What is a customer journey?

It’s been said that you’ll never really understand someone until you walk a mile in their shoes. Customer journey mapping allows you to do just that: placing yourself in your customers’ position and gaining a clearer understanding of their perspective. In addition to more clearly defining the realities of your customers’ experiences, journey mapping provides other advantages as well.

Inbound marketing depends on your ability to create interesting and useful content to help generate interest and draw in prospective customers. Customer mapping gives you clever insight into your customers’ interests, as well as how they feel about individual aspects and touchpoints as they interact with your business. With this information, you can tailor your content offering to better attract and retain qualified leads.

By mapping out the customer journey, you are able identify potential points of friction well in advance. You can then adjust your customer service strategy accordingly, intervening where necessary to increase your brand value and help cement a positive customer relationship. Being proactive makes your brand more reliable and helps you provide better support options for parts of the journey that may become difficult.

Locating and guiding prospective customers through their journey can be expensive, and when your leads fail to become customers, then all of that cost goes to waste. A detailed customer journey map can help you more clearly identify the demographics and traits of those who would be most interested in your services. By understanding their needs, pain points, and goals, you will be better positioned to market to the right audiences.

The customer journey isn’t designed only for new customers; a complete view of the customer journey provides opportunities to improve any areas that stand out as possibly problematic for returning customers as well. Customer journey mapping can help you identify those who might be considering leaving. By comparing journeys between churned customers, you may be able to identify common issues, which you can then then address to help ensure that future customers keep coming back again and again.

It can be difficult to coordinate all departments as your company grows. Sometimes, sales and marketing goals may not be aligned, or might not actually be relevant to your customers wants or needs. Your customer journey map supports a shared vision across departments. When adopted throughout your business, it can become the basis for decision-making, informing goals, supporting strategy, and aligning teams towards creating a better experience for your customers.

The journey that a customer takes is married to each instance that a customer comes in contact with your company. These instances include pre-purchase, mid- purchase, and post-purchase. When you break these three instances down into their constituent parts, there are seven phases of the customer journey to be aware of.

This is the phase where a customer is looking to improve their business, and they want the company to be productive and efficient. At this point, they may not have a solution to achieve their goals, but they are open to inspiration and ideas.

A customer uncovers the opportunity to grow and improve their business at this phase—they have identified an issue that could be resolved.

After customers have identified a solution to their problem, they will begin to research. Stakeholders and a project group work to identify the top brands in the market they need, scope out a project, and review the key functionalities and requirements.

Customers then take their long list of possible solutions and narrow it down to a short list of brands. Customers contact the vendors on the short list and invite them to a meeting or demo, at which point they will review the solutions based on their trust, expertise, and scalability.

This is when the customer decides on a vendor, agrees on the solution, and works out a purchase contract. Implementation begins, and customers start to roll out a team. The solution provider supports the customer as they outline KPIs, success criteria, and a timeline.

Once the customer has found the solution and teamed up with a company, they want to get the solution up and running as quickly as possible, and they want a smooth launch process. It is important to ensure that all users are trained and have proper access to consultants or account managers for support.

Once the solution has been rolled out, the customer wants to see fast results. The provider of the solution follows up, implements the solutions, and continues to help the customer fulfill their goals. This phase is where customers become loyal as results are being delivered.