Journey Mapping

October 15, 2022

3 min read

(Coming soon)

B2B SaaS Product Marketer & Operating Partner

Definition

Journey Mapping is the practice of visualizing the intent, expectations, steps, actions, and emotions a customer goes through as they engage with a brand to accomplish a defined goal.

Want to know more? Keep reading.

Benefits of Journey Mapping

Journey Mapping is a valuable tool for any business or brand that wants to improve its customer experiences. According to the Aberdeen Group, examining how the customer experience affects the business, they see an average increase of 24.9% of incremental revenue attributed to marketing campaigns, a 21% decrease in service cost, and a 16% reduction in the sales cycle when customer-centric experiences are in place. Understanding a customer journey throughout the entire company can be more than a simple way of generating new revenue for the company. It helps you retain loyal customers and keep them happy.

Benefits of Journey Mapping

By mapping out your customers' journeys, you can gain valuable insights into their needs and expectations. I see at least three benefits to Journey Mapping:

1. See the experience from the customer's perspective

One of the most important is that Journey Mapping allows businesses to visualize the experience through their customer's lenses. This can help businesses identify pain points or areas where the customer's experience could or should be improved.

2. Capture customer emotions

Journey Mapping can help businesses understand what emotions the customer experiences throughout their journey and what factors influence those emotions. Getting customer sentiment and feedback can create a more customer-centric approach to business operations, which, in return, can lead to increased sales and customer loyalty.

3. Bring internal CX alignment

Journey Mapping brings internal alignment to CX teams and the entire organization. By creating a shared understanding of customer needs and experiences, everyone can work together to improve the customer experience. Additionally, Journey Mapping can help identify areas where different teams may need to collaborate to provide a better experience for customers.

Core functionalities when selecting a Journey Mapping technology

To help inform your decision in looking for the right Journey Mapping technology that best suits your business goals, I suggest you look for the following three critical capabilities as a base for your technology selection:

1. Journey visualization

Journey visualization provides a canvas and a set of features to help you map out every step that makes up a customer's journey. There are a few key things to look for in a technology tool. The first is templates. A good Journey Mapping tool will offer customer journey map templates and a library of customer journey mapping examples that make creating a storyboard of your journey easy. The second is storyboarding. Being able to see your journey as a story can help you identify pain points and areas for improvement. The third is capturing essential content. Your journey map should include target personas, their emotions, and the various touchpoints they go through to fulfill a specific need.

2. Journey planning and design

When creating a customer journey map, it is important to consider all aspects of the undertaking. This includes thinking about the customer persona who will take the journey, what they hope to achieve, and what resources are available to them to get there. It is also important to establish clear goals and objectives for your journeys and to look for features to help you develop a plan allowing flexibility and adjustment. The inclusion of collaboration features is key during the journey design process. Bringing together individuals with different skills and knowledge can help ensure that all potential obstacles are considered and addressed.

3. Journey testing and optimization

Testing and optimization are essential to ensuring your current and future customer journey maps are effective. One of the most important features to look for is to accurately measure your journey results. Look for features that allow you to collect your results and how they compare to the business goals and target persona you set. Another feature to help you test and optimize your customer journeys is the ability to survey customers to validate your business hypotheses. This can help you determine whether or not the changes you make impact customer interactions and actions. Finally, look for features to complement your Journey Mapping technology with Customer Analytics and Journey Orchestration technologies if these are not included. Adding fresh customer data as a feedback loop will allow you to proactively discover new journeys, have a deeper understanding of your customer expectations, accurately predict customer outcomes, test new hypotheses, and open up new customer engagement avenues.