What is the Customer Journey, and Why Is It Important for Your Company?

Customer journey is a marketing concept used to understand customers better, allowing the company to utilise the resulting map to improve its services and product development. The customer journey map helps the company decipher customers' needs, concerns, and emotions when interacting with the brand. The information can be used during the planning and developmental stage of products and services, and at the same time, help improve the customer experience—which leads to higher conversions and improved customer retention.

What is a customer journey?

Customer journey is a way of thinking about the customers’ experiences during the process of recognising or interacting with the company's products and services, and then purchasing them; this can be described as a "journey". The customer journey highlights what the customer experiences at each point of their connection with the brand. The company can formulate better marketing decisions by understanding the customer's emotions, behaviours and thoughts from service/product recognition to purchase.

The "Customer Journey Map" is a diagram that visualises the thoughts and behaviours of customers in chronological order. The map gives the organisation a bird's eye view of the customer, so they can see and understand the customer's emotions, needs, and perceptions when interacting with their brand.

The following is a Customer Journey Map of a fashion brand that develops physical stores and e-commerce websites.

Importance of the customer journey

By drawing a customer journey map, the company can visualise the behavioural and thought processes that lead customers to purchase their product or services. It is a strategic approach to understanding the customers' expectations at each point of contact with the company. The map enables businesses to remove obstacles, if any, and make the purchasing experience seamless and efficient.

Before the advent of social media and the Internet, customers had limited options for interacting with businesses—such as TV, newspapers, magazines, and physical stores. Nowadays, with the development of e-commerce sites and social media, customers can interact with businesses even when they are offline. Customers now use messaging apps, email, phone calls, WhatsApp, social media, and various other channels to communicate with the business. All these points of contact are called touchpoints.

With each touchpoint, the customer journey becomes more complex; by setting up a customer journey map, businesses can identify the various touchpoints. Each touchpoint helps companies to determine what the customers may be looking for and needing at different times.

Benefits of using the Customer Journey Map

The benefits of using a customer journey map are as follows:

• Businesses can improve their services from the customers’ point of view.
• Understand the touchpoints that need to be strengthened and optimised.
• Unify the perceptions of all teams and develop measures accordingly.
   

Businesses can improve their service from their customers’ perspective

A company can only succeed if it meets the needs and demands of its customer base. The customer's perspective is vital in improving customer service. By creating a customer journey map, you can incorporate the customers' perspective into improving your products and services.

In the customer journey map, you can imagine the behaviour and emotions of the customer at each touchpoint and visualise it in a diagram. When the company can see things from the customers' perspective and understand their worries and concerns at each touchpoint, it can implement measures and improve its services accordingly.

Understanding the important touchpoints

With the help of the customer journey map, the company can see all the touchpoints and decide on their priority.

As the number of touchpoints, both online and offline, increases, an ideal approach would be to improve each touchpoint. However, this will incur high costs. Therefore, it is more efficient and appropriate to prioritise and strengthen the areas that significantly impact your sales and service purchases.

Seamless development of measures

The company can make consistent improvements by visually capturing and sharing customer concerns and emotions on the customer journey map. Communication from all departments is necessary to improve service and product development. The best way to map a customer's journey is to get the perspective of the different teams involved, such as the telephone representatives, customer services, shipping, management sales representatives and marketing teams.

By incorporating each team's interactive experience with the customers, the diverse insights and collaboration from all departments will allow for a holistic overview of the customer's experience, which allows a complete customer journey to be mapped. Appropriate measures can then be taken to solve any issues, creating a smoother and more streamlined interaction with your brand.

Summary

In order to improve your business, it is crucial to understand your customers’ behaviour patterns and interactions with your brand. This allows for a smoother journey for the customer, and the higher chance to convert the journey into a sale. By making a customer journey map part of your marketing strategy, businesses can look forward to a better and more detailed understanding of their customer base.