Customer Experience Journey Mapping: Why Your Business Needs It

Customer experience journey mapping brings another dimension to the time-honored customer journey map. In addition to outlining every touchpoint customers have with your brand, from awareness to post-purchase, CX journey mapping takes into account how they feel at each point.

Although “customer experience journey mapping” and “customer journey mapping” are often used interchangeably, true CX mapping overlays the “why” and “how” of customer emotion and sentiment on top of the “where” and “when” of the journey itself. It’s not enough to know that a customer came to your brand’s website after seeing a social media post, then proceeded to make two subsequent visits before making a purchase. Only when you understand why that particular social post spurred the site visit can you create additional posts to attract more consumers. Likewise, only by understanding why the customer didn’t complete the purchase during their first visit can you try to improve the site and the customer experience so that you can capture sales sooner.

Why Mapping the Customer Experience Journey Matters

Understanding the emotional underpinnings of how people interact — or opt not to interact —with your brand gives context to metrics such as email clickthrough rates, website page drop-off rates and promotion conversion rates. Mapping both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the CX journey, then, helps brands improve the journey itself and customers’ experience of it.

For instance, a customer journey map might reveal that a significant number of website visitors are abandoning their carts at checkout, leading the brand’s CX team to try to streamline the checkout process. But customer experience mapping might show that in fact consumers want more, not less, information on the checkout pages. What’s more, it might uncover that visitors who come to the site after a Google search leave because they’re disappointed by the lack of return-policy information, while those who arrive after seeing ads on YouTube are abandoning out of frustration with the confusing shipping options. The brand could then personalize the checkout pages so that each segment would receive a version better suited to their needs.

More effective personalization is just one benefit of customer experience journey mapping. Others include improved marketing ROAS due to knowing which campaign elements are the most effective and stronger customer loyalty by smoothing areas of friction during the journey with experiences that delight.

The Five Stages of the Customer Experience Journey

To optimize the CX journey, brands need to understand where in the marketing funnel or journey consumers are while interacting with the brand. Broadly speaking, the customer journey can be broken down into five stages.

1. Awareness

To initiate this first stage on the CX journey, a brand needs to command the attention of the consumer. Researching how their most valuable customers came to be aware of the brand enables businesses to hone its top-of-funnel marketing to optimal effect.

2. Consideration

At this point, consumers are assessing not only whether the brand will meet their needs but also whether another brand can do so more effectively. Customer experience mapping can show at which touchpoints visitors abandoned the brand, as well as which aspects of the consideration process encouraged consumers to proceed to the next stage — and of course, why they did so.

3. Decision

Also known as the purchase stage, this is where customer experience research reveals, among other things, the reasons for cart abandonment and how many touchpoints the consumer engaged with during the purchase process: Did they interact with chatbots, for instance, or opt to order online but pick up in store?

4. Post-Purchase

From the viewpoint of the brand, this is the retention stage. CX mapping shows whether customers interacted with customer support, and if so, in what way and their level of satisfaction. It can also guide a brand in determining the most productive ways to continue interacting with customers — for instance, are they more likely to respond to promotional emails or texts, or what sort of benefits would make them most likely to participate in a loyalty program?

5. Advocacy

Not all customer journeys end with advocacy, but all brands want them to. By using CX mapping to assess at what point customers went beyond making repeat purchases to promoting the brand, the company can be sure to offer rewards and experiences that will continue to resonate, boosting loyalty and lifetime value.

Starting a Customer Experience Journey Map

Because an actionable CX journey map marries quantitative and qualitative findings, creating one entails more than simply tracking the consumers from one touchpoint to the next. The following tactics can help you get started.

• Secure cross-functional alignment. Because the customer experience encompasses multiple points of contact, numerous departments across the organization need to be involved. Determine who will be responsible for implementing any necessary changes in each area of the journey, and emphasize that metrics for each team are less important than improving the overall customer experience journey, which should in turn boost immediate sales and long-term loyalty.

• Prioritize the areas to be improved. Limited resources may require determining which areas of the CX journey should receive attention first. It’s possible to have less-than-perfect aspects of your CX and still provide an experience worthy of brand loyalty. Begin by focusing on the areas that will have the biggest impact, and make sure any changes make good business and brand sense.

• Look beyond your owned channels. Customers engage with your brand outside your ecosystem as well as within. That means you need to map and understand points of contact you might not own, such as the checkout experience at a retailer that carries your products.

• Use multiple methods of research. For instance, real-time customer journey analytics solutions can provide quantitative data indicating where website visitors are coming from and what they do while on your site; structured surveys that walk customers through their recent CX journeys help you capture critical points in their decision-making process; in-depth customer interviews provide qualitative insights that can help improve conversion rates.

• Don’t get bogged down by minutia. Rather than creating a detailed experience journey map listing every form, mailing or email you’ve ever sent your customers, focus on key touchpoints and how they can be improved.

Mapping the Customer Experience Journey with Material

Delineating the customer journey and learning how consumers feel about points of contact helps brands create more rewarding experiences and strengthen customer relationships, leading consumers to choose them over the competition and to remain loyal for longer. Conducting the necessary customer experience research and then determining how to use it, however, can be daunting. At Material, we’ve helped countless brands better understand and improve their CX journeys with actionable insights. Contact us today to see how we can do the same for your business.

FAQ

What role does data play in understanding the customer experience journey?

Data is a cornerstone of CX journey mapping. When viewed holistically, behavioral data such as the actions taken on a brand’s website or app, demographic data, sentiment data and purchase data such as the recency and frequency of repeat purchases provide a multidimensional picture of not only how different segments of consumers interact with a brand but also why they do so —or why they opt not to.

How can we use customer feedback to improve different stages of the customer experience journey?

Customer feedback gives context to customer behavior. A well-structured post-purchase survey, for instance, will show not only whether a customer is satisfied but also why or why not.  Consumer interactions with chatbots, sales professionals and service representatives can further spotlight areas of the experience in need of improvement.

How does one identify touchpoints in the customer experience journey?

A touchpoint is simply a point of contact between a consumer and a brand or organization. This encompasses the brand’s owned channels, such as websites, social media feeds and loyalty programs, along with touchpoints outside the brand’s ecosystem, including PR mentions in magazines, reviews on rating sites and product displays in third-party stores. Multichannel analytics platforms, share-of-voice tools and customer surveys and interviews are among the methods a brand can use to identify these points of contact.

How can we ensure consistency and quality across all customer touchpoints?

Defining your brand ethos internally is the first step. Only when everyone within your organization understands your brand’s mission and identity can you provide consistency throughout every aspect of the customer experience journey. Then you can create a CX journey map of every point of contact a consumer could have with your brand, from ads that create awareness to help-desk calls to post-purchase emails. Once you have this map, audit the assets and interactions to be sure that the messaging, offers and quality are consistent with the brand overall as well as with each other.

How does the customer experience journey impact customer retention and loyalty?

Especially in this era of multichannel commerce and communications, the CX journey is complex, encompassing multiple touchpoints and interactions. A failure in any one area can disappoint consumers, leading them to purchase from a brand’s competitors instead. Even customers who are pleased with their product or service can be dissatisfied with post-purchase communications — someone who made a big-ticket purchase, for instance, might be put off from returning to the brand after receiving an email that misspelled their name or a phone call from a salesperson trying to upsell them on an irrelevant product. Customer experience journey mapping can pinpoint these and other interactions that are eroding retention and loyalty.