The most challenging part of marketing is to get your brand in the customer’s mind. Most customers take a lot of time to browse the product selection and add items to the cart and only to close the tab soon after. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know what paths users took to reach the product selection, and what possibly led to sudden customer drop-off?. Hence, it becomes vital for marketers to get a grasp of the user journey with your brand. In this blog let us see about Product Journey Maps – A Visual Mapping of Customers Perspective. 

Do you wonder how a customer journey can help your company to achieve the goals?

This blog post is here to help you with the User Journey’s insights and some of the interesting examples. 

A brief on Customer Journey        

A customer journey is all about the user process that goes through to accomplish the goal, as conveyed from their perspective as a visual representation. It is often depicted as a series of touchpoints that they have with the brand, beginning from exploring products and ending when the desired action such as purchase is completed. If you can thoroughly understand your customer journey, you can make your product valuable to your customers. 

Furthermore, with the help of the customer journey map, you will be able to achieve the organization’s goal and sense the customer motivation, their requirements, and pain points. In short, the journey map is a visual depiction of the collection of customer research that is recognizable by its timeline. Each touchpoint that is associated with the business is laid out from left to right.

Essential components of a Customer Journey map  

To develop a complete customer journey, marketers should collect the following data: 

TouchPoints: Every interaction with product or services is counted as a touchpoint

Interaction timeline: The timeline marks the points in the journey map, displaying the touchpoint in the order they had occurred. 

Emotions: Every touchpoint possesses an emotional register that is usually neutral, positive, or negative. 

User personas: These data are vital as they are usually written archetypes or profiles which generally represent a team of customers. Most brands have various user personas, and brands give them catchy and short names that often come with a touch of alliteration. 

Channels: The occurrence of a touchpoint is significant. The context is different for every user. People who signed up with a friend’s recommendation will be others who found it by searching it in-app. 

What are the benefits of a journey map?

The user journey map helps the marketers to understand their customer’s intentions from a much more in-depth perspective. The ability to view the journey of the user visually helps in revealing the emotional landscape of the user. It allows the marketing, product, analytics team, and customer support to understand what precisely the customer feels at every point and identify the various approaches through which the team can enhance their user experience. 

Here are some of the benefits of implementing user journey maps:

– Helps the company to refocus with an inbound perspective

– Incorporate more proactive customer service with a more customer-centric mentality

– Establish a new target audience base 

– Boost customer retention rates 

How to create an interesting user journey map one for your company?

1. Set clear goals/ objectives for the map.

Before you can plunge into making the user journey map, you need to ask the following questions to yourself:

– Why are we making one, and what is the intention?

– What objectives are we directing?

– What experience is it based on, and who is it specific about?

Given this, you might need to make a buyer persona because having a clear user persona will help you remind you about the direction you need to move in every aspect of your customer journey map. 

2. Profile your user personas and define their objective.

You should do thorough research and figure out great ways to receive valuable customer feedback through testing and questionnaires. The crucial thing here is to reach out to actual users or prospects. If you plan to receive feedback from the customers who are interested in buying your services and products and who have interacted, then follow the below steps:

– How did you hear about the brand?

– What was the main and first thing that attracted you to this website or app?

– What is your intention in using this service or the challenges you are trying to solve?

– What is the typical time you spend on this website?

– Had you purchased with us before? If yes, what was the deciding factor?

3. Highlight your target audience personas.

Once you have gained insights on the various customer personas that interact with your company, you should narrow down your focus on one or two of them. A customer journey map is something that tracks the experience of the user type who is taking a specific path with your business. If you are trying to group several personas as one journey, then the map will not reflect the accurate customer experience. 

4. Determine the resources you have and the ones you’ll need.

The user journey map will touch on almost every part of the business, so it is suggested to highlight all the resources that it is going to take to create a better customer experience. Hence it is critical to take inventory of the resources that are already existing and the ones that you require to enhance the user’s journey. 

5. List out all the touchpoints.

Touchpoints are the instances on the website or an app that your customer can interact with the business. As per the research, you should list all the touchpoints your prospects and customers are using, along with the ones you believe they should be using. Some of the common touchpoints are Emotions, Actions, Pain Points, and Obstacles.

The below described is an example of an e-commerce site purchase:

Here are the touchpoints when a customer purchases an e-commerce site:

– Customer clicks an ad for a shirt 

– The ad directs them to the home page, which does not take them to the shirt page 

– The customer searches for the product 

– Customer sees further recommendation features that show the customer another shirt they have been seeking

– The Customer adds the shirt to the cart 

– The Customer makes the payment

6. Make the necessary changes.

The data analysis should offer you a sense of what your intent your website should appear. You can make the required changes to your site to accomplish these objectives. Indeed, making the needed changes is a more distinct Call-to-action. 

When the above scenario is considered, giving appropriate descriptions under each category or product can make its purpose clearer. 

Irrespective of the size of the change, every change will be significant as they can directly correlate with what users listed as their pain points. Instead of making the changes blindly, hoping that these changes will enhance the user experience, you can make use of the user journey map to visualize the customer requirement and make sure the customer needs are fulfilled. 

Exciting examples of User Journey 

With the help of the customer journey map given below, businesses can instantly identify the threats and opportunities to the customer experience we can find in the customer service. 

Takeaway

Throughout the customer journey, they experience emotional ups and downs, the map timelines account the events and activities of your prospects. This is where you understand and propose the changes, and recommend required solutions to fill the identified gaps.