Marketing

What is customer journey mapping and why it is important?

Nov 26, 2021 4 min read

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What is customer journey mapping and why it is important?

Reading Time: 4 minutes

What is a Customer Journey Mapping (CJM)? Sounds simple enough. You show them what you are selling, they buy them if they like it. This can be the shortest definition of customer journey mapping. However, this “little cycle” has a lot more into it than it seems from the top. 

Centuries of hard work, hefty losses, and courage is, what it takes to make a map, whether it is an atlas or customer journey mapping. Travelers like Columbus suffered great losses so that we could eat the juicy fruit of success. Nonetheless, in the corporate world, everything is new every single day, with the new emerging technologies. Through mapping, we are trying to trace how a customer behaves while buying your product or service. Our mission behind mapping is to know why a customer may draw out halfway the circle of purchase? Do you want to know more? Well, let’s discuss it like it’s hot.

Rendering The Pain Points

You may have a very loyal customer chain, but you must be losing a few of them every day, due to various reasons. It can be the slower speed of your website. The turnoff can be the bad order of your outlet. The pain point can also be a lack of presence on social media by your brand.

Customer journey mapping helps marketing teams to unveil the repeating pain points of your customers. Once your marketing department will zero out what is driving the potential customers away, it is given that they should eliminate the issues. Even if they won’t, you can always outsource your marketing department to someone more proficient. 

The practice of customer journey mapping is also a great judge of your marketing employees. You will get to know how well they can work with important statistics, to bring our desired results.

The Outsider’s View 

Most of the kings saw defeats in the past, were actually failed by the yes-masters and people who didn’t let them see the reality. The very same thing can happen to your company as well. You have to have people who can help you gain the outsider’s perspective of your company.

The CJM will allow you to see how easy or hard it is for a customer to buy something from your company, online, or from any physical store. It will tell you what the customers think should change and what they appreciate the most. This is like untold, unconsciously given feedback, which you can feed on to conquer the market.

An accurate Personal Experience to customers

Today, customers want everything personalized for them. They care about the companies that care about them. Your customer care and marketing departments both have to be on their toes to use the given factor to your company’s factor. This intermingled approach is known as omnichannel marketing. 

How do we do it? It is actually very simple. We are working on targeting a customer on various platforms or ‘channels.’ When a person completes a purchase via your eCommerce website, you can use their information to later target the person via a social media advertisement. This brings us to the service part of the deal. Your customer service can also use the same information to help any complainant at various platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. 

Omni-channel marketing will go hand in hand with omnichannel customer service. But, this dream of covering all the turfs can only be completed when you have the customer journey mapping part right. The key point to remember here is we are not just mapping their journey but their behavior too.

You will always stay one step ahead

Your team just has to be smart and thanks to customer journey mapping, you will always stay one step ahead of your customers. 

You can map, when your customers may catch the feeling that your brand is getting too expensive, or any product or service is lacking now. 

The discount sales, the price drops, and other personalized discounts can be planned thanks to this data. A company will always know when a customer is getting annoyed and when they could lose a customer. They can plan ahead, all the time. 

You are just not retaining a valuable customer but are also going to increase your sales significantly.

Strong customer units and satisfied employees

 We have thoroughly discussed until now how the customer journey mapping scheme will help you give your customers what they need from you. Given everything we have discussed, it is safer to say that your company is going to have a very strong customer unit. 

Consumers/customers who will be loyal and satisfied. It will increase the number of repeat sales, which is one of the top priorities of every company. And if they want to leave, you can always lure them back with rewards, cashback, and hefty discounts.

The satisfaction will spill the beans inside your office as well. When the employees know what they are supposed to do to get their job done, it is going to be a very happy office. It is really frustrating for any team to keep on banging their heads into the wrong walls, trying to get lucky, and finally find a way out. They are now getting the helicopter view from above the puzzle, and have a pretty good idea of what they should do to improve?

It will speed up your sales

Every department knows what to do when a customer shows up at your website or outlet. You know how most of your customers are making purchases and how much time they are spending at your online or physical premises. You can cut out all the unusual and unwanted delays in the process of making a purchase. 

You can work on your website’s UI, speed, design, and other factors if you see a lot of customers are getting fed up in between sales. In the physical store, you can move your billing counters. Can install posters, or even mirrors to increase the purchase of any given sale. 
Every website development starts with keeping customers’ needs into the prime focus but as we hit the implementation phase, it kind of fades away. The statistics pulled out by the customer journey mapping will help you pull back to the basics and see what you have been missing. We want customers to spend a good amount of time at our website so that they can buy more than they had in mind, but we don’t want to bore them. After all, the phase of purchase only completes its whole cycle when the customer is excited, all the way to the end.

Happy Mapping

So, this was all about customer journey mapping and why it is so important to adopt this practice for your company. We create a company with sweat, blood, hard work, and a lot of money. Our first focus should be to make people fall in love with our products and services. Customer journey mapping will help you get back to the basics.  Happy mapping you all!

Pamala Brown has been writing about business and marketing for quite some time now. She is currently working as an editor at SHE In Charge. Keeping up with marketing trends, algorithm updates, and growing her knowledge in an evolving industry is a dream come true.