Understanding the needs and motivations of your customers is crucial in improving your sites user experience. This not only benefits the customer but also your business with an increase in repeat sales. Most websites have a specific feature that they want customers to interact with however, but the question remains, how do you get customers where you want them on your site.
Customer Journey Maps are used for identifying customer needs through storytelling and visualisation methods and can be used to help your customers achieve their goals from visiting your site.
Analytics programs often provide data which can be used to improve services however using customer journey maps allow for the thoughts, feelings and frustrations of the customer to be brought to focus.
If you have already used customer journey maps then you know they can be incredibly complicated, even though they are worth making.
The more times you utilise customer journey mapping in your projects the more you will come to learn its mechanics and better understand your customers.
Here are some tips for using customer journey maps:
1. Define the stages
As all businesses are different the stages users go through whilst using your site will be different. The stages can be created by looking at your Personas to get a good idea about the process your customers go through from their landing page to what they want from the website. Some popular ones include information gathering, journey to purchase and final purchase.
2. Align the Customers with stages
Think about what your customers want from the site as they move through the stages; you’ll then be able to see if your website has the information needed to support these goals.
The types of data you can use to understand goals are survey answers, user-testing feedback, interview transcripts and customer service emails and support transcripts.
3. Identify Touchpoints
From the different stages identified think of the ways in which you interact and engage with your customer. Think of the customer needs and where, in each stage of the process, they can be met.
The Outcome of a successful Customer Journey map
Customer Journey Maps can help your business decide what the main business goal you should be focussing on. This is because priority can be given to tasks which will improve the customer flow.
It can also be used to focus different teams to achieve customer experience. This means everyone knows what the customer is asking for.
The Course
If you are interested in more detail about Customer Journey Mapping then we run a course on all the features of a customer journey map and how to apply it to your business.
The course includes an introduction to Customer Journey Mapping, personas, user scenarios, the process of Customer Journey Mapping, mapping the ideal customer journey and the final product.
We can also run training in-house, For more details on the different courses, please click the link below.