A guide to customer journey mapping with a simple example

Customer journey mapping is the easiest way to see eye-to-eye with your customers. Customer centricity is thrown around as a buzzword by most big organizations nowadays. But if you draw up customer journey maps then you can truly make your customers the center of all considerations while marketing your business and brand!

What is customer journey mapping?

As clear by the name, customer journey mapping is about drawing out all the touchpoints where your customers interact with your brand. By doing this across all your paid, owned and shared channels, you depict a visual story of your customers’ experience, as a result.

While choosing touchpoints, you can include your website, social media platforms, storefronts, affiliate channels, support, and service points! You can also consider any sales and marketing channels whether temporary or permanent. These are vital and should be considered to assess the entire customer journey fairly. If you need help choosing the right marketing channels, this blog post sheds some light on that!

Obviously, all customer journeys are not the same. Different people and segments react differently with brand touchpoints. So, what’s the solution? CUSTOMER PERSONAS.

For instance, creating separate journeys for your top 3 customer persona types is always recommended as a good starting point. This way you are prioritizing the segments that most affect your brand and business.

Why should you map your customer journeys?

Mapping consumer journeys helps you:

• Put your customers first, based on their behavior and preferences
  
• Identify ways to enhance the customer experience
  
• Create customized approaches for each of your customer personas

And this creates a host of benefits that elevate your brand in the hearts and minds of your customers. You can:

• Increase customer satisfaction
  
• Boost customer retention
  
• Maximize conversion rates

As with everything in marketing, your implementation of strategy makes all the difference. So let’s take a look at how you can do that with customer journey mapping.

Implementing customer journey mapping

Firstly, it is highly recommended that your customer journey matches your broader marketing framework. Take for example a marketing planning framework like STDC. How do you align that with your customer journey?

That’s an easy one.

You create stages based on your customer’s needs, questions, emotions, and actions.

Here’s a simplified B2B example to describe that:

Assume that you work for a studio that provides photography services for eCommerce brands. Here’s a sample journey:

1: Your prospective client might have someone share the link to your Instagram account and like what they see. 
2: They then use the website link to do more research and get a better idea if you are the right fit. 
3: Then they get in touch with you via email to place an inquiry. Your sales representative might schedule a meeting or call to understand the details of the project and the needs of the client.
4: The next step might be submitting a template for a creative brief followed by meetings with your creative team followed by an operations team to execute.
5: You conduct after-sales feedback calls and add them to a mailing list to keep them up to date on what you offer so they are primed to return to you for future projects!

So here’s what it would like when arranged using the STDC framework stages

Sample Customer Journey map

Stage	SEE	THINK	DO	CARE
Customer Actions	Organic social share and reviews IG feed	Research on website and fills up contact form	Correspond via meetings and calls to discuss project details	Read newsletter, respond to emails, follow-up calls
Thoughts	Need to find a reliable studio for a project	I wonder if they are a fit for my needs	Need to know if this is the best option I have	I loved working with them and can’t wait to do it again
Emotions	Curiosity, exploration	Trust, Compatibility	Benefits, success	Satisfaction, eagerness
Touchpoints	Instagram, word-of-mouth, Google SERP	Website, portfolio, aggregators	Video calls, email, template forms	Email, feedback forms, newsletter, calls
Learnings & Opportunity	Robust content strategy, SEO and social media management	Clear and organized website with solid CTA	Effortless sales process from discovery to onboarding	Maximize feedback, and focus on retention

You can also use other templates, add other elements to be considered like “Challenges”, “Expectations” or “Risks”. It will all depend on what matters most for YOUR customers and how well you want to understand and help them! The more detailed, the better! You can even use simplified phases/stages that track specific actions of your customers as a separate stage. For example, specific clicks, page visits, email opens. This will all depend on how you operate and market your business!

You can also use stages from other marketing funnels like AIDA if that helps your process and provides better information about your customers.

So you have your map, What do you do next?

Once you’ve created your map, use it for training, to draft your SOPs, and even set customer-centric goals monthly and annually that you can work towards. Additionally, you can determine metrics that indicate performance towards these goals.

For eg. if you were trying to maximize retention, customer satisfaction would be a key performance indicator and you can use a CSAT or NPS score to track and measure those goals. For bigger organizations, the customer journey map has to be aligned across all teams from sales to customer service since all functions will contribute to the optimization of workflow and processes to better the customer experience.

Similarly, doing a similar customer journey map for B2C would be just as easy. Although, a big consideration would be to understand how much of the customer journey can be automated. Using a host of tools like email sequences, chatbots or other marketing automation methods is feasible. But finding a balance between scaling and customization is key to enhancing your customer’s experiences.

Here are a few additional resources, that I found immensely helpful when I started drafting customer journey maps and needed a little direction:

– Delighted’s guide to customer journey maps
– Invesp discusses types of maps in their guide: Current state, future state and Day in the life mapping
– Understand the what and why of customer journey mapping more clearly with Salesforce’s blog post

Conclusion

As seen with the example, this exercise helps businesses step into their customer’s shoes. You get to see the business from the customer’s perspective. It allows you to gain insight into common customer pain points and how to improve your stages for each persona type. In conclusion, customer journey maps are all you need to truly become customer-centric, and that is essential to sustainable growth for your brand and business!