Build a Path to Customer Loyalty with These 5 Customer Journey Mapping Essentials

The world around us is more competitive than ever before. The pandemic has made it even harder for traditional brands to stand out against the agile digital brands that put all their focus on building a strong digital presence.

So, what should traditional brands do to stay at par with the growing competition? Should they build complex digital solutions or prepare experiments? The question at the end would be: How should they approach digital transformation?

Well, the first step in approaching digital transformation is to understand your customer’s intent. To do this, you must keep in mind a few questions like - Who is your target audience and what do they want? What is their digital and real geolocation? What solution can your company provide for their problem?

The battle for buyer’s attention has never been fiercer.

Gone are the days when having a domain like .com was enough. Today, you must engage your customers with personalized interactions and content while fulfilling their demands, as fast as possible. To be able to do this effectively, businesses must have a fair insight on customer demands, derived from studying customer behavior across multiple touch points. This is where they need to build a Customer Journey Map.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of the path taken by the prospect to complete a goal. In customer journey maps, all potential interactions between a brand and its customers are captured, that help the organization to understand potential friction points to solve. This is essentially done for improving customer experience and helping the prospect to achieve the goal easily.

How Can Altudo Help You Do That?

At Altudo, we use Design Thinking to build Journey Maps for our customers that helps us empathize with the end user and build actionable maps that companies can start to use immediately.

But the overall process involves the following 8 steps:

1. Define Goals and Objectives
2. Research and Persona Development
3. Define Phases for the journey
4. Creating Journey Maps
5. Analyze the Journey and Outline Opportunities
6. Journey Validation
7. Presentation and Prototyping
8. Test, test, and test!

Building Journey Maps is a Complex Process

If you or anyone in your team is working on a Customer Journey Mapping Assignment, don’t forget to take care of the following essentials while building effective journey maps:

1. Empathize with your prospects
   This is the most important part. You will have to talk to your prospects a lot. While doing that, make sure that they see you as a friend rather than an employee who just wants to get things done.
   
   To ensure quality feedback from your prospects, incentivize their good behavior. You can offer them gift vouchers or free products in return. [I have personally seen Drizly vouchers working better than Amazon ones, of course you know why!]



2. Have a good understanding of teams involved
   In the process of deeply analyzing the journeys, you might often need to connect with people managing different teams to understand their pain points. How do they plan to do that and what are the solutions that they’re seeking? Include the future plan in the journey notes for future teams to go through.
   
   For instance, let’s say that you are solving a problem in the acquisition funnel and your research indicates a need for chatbots. In such a case, you would need to get in touch with the person responsible for marketing conversions. In some organizations, that person will be Acquisition Product Manager, in others, it could be a UX team member. That is why you must have a clear understanding of responsibilities across the customer journey.
3. Go with data, not with the gut
   
   I have learnt this the hard way but you need not make the mistake. Whenever highlighting any pain points, use analytical tools like Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics to understand the problem and deep dive into opportunities for future teams to consider. Using data can give your teams a clearer picture of the issue and better ways to resolve them.
4. Have a measurement strategy in place
   As you go on solving the problems and highlighting opportunities, mention the KPIs to track at the stage for future teams to better have an idea about how to improve the things moving forward. Data gathered from using analytical tools can come handy in such cases. It can enable the other teams involved in the project to get a better understanding on the problem while keeping a measure of how much their efforts are making a difference.



5. Take special care of the competitors’ “Aha moments”
   The pleasure moments also called as aha moments are the ones where your prospect is the happiest
   
   If you are a B2B Company, your customers’ potential aha moment could be a Whitepaper that they can pitch to internal teams. One the other hand, if you are a CPG B2C Company, your customers’ potential aha moment could be when they unwrap your product.
   
   “Aha moments” are super delicate and companies need to take special care of them to effectively build quality relationships that last for a long term.
   
   These are the most important things to consider while building a journey map.
   
   For more information on picking out the right self-service solutions tailored to your demands to enhance customer experience, you can connect with our Digital Marketing experts at marketing@altudo.co and have a more detailed discussion.