Table of Content

1.     What is a customer journey map? 

2.     Why is customer journey mapping important?

3.     How does customer journey mapping enable omnichannel marketing and customer service?

4.     Conclusion

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is redefining customer expectations every day, and today the average consumer uses 10 channels to communicate with businesses. All of these touchpoints make the customer journey more and more complex, making it difficult to consistently deliver a great customer experience. But customer experience is more important than ever, according to a recent study by Salesforce:

• Now 80% of his customers believe that the company experience is as important as the product.
• 69% of consumers want to talk to businesses in real-time

Customer expectations are definitely undergoing a major shift. Here's the problem: How can brands meet these expectations and keep every customer on their journey smooth?

A great way to understand and optimize the customer experience is through a process called customer journey mapping.

What is a customer journey map?

The customer journey is an important concept for marketers and business owners. It is a model that attempts to show the interactions, decisions, and impressions a consumer has during the time they are in your sphere of influence.

The idea of the customer journey model was first introduced by Gerry McGovern who coined it “the four moments of truth”. He then went on to create what he called “the five stages of the customer journey” which involve research, analytics, targeting touchpoints and devices, monitoring feedback, and a dashboard.

A Customer Journey Map is a representation of the path a customer takes, from awareness to purchase. It helps all company members, from sales and marketing to customer service, understand how their work affects customers during that journey.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

A customer journey map is an interactive, graphical representation of the various steps one takes when interacting with a company. These maps aim to help marketing professionals understand how customers experience their brand.

•  it helps marketers understand their customers better by analyzing their emotional and rational decision-making processes;
•  it makes things easier for customers by anticipating potential pitfalls and proactively providing them with the information they need;
•  it improves the quality of conversations with prospects and customers; 
• it builds confidence among your team that they are working in unison toward shared goals;
• It gives insights into how to optimize audiences and improve customer retention rates;
• It helps marketers ensure that all aspects of their customer experience are considered.

The customer experience begins before the product or service even launches with research. Marketer needs to understand who their audience is and what their needs are in order to create something that will resonate with them. This stage also includes understanding what companies are doing in their industry to understand how their product compares against the competition.

Analyzing data can be one of the most powerful tools for understanding what's going on with your customers during this stage. A business should have clear metrics that they use to track success during this time period because it helps them identify problems and plan for future events such as marketing changes or releases of new products or services.

How does customer journey mapping enable omnichannel marketing and customer service?

Today's consumers demand highly personalized experiences, including marketing and customer service efforts. This connected approach is known as omnichannel marketing and omnichannel customer service.

When it comes to marketing, marketers can target prospects at multiple touchpoints, so customer journey mapping plays an important role in this process. For example, customers browsing products on your website may later be retargeted with social media ads. To provide the best possible customer experience, omnichannel marketing is often backed by omnichannel customer service. Here, customers can get customer support through all channels such as social media, messenger apps, or live chat. In that situation, customer journey mapping helps customer service teams better understand the customer experience and improve their ability to resolve issues.

Conclusion

Mapping different customer journeys across many different buyer personas can be very time-consuming. After mapping them, you still need a way to deliver personalized omnichannel customer experiences based on that map. So if you're serious about customer journey mapping, you need to invest in software/platform that can do the job.  You can easily create custom customer journeys and automate marketing actions with the analytics tool. This takes your marketing automation efforts to the next level.

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