What is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map illustrates the touchpoints from start to end of your customer’s buying journey. This could be simply buying a product online or speaking directly to a Customer Service team member on the phone.

There are various pathways a client might take, whether they are wholly online, somewhat offline, or both. So, because your customer journey may not always take the same shape, you need to be able to identify the different ways in which customers source and buy your products so you can deliver a personalised experience.

B2B customer journeys tend to be more complex than B2C due to longer sales cycles and more stakeholders involved in the decision-making process. This means that understanding the journey your customers take is crucial to delivering the best experience.

A thorough understanding of the customer journey enables you to pinpoint consumer pain points, take appropriate action, and replicate successful strategies. By doing this, you’ll enhance your clients' entire experience, which will benefit your company’s performance.

In fact, a study by McKinsey outlines that maximising satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20%, but also lift revenue up by 15% and lower the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%.

Benefits of customer journey mapping

Some benefits include:

• Understand your customers: see your customer journey from a different perspective and adapt your processes to suit their needs.
• Identify pain points: mapping out your customer journey helps you identify pain points that are imperceivable otherwise.
• Use patterns to predict outcomes: when you’re familiar with your customer’s journey, and the typical outcome, you can predict the likelihood of customer conversion and anticipate customer churn.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

1. Build a buyer persona

Before attempting to create your map, create buyer persona profiles for each core customer you expect to purchase from you, to ensure your journey map addresses their requirements. 

It’s very likely that your organisation serves more than one customer segment. Additionally, it’s likely that distinct segments will have customer journey maps that are either significantly different or entirely different.

Here’s an example of a buyer persona:

2. Identify your touchpoints

Note down all the points throughout your customer journey where a customer will interact with your business. 

Examples of this include:

• Product demonstrations
• Sending out a product sample
• Liaising with Sales Reps
• Requesting a quote 
• Browsing your company website

3. Evaluate your pain points

Evaluate your processes - is there a certain point in the sales pipeline that leads are typically lost? Identifying your weaknesses helps you build out the ideal customer journey that will eliminate these pain points. 

For example, if you have low click-through rates in your marketing campaigns, it might be the case that you’re targeting the wrong leads and need to adapt your customer journey to cater to your ideal customers.

4. Utilise your reporting tools & analytics

Using a reporting tool, such as CRM reporting, you can analyse common buying patterns along your customer journey. Using data-driven insights, evaluate which sales channels are succeeding and which are making you lose customers.

5. Gather & listen to customer feedback

Asking your customers for feedback after a sale is one of the most effective ways to build and improve your customer journey map. Through the distribution of surveys or simply just reaching out to regular customers, you can gain a holistic understanding of your customers’ buying journey. 

Now that your map is complete, it’s time to start putting a strategy together that will improve the experience you deliver to customers. Whether this is optimising your quote-to-order workflow, revising your sales pipeline, or implementing a CRM system, there are a number of ways to optimise your customer journey.

To confirm that the buyer personas, touchpoints, and audience demands are still accurate, it’s important to reassess each stage in your map every few months, and update as necessary. You can also use metrics and KPIs for each stage’s primary touchpoints to see if they’re performing as anticipated or if they require further development.

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