How can a business step into its customers’ shoes to see things from their perspective? What tool can an organisation use to look at each experience that a customer has and try and make it as positive as possible? The answer to both of these questions is to use a customer journey map. This is a visual way of representing a customer’s journey with your brand, which can include many different types of contact and starting points – for example, social media, marketing, referrals, search, customer service enquiries and so on.

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What Are the Benefits of a Customer Journey Map?

Journey mapping can give a business an insight into its customers’ common ‘pain points’ and help to give a seamless experience by:

* Clarifying all the ways customers interact with the business
* Focusing attention on customer needs at different points in the buying funnel
* Ensuring the customer journey is in the most logical order
* Providing an outside perspective on the sales process
* Revealing any gaps in the desired experience and the one received
* Highlighting priorities for development
* Concentrating effort and expenditure where it will have the maximum effect

According to McKinsey, the number of touch points in a journey is growing. As consumers shift from offline to online, the variety of digital tools to help customers with their purchasing decision is growing, and offline interactions also increasingly include on a digital dimension. It is vital to business success to be able to map all these interactions and understand them so you can connect with customers in new ways and foster long-term relationships.

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There are many specialist companies that can help meet your customers’ needs in terms of your digital strategy, such as https://netcentrics.co.uk/. Customer journey mapping could reveal useful detail about any number of different aspects of your business in any location, from your sales team in London to web design in Cardiff.

How Is Journey Mapping Achieved?

A visual representation is created using detailed data from every time a customer makes contact with your business. By overlaying all this data and looking at the complete picture, from initial enquiry to after-sales, potential opportunities and obstacles for the business can be identified and key data about how real-life customer experience matches with brand promises can be benchmarked.