tool, available for browser users and on mobile devices, you can visually review the paths customers can take as they interact with your business. JourneyFlow enables you to drag-and-drop blocks to build decisions, delays and actions to show the paths customers might take. 

Walk through each possible route on your journey. Make sure that no matter which path the customer takes, 

  • Each decision has one path for True and one for False.
  • Each action includes detail of what should happen at that point.
  • Appropriate delays are in place to allow time for something to occur.
  • Each path stops with a deliberate endpoint.

JourneyFlow is easy to use and is a great way to share your vision with your team. 

Step 5: Execute and evaluate your process. After you've designed the customer journey with JourneyFlow, it's time to execute and evaluate your process. This is the most important step as it allows you to implement your game plan and examine the process to see if your strategy is achieving your objective. 

To execute, go through each step of your customer journey and set up an action or process to accomplish it. Oftentimes, execution can be addressed using marketing automation tools, such as those found in GreenRope’s CRM. Use email autoresponders, gated content, drip campaigns and workflows to make the decisions and perform the actions you outlined in your customer journey map. Other steps can be accomplished using manual processes if you choose.

Once you’ve executed the plan, it is vital to evaluate the results. First, measure the journey as a whole. Are you meeting the overall goals of the journey? Which touch points are more effective than others? Is there a way that you could improve the experience with that particular touch point? Are your leads and customers converting at the end of the journey? Are they satisfied? You can measure this with both qualitative and quantitative data, but as for a simple hint that your customer journey is effective? Your clients are happy and converting!

If you find that your main goals are being met, you can further optimize your customer journeys by testing and measuring KPIs of individual paths. Pay attention to the results for each path within the journey. For example, you may find that you have a solid plan for happy customers, but you don’t follow up with leads who visited your website but never purchased. Perhaps there is a way to re-engage those leads.

Remember, you need to review and evaluate your customer journey regularly. This is not something you do once and never revisit again. You will want to test out different content and change up the journey to see which strategy is most effective. If you notice that people are falling off and out of your funnel, it is time to change it up. 

Once you understand your customers’ journey, you can evaluate their interactions with your business and recognize and resolve their pain points. Improve their journey and see the benefits in your bottom line.

JourneyFlow is an innovative solution for businesses in search of ways to optimize their understanding of the customer journey. It's a perfect complement to GreenRope, a premiere CRM and marketing automation tool tailored to meet the needs of small and mid-sized businesses. Utilizing software that services all your business's needs under one roof is proven to promote increased productivity, collaboration, and most importantly, sanity.

To learn more about the innovative business solution that provides tools that enhance your sales, marketing, and operation departments, contact us at GreenRope today.

We have the tools you need to take your business to its next phase.

Check out these other Blogs of Interest

The Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping 

4 Critical Tactics for Developing your Customer Journey Maps

Best Practices for Setting Up Customer Journeys (Part I)

Map your Customer Journey and Create Winning Customer Experiences


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