Achieve an enhanced customer experience through effective Customer Journey Mapping and simultaneously discover how your business can benefit from additional success.
As a customer-first company, it is crucial to prioritize your customers and place them at the center of everything you do. It is about ensuring that every interaction on your online platform delivers a fantastic experience. Your primary goal should be to delight your customers while simultaneously fostering the continuous growth of your business through increasing satisfaction.
A crucial factor in achieving this is by offering the absolute best customer journey. By prioritizing your customers' needs and catering to their desires, you create an environment where they feel valued and engaged, contributing to your long-term success.
Create a Seamless Customer Journey: The Importance of a Customer Journey Map in Businesses
Many companies have only a few or even just a single point of measurement when it comes to evaluating customer experience. This may include assessing sales team dialogue, chat communication, or the number of incoming customer service emails. While these are all important metrics, they should never stand alone when examining the overall customer experience.
A customer journey consists of various touchpoints that collectively form the customer's experience. It is crucial to consider the entire journey from start to finish in order to obtain a complete picture of the customer's experience and avoid drawing conclusions based on a limited set of metrics. Creating a great customer experience depends not only on individuals or teams within the company but also on all parties involved, from the marketing and sales teams to the customer service team.
The marketing team generates content that attracts, engages, and converts potential customers. The sales team engages in conversations with relevant leads, demonstrating the value of products or services and closing deals. Finally, the customer service team steps in to educate customers on product usage, resolve issues, and answer questions.
With such a process in place, customers embark on a seamless journey through the company. They are guided from start to finish, feeling confident about who to turn to for assistance.
However, this can only be achieved if the different teams in your company collaborate and share knowledge. Does your sales team understand the expectations set by your marketing team through their content? Does your customer service team know what your sales team communicates to potential customers in their dialogue?
Opportunities may be missed if these processes are not properly managed, and customers may feel that their needs are not adequately heard or addressed. Therefore, it is crucial to have control over all aspects of your customer journey, both internally and externally.
That is why your company should have a 'Customer Journey Map'.
What is a Customer Journey?
It is impossible to create a Customer Journey Map that is 100% accurate. We are all different, and therefore, it is not possible to encompass everyone in a single visualization. However, by understanding your customers' Customer Journey, you can come much closer to a solution.
A Customer Journey typically consists of 5 stages:
1. Awareness
In this stage, the customer has recognized that they have a problem, but the solution is not yet known. Therefore, they begin searching for a solution.
In this stage, offering informative content such as whitepapers, courses, and blog posts can be advantageous.
2. Consideration
The customer has finished researching and knows that they need a product or service to solve the problem. They begin comparing different brands, companies, and organizations.
Here, you should showcase your products and provide customer satisfaction surveys.
3. Decision
The customer has now chosen a solution and is ready to make a purchase. Therefore, it is important to have a streamlined buying process. Additionally, price comparisons and demo offers can be beneficial.
4. Retention
The customer has made the purchase and expects a certain level of service from the company. Therefore, you should offer a good customer experience, such as easy access to customer service.
5. Loyalty
Customers are now ready to share their positive experiences with your company. They may even recommend your brand to others if they have experienced the desired success with the product or service. This is why the preceding stages are crucial, as they contribute to the overall successful experience.
In this stage, having a user-friendly website and customer benefits such as discount codes can be advantageous.
Why Should You Have a Customer Journey Map?
Did you know that around 70% of online shoppers abandoned a filled shopping cart in 2021? How is it possible that some people would spend hours browsing through a website or an online store, adding products to their carts, only to disappear without completing the purchase?
Understanding your customers can be challenging. However, having an idea of what leads your customers on a journey from awareness of your business to making a purchase is crucial.
A Customer Journey Map is a visualization of the process a customer goes through in relation to your business. It takes into account perceptions, interactions, and aims to help you understand the steps customers take, both those you can see and those you were not aware of, when they interact with your company.
A Customer Journey Map can help you map out your customer journey, ensuring that you consider all aspects. It provides a comprehensive overview of the entire customer journey and ensures that all teams involved are working towards the same goal. It is an ideal opportunity to bring all your teams together and gain alignment on important decisions that impact lead nurturing and conversion to customers.
At the same time, it helps identify potential gaps or challenges that customers may encounter along the way. It serves as a guideline for identifying areas that require improvement, adjustments, or changes to best meet the individual customer's needs.
It is essential to analyze what is working, what can be improved, and, most importantly, why these changes are important.
The key is to understand the customer journey from the customer's perspective. Customer needs and desires should be at the forefront, not just the company's own goals. For the marketing team, it means understanding what happens after their initiatives are implemented. For the sales team, it means gaining insights into what happens before and after they engage in a conversation with a customer. And for the customer service team, it is about understanding what happens before a customer makes a purchase decision.
By understanding the customer journey from the customer's perspective, you can optimize your company's efforts across teams and create a cohesive and seamless experience for customers. This will strengthen your ability to attract, retain, and delight customers, which is crucial for the success of your business.
How to Create a Customer Journey Map in HubSpot
Creating a Customer Journey Map can be a challenging task, but it is an effort that will yield returns in the end. Therefore, it is important to allocate time and resources to undertake this process as it will benefit your business in multiple ways.
There are various programs available that can assist you in creating a Customer Journey Map, and each of them has its own ways of visualizing the customer journey. Some of these programs may be more complex than others and offer additional features. If you prefer not to use software, you can also utilize more traditional methods such as whiteboards, sticky notes, pencil, and paper.
The most important thing is to store your Customer Journey Map in a place where it is easily accessible, allowing you to make adjustments as needed when you gain more insights into your customers' interactions with your website or online store.
A tip can be to create at least one buyer persona before diving into the development of your Customer Journey Map. This way, you will find it easier to relate to your customers' mindset. You will be able to document what the customer thinks, feels, and does.
Annemette Rosenkilde Lucas, marketing manager AT mcb
In recent years, HubSpot has introduced their own version of a Customer Journey Map through Advanced Marketing Reporting. HubSpot offers a wide range of data analysis tools, making it ideal for compiling this data into a map.
Here's how you can create a Journey Report in HubSpot (Note: Requires Marketing Hub Enterprise):
- Log in to your HubSpot account and navigate to 'Reports'.
- Click on 'Create report' in the top right corner.
- In the "Build from scratch" section, select 'Journey Reports'.
- In the left panel, you can add different properties to your report. You can include up to seven properties in the customer journey.
- If you want to filter data based on the properties you have added, you can click on the filter icon and choose your filtering options (note that some properties may not be filterable).
- DA dropdown menu will appear where you can select your filtering options.
Remember to click 'Apply' once you have set up the desired filtering.
- You can further expand your Journey Report by adding branches or making specific steps optional (excluding the first and last steps).
- Once you are done, you can click on 'Run report' to view your data.
- Click on "Save report" in the top right corner to save your report.
You can find a complete guide to creating a Journey Report in HubSpots Kowledgebase.
By using these tools and methods, you can effectively map your customer journey and enhance your understanding of your customers' behavior and needs. This will contribute to better aligning your company's efforts and improving the customer experience.
