As a customer, what makes you return to a specific business? Is it because of their products, their services, their prices… or is it because of the customer journey they provide.
In present day, there are so many businesses that offer similar products or services for similar prices – all in an attempt to remain competitive. However, how many businesses really prioritise a customer’s experience? Recent research shows that 84% of consumers feel that a positive customer experience or being ‘treated like a human rather than a number’ makes them return to a specific business. Personalised service, tailored content and customer experience are helping businesses become top competitors.
How can your business create a more personalised customer experience? The best way to do it is through a Customer Journey Map.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A Customer Journey Map is a visual story of your customer’s interactions, needs and processes throughout their relationship with your business. This gives businesses the customer’s perspective and knowledge on what touchpoints a customer passes through when engaging with the business. Think about it like signposts on a path, each one pointing to the next before you reach your destination.
Why is Customer Journey Mapping important?
Creating a customer journey map to track and explain a customer’s experience at each stage of their journey can enable a business to:
- Understand whether what the envisioned the customer experience is well matched to reality
- Recognise pain points and challenges a customer might encounter
- Identify opportunity to improve and intervene
- Bring teams and departments together where they discover gaps
A business can use their customer journey map to:
- Improve the overall customer experience
- Improve customer loyalty and engagement
- Understand the different buyer personas and cater to all of them
- Deliver coherent, streamlined products and services that pass through the various departments/teams of a business
- Understand the most influential touchpoints a customer encounters, focusing on these and improving the less influential touchpoints
How to create a B2B Customer Journey Map?
Firstly, to create a B2B Customer Journey Map, the business must step into the shoes of the customer and experience the process of interacting with their business. You must think about what the customer values? What makes them frustrated? Why does it make them frustrated? A lot of research goes into creating a Customer Journey Map.
Follow these four steps to create a B2B Customer Journey Map:
1. Create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- An ICP helps you discover what kind of customer you want to sell to and which type of customers you are actually selling to. This way you can identify the exact pain points, incentives and expectations of that kind of customer.
- Make note of the following attributes:
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- Company size (number of employees, number of customers)
- Industry (who are the competitors?)
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2. Make personas
- Create a persona within the ICP you have created, imagine a key stakeholder. Identify their goals, motivators and frustrations.
- Understand how and when your products/services address their needs.
3. Define the stages a customer experiences
- What feelings does a B2B customer feel that makes them interact with your business?
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- Acknowledgement – they acknowledge that their business has a gap/problem that needs fixing
- Consideration – they start to research for something that will be able to fix the gap/problem
- Buying – they have decided on a product and decide to invest in it
- Adoption – they like the solution and they become a user.
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4. Plot out the main touchpoints in each of those stages
- Each stage has a sequence of activities that need to be performed to reach the next stage. When mapping these touchpoints, think about:
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- What platform is it on? (web, newspaper, etc.)
- How long does it take to complete each activity? (web-form, log-in?)
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- Mapping out these touchpoints will then let you see where the pain points are.
Creating a Customer Journey Map and from it seeing where you need to improve will help your business develop a more positive customer experience and rev up your revenue. It all sounds great! But how do you begin… where do you start? If you’re asking yourself these questions, then why not get in touch here and start a conversation with us. Our team of expert consultants draw on their years of experience creating the very best customer journeys to help your business thrive.
