6 Ways to Harness the Power of Customer Journey Maps for Strategic Business Decisions

“Make the customer the hero of your story” — because does anything else make sense if you don’t have customers? The most successful companies in the world were successful because they emphasized on catering to and understanding their customers’ needs. How do you gain this understanding? It’s through the amazing concept of customer journey maps. 

Customer journey maps look like a simple concept in the beginning — from marketing a product to selling it to the product. However, each customer journey map gives an insight into the various stages your customer goes through before making the final purchase. These maps play a crucial role in improving customer experience and help in quick decision-making for the business. 

Blueprint of customer journey maps

A customer journey map gives you a visual storyline of a customer’s engagement with your brand from their perspective. You can get into the customer’s mind and understand their likes, needs, perceptions and other factors influencing their decisions. The touchpoints in this journey include things like how the customer heard about your brand, their navigation experience online or offline, their preferences of the options you’re offering, and more. 

For example, the customer journey map for a customer looking for a good-quality sofa may look like this:

• The intention arises and creates a need for a sofa in the house
• The customer searches for good furniture stores online and nearby to their location
• They visit the store to try out different sofas available in the store, depending on the price and seating capacity they’re looking for
• A systematic review system is put in place where online reviews and suggestions from friends who’ve purchased from the same place are welcome
• The customer directly interacts with the store workers and observes the service being offered
• When satisfied, the final purchase is made and they avail after-sales service for the maintenance of the sofa
• If happy with the product after using it for a significant period, they will recommend the brand in their circles
• The customer will consider making a repeat purchase for their furniture needs at the same store.

In this day and age, companies with successful customer journey maps are still remembered by customers several decades later. Disney is one such successful brand whose customer journey map emphasizes on creating joyful moments for all age groups, but mainly children. When you hear of Disney, you first associate it with magic, fairytales and happiness. All Disney theme parks create unforgettable experiences for their customers by simplifying ticket booking, improving dining experiences and creating entertainment that seems out of this world. Disney’s customer journey maps have finally paid off!

6 benefits of using customer journey maps in business decisions

Without a customer journey map, your company is walking a path with dense fog. With a customer journey map, your company is uncovering a valuable chest of information that will push you in taking customer-centric business decisions. The advantages of journey maps are:

1. Easy identification of customers’ pain points

The most important role of a customer journey map is identifying customers’ pain points and eliminating them for a better experience. These pain points are the issues people face while directly dealing with your company. While these pain points are ignored, they lead to poor goodwill and customer loyalty, eventually impacting business decisions. 

With the usage of technology, companies can quickly identify these gaps in customer journey maps. This list of software contains all those tools capable of showing customer feedback in real-time capable of visualizing pain points, without any preconceived notions. They can be segmented further depending on customer personas for which you can apply specific solutions. 

2. Creating customer personas

When you create customer personas, you’re establishing yourself as a company that understands its diverse customer base. Doing so will further help in developing targeted strategies and marketing only those products and services that will appeal to the target audience. Your marketing efforts will not go down the drain and all your resources will be accurately utilized. 

For example, Amazon is a globally-renowned company that boasts of offering everything from A-Z. It identifies customer personas as per price brackets, reviews, categories, etc. everything is segmented on the website so that the customer has an impeccable navigation experience. Whether it’s a festive season offer or mega sale, it knows which audience to target based on buyer history.

3. Allocating resources rightly

Companies have limited resources to spend on various processes in the company. However, since customer experience and satisfaction are paramount, you may end up spending more than what’s required and exhaust available resources. A few ways in which a customer journey map aids business decisions are:

• Optimizes results: The customer journey map does a thorough checkup of the pain points and ensures that resources are used optimally there. Labor force, time, finance, and other resources can be redirected toward those stages in the map where customer satisfaction is affected. 
• Meets objectives: A customer journey map aligns resource allocation with the overall business objectives. Whether it’s customer retention or improving brand perception, taking business decisions becomes simpler when you know where your resources are going. 
• Gives advantage over competitors in the market: Once you know how to grab the attention of your consumers, half of your business issues will be solved. When you differentiate your brand, customers will prefer you over other brands in the market. A customer journey map helps with understanding the needs and likes, i.e., the mind of your target audience.

4. More scope for innovation

With advanced software, you’ll be capable of forecasting the behavior and mindset of your audience. Doing so will enable you to make more forward-thinking decisions where the entire marketing strategy is customer-centric. Innovation in customer journey maps aids business decisions in the following ways:

• Meeting emerging trends by adapting to technological advancements, leading to higher customer satisfaction
• Finding innovative ways to detect and address pain points before they become widely noticeable
• Advanced mapping methods will improve a customer’s experience with your company
• Cutting-edge technology can create more personalized customer engagement methods, leading to more meaningful customer interactions with you and your brand
• Futuristic technologies will save time and money and streamline the entire customer journey mapping process.

5. Training personnel for better customer handling

Your employees are the first POC of your customers. A customer journey map gives you detailed information of the points where your customers and employees are interacting with each other. By improving experiences at these interaction points, you can create targeted campaigns and similarly, level up employees by training them for these stages. 

Customer journey mapping improves customer handling methods by:

• Providing those touchpoints for your employees so that they know when and where to interact with customers.
• Changing an employee’s perspective to a customer-based one so that they’ll understand the needs, emotions, and requirements more deeply.
• Integrating customer feedback into training and development programmes that your employees will undertake. 
• Measuring employee performance based on how effective they were in addressing and resolving customer queries. 
• Improving overall business decisions that cater to employees and customers and elevating branding. 

6. Discovering opportunities in untapped markets

There is a wide base of audience that is waiting for the right brand to establish a connection with them. You can use customer journey mapping to connect with untapped markets in the following ways:

• Identifying entry points where you can forge connections with untapped marketplaces
• Meeting customer preferences by looking at different purchase patterns and journeys
• Gaining insight into the cultural and demographic differences in new audiences
• Creating highly-personalized marketing messages for customers in unexplored markets
• Analyzing the competitors’ strategies for similar markets, thereby enabling you to provide a far better option.

Customer journey mapping: the key to knowing your customers

A customer journey map is your must-have tool if you truly wish to understand your customers. It’s not just a visual representation of your customer’s interactions with your brand but is also a life and death for your business’ existence in the long term as without customers, your company will collapse. You need to foster a customer-centric landscape, leaving aside personal expectations, to gain success in this highly cluttered and competitive marketplace. 

About the Author: 

Naomi Grace is a freelance content writer with a Master’s in Mass Communication. She loved writing poems as a child and turned her passion into a profession in 2019. Her greatest joy comes from knowing that her content has the power to help someone. She also loves singing songs, baking cakes, and editing videos. When she’s not writing, you can find her kickboxing with her brothers or enjoying a cuppa Joe at her favorite cafe, or wandering through nature, away from city life.

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