First of all, yes. Yes, customer journey mapping is important. We work on websites every day. You could say it’s in our DNA as a design agency. Naturally, for our clients, we know customer journey mapping is important. Their websites have a purpose and ultimately there’s a service or product you want to guide customers to at the end of their journey. The same can be said for ourselves, we want to help brands out there grow (we aren’t called The Creative Growth Agency for nothing!) and be the best they can possibly be. So what we’re trying to say is we all already know how important it is to understand how customers engage with your business because it’s how your business is successful!
As a small business, there is always an element of reflection when we take on what we do for our brand design, UX design and how we can improve our clients’ customer journey mapping. And our industry has updates happening all the time with technology, techniques and tools we can use. So just because you understand and maybe have a journey map in place, doesn’t mean it’s delivering on expectations. There could be a world of untapped potential to really understand how your customers behave and how you can use this to your advantage.
Step 1 of customer journey mapping
So maybe there are aspects of your business you think could be working better. You’re probably sitting on a gold mine of information you can use to improve customer experience. You need to look at where customers are interacting with your business so that these are really the best they can be. Overlap how customers interact with your company from visiting your website to your social media networks and live chat.
We like Google Analytics. It lets us see how our visitors use our website. What page did they come onto our site in the first place (and if it’s blog they’ve probably found us on social media!), what pages do they go to next and how long do they spend on these pages. We can see where they’re visiting us from and a range of other useful infographics (as long as they have agreed as per GDPR of course).
Overlap this with your use of social media. Check out likes, comments and interactions you get from here. If you use Google URL for links on social you can also see how many click-throughs these get. But we would also recommend having a CRM system in place because they are super useful!
Identify your persona!
This will help your marketing and sales teams, trust us! If the persona you put out there for your business is accurate to drive engagement, you will notice and your business will thank you for it. If your target audience can connect with you, you’ll be able to see in the way they navigate through your business. Know your customer, grow your business.
It helps you to target demographics but you learn a whole host of other valuable information; too such as: how do they interact with you? How have they found your business? When are they spending the most time on your site?
Knowing the answer to these can help you to see where you can make potential improvements and look at the things that are really working, and do more or less of said things! You learn your business’ strengths and weaknesses in this way.
Identify gaps
When you’ve looked and analysed everything you know where the touch points are, you understand your UX design and customer journey mapping. You know what needs to be done pre and post-sale, the engagement in between and building that relationship. It might not have taught you anything new, or you might have learnt a lot. You’ve created an overall picture, so now look at the gaps. It could be the devices they’re using, the way your departments hand over clients to each other or the channels users have used (how they leave, if it’s social media to your website, what happens?). The transitions might not be bad but if you don’t manage them properly you could end up losing customers.
If you identify and ‘fill in’ the gaps, your sales funnel will probably be more effective and transitions easier.
Likewise identifying gaps on where you’re not delivering on brand at each touch point can help you create WOW for your clients and make your brand more memorable. Off the top of my head one of the most famous ‘touch points’ I can think of it the beautiful little blue box you get with a Tiffany purchase. It’s become an icon.
If you’re B2B it’s just as important, find out how we helped JETPUBS improve their customer journey and the unexpected successes we had.
One shoe doesn’t fit all…
What works for one person might not work for another in the brand design and UX design world. Even if you have loads of good reviews left for you, it’s important to look at everything from pre-sale, when a customer is onboard and post-sale. You need to put yourselves in your customers’ shoes and think about different scenarios that might lead them on different journeys. If you can anticipate as many journeys as possible, you can be a prepared as possible for these scenarios and how best to handle the customer. In business, you can’t be comfortable and rely on one route and just hope for the best.
Work with sales and marketing at points where you get the most and least interaction, where people drop off or really buy in. You can only learn from all of this. It’s time to adapt to your ideal customer and use all the information you have found to grow your business! Remember, if your customers are upset with you they will tell far more people than if they’re happy, we’re all only human after all.
Of course, if you’re really stuck we have some in-house expertise to help you refine this and be on your way to absolute greatness, just make sure your business is flowing as it should be to make sure you aren’t missing anything!
We’d love to help you identify gaps and how you can enhance those touch points to create brand magic.
