A Complete Guide On Effective Customer Journey Map Types, Example & Templates

There is no easy way to collect information about your consumers’ experiences. Preparing a Customer journey map is one of the intelligent things.

In terms of customer journey maps, there are advantages and disadvantages. Nevertheless, just like with any other marketing study and documentation, the bottom line boils down to two things Identifying the overall aim and purpose of the project & knowing how to put it into practice and put it to use.

It is the process through which a consumer engages with a business to accomplish a specific objective. Consumers now engage with companies in a variety of ways that are difficult to categorize.

In most instances, there are numerous and varied phases involved in the process, from increasing awareness of a company through social media to receiving a “thank you on your purchase” email following a successful transaction. There are many types of customer journey maps that an organization uses.

A customer journey map provides a concise summary of the entire process. It may be presented in various formats (infographics, drawings, diagrams, and all of that beautiful stuff).

These maps depict all locations and touchpoints where consumers contact your business, whether online or in person. Moreover, they assist you in seeing your company’s brand, product, and procedures through the eyes of the consumer, allowing you to picture their actual trip through the funnel. Many businesses use financial accounting software to enhance the customer journey.

In this blog post, we’ll go through types of customer journey maps, examples & templates of customer journey maps for your company, and how to assess and utilize it efficiently using cloud-based accounting software.

Also, online billing software for business helps you manage customer experience, preferences, accounts, finance, and much more.

Why should you use it?

Successful, long-term customer relationships are based on empathy and a thorough understanding of the requirements and difficulties of the consumers.

Knowing your consumers’ thoughts, feelings, and struggles is essential for establishing a shared understanding of their behavior and interactions with your business as they engage with your brand.

A customer journey map may assist your teams in aligning around addressing known issues, discovering new user pain points, and eliminating obstacles to your customer’s (and consequently your company’s) success via the usage of user stories.

Client journey mapping allows you to:

• Visualize the whole customer experience from beginning to finish
• Recognize a variety of customer journeys and complicated user experiences.
• Empathy for existing and potential consumers should be increased.
• Improve your ability to target personalities and solve issues.
• Discover and prioritize new sources of discomfort and obstacles.
• Improvements in internal alignment and the dismantling of silos
• Improve the quality of your tales to increase stakeholder acceptance.

Every business should engage in customer journey mapping. However, not every organization’s customer journey map will look the same or include the same amount of information. Some use business management software, and some use online billing software.

Likely, a customer journey map intended to assist hotel management in optimizing contact points with visitors would appear quite different from a map designed to assist UX designers in understanding their B2B SaaS customers more effectively.

In the same way, the customer journey map you give to design stakeholders may be very different from the format you select to show executives who are only concerned with the organization’s bottom line.

The following six stages will guide you through establishing a customer journey map for your business.

1. Creating an ideal customer profile

The first step in understanding the buyer’s journey is to define your target audience. What is your customer’s personality like? You may believe you know your consumers and their requirements, but how well do you know them?

To build a successful customer journey map, you must have a more profound knowledge of your customers than a surface-level understanding. Google Analytics is the logical option for gathering demographic and psychographic data about your average customer. You must approach a customer journey map from the consumer’s perspective, not the view of the brand’s employees!

Even better, ask your consumers what information you need, and they will gladly fill in the gaps for you! Surveys are an excellent tool for doing this. There are many methods to gather feedback from consumers and better understand them, ranging from Net Promoter Score (NPS) to the Customer Satisfaction Index (CES). Additionally, data collected directly from your consumers sheds light on how they first learned about you, what motivated them to choose your product or service, and what obstacles they encountered along the way.

Once you’ve gathered all the necessary information, you can build up a fictional customer profile that accurately represents your typical client using business management software or cloud-based accounting software.

Buyer personas don’t have to be crammed full of the qualities of many different individuals. You may have several personas, each representing a different kind of client. Additionally, having numerous personas would imply having different versions of customer journey maps. A good rule of thumb to follow is to have a separate map for each identification.

2. Identify the behavioral stage and the objectives of the participants

Consider the customer’s point of view, and begin at the beginning of the process the very beginning would be how consumers first became aware of you.

There are five unique stages that your prospective client goes through, and the objectives you set for each of these phases will be distinct from one another. Awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy are five stages of it.

While most consumers go through all of these stages in one way or another, the process cannot be depicted as a straight line from point A to point B. To get to the endpoint, most consumers go back and forth, mix it up, cycle through it, or go through several channels. As a result, it makes it logical to map each of these more prominent stages separately and give a goal to each phase.

Choosing the most common consumer profile and mapping the path they would follow the first time they interact with you is a smart strategy to take when building your first map.

Even if you choose to map by particular market groups or stages, it is critical to make your touchpoints meaningful (more on that below) and evaluate whether consumers accomplish their objectives by taking this path.

Here’s a peek of how an airline business might appear:

3. List customer contact touchpoints

To enhance your business, you need to understand your customer’s journey.

All the locations your clients may engage with you are touchpoints. It refers to when your client contacts your business for any reason at any point of the purchase cycle.

The whole customer journey is a complete map, from the first to the final contact point. This exercise aims to evaluate how effectively they achieve their targets in each point/phase and improve the performance of these points using online billing software for business.

Not all points of contact must be handled in the same way since some have a determining effect. For example, the whole shopping experience may be filled with a gloomy supply! That said, you may also not allow yourself to disregard any touchpoint totally there are always chances to listen and to make the trip straightforward.

4. Identification of pain spots

You know, if it is not planned correctly, any touchpoint may become a pain point? It is natural that as you map touchpoints on a client’s journey, you find bumps and obstacles. The background to developing a customer journey map to enhance the customer experience is to address these problems and remediate consumer bumps.

To enhance the customer experience, you may use online billing software for business.

You can prepare, if not proactive, customer journey maps. Your clients’ motives, requirements, friction spots, and pain points may be pulsed and planned appropriately.

CX specialists advise you since only those that you recognize will finally be resolved. It’s also a good idea to write down the appropriate places to work, replicate takeovers to sections that don’t exist, and find methods to enhance them.

This phase is simple to get carried away, and finally, all these contact points are optimized for optimization. The issue is that you are derailing from the ultimate objective of a smoother CX that may lead to increased conversions and retention. You may have to think twice before you decide to work on a particular touchpoint and extend the trip, rather than driving the funnel down your consumers.

5. Choose a journey and a map

A brand may have many customer journeys, which is the step in choosing the closest customer journey map to your objectives. You may map the map at last!

Some companies are more suitable for end-to-end consumer journeys, while others discover that their objectives are closer to a map focused on a particular portion of a trip.

6. Current state

These kinds of journey maps are popular among businesses of all sorts and are frequently utilized. The most excellent way to improve customer journeys continually is to use them.

As the name implies, current State journey maps show how consumers engage with your company displaying your customers’ actions, ideas, and emotions right now. It underlines the existing dangers and possibilities and outlines measures you may take to enhance customer relationships. You may use business management software for the same.

7. Day in the life

The day-to-day model, which focuses on the broader aspects which influence a client’s journey, visualizes everyday typical customer experience, whether it goes for your brand or not. This is a fantastic method to meet unsatisfied consumer requirements before customers know what they want!

To analyze such things, you may use cloud-based accounting software. The customer journey day-by-day maps indicate typical purchaser habits concerning your business and highlight important information to increase communication and retention of customers.

8. State of the future

The less popular relatives of the current State journey maps are helpful, though. The emphasis is on anticipating and developing a customer-friendly procedure in the future. In their future encounters with the business, this is done by assessing consumers’ behaviors, thoughts, and emotions.

Future customer journeys in the State will best reflect the vision of the business and bring CX into line with the company’s future objectives. This approach provides the opportunity to improve CX for the company using business management software.

9. Blueprint

A master plan that ties your company journey with your customer journey is also called Service Blueprint customer journey maps. The Blueprint model is a sophisticated map built on top of the previous three client journey kinds, providing a single organizational knowledge of where they wish to go.

This is the interim plan that connects a customer journey map with a fundamental shift in the organization. Service Blueprint can better be characterized as the fourth kind of customer journey map for workers.

10. Determine action course/recommended modifications

A robust customer map highlights how companies may develop long-term solutions and achieve better retention rates for their customers.

Tracking every customer’s mental and physical process is difficult, but it has a guaranteed effect on the customer journey. Now that we’ve divided the customer journey map into distinct stages and guaranteed each step has a quantifiable objective, the only remaining step is reorganizing the contact points to achieve the goals more quickly.

The goal is to improve goods and services and maximize the success of customers. Every action and strategy suggested at the moment is backed and made virtually impregnable by actual customer experience. Here the map enters the whole circle!

Wrap Up

So, that’s it for the customer journey map, and as mentioned above, there are many types of customer journey maps that you can use for your business.

We recommend using online accounting software, which eventually works as business management software.