What is a Customer Journey Map and Why is It Important?

It’s easy to get so wrapped up in your day-to-day that you forget about the people on the other end of your product. It’s easy to take things for granted, especially when it comes to something like making coffee. You know where everything is, how to work it, and what buttons to push when there’s a problem. But, how often do you really think about the user journey?

But customer journey mapping isn’t just for coffee makers—it’s for everything. The customer journey matters. And it’s your role as a business to take your customers from A to Z.

Let’s dive into some of the basics of customer journey mapping and how you can use it to get valuable customer insights.

What Is Customer Journey Mapping?

Customer journey mapping is the process of understanding customer journeys through your product or service. It’s a way to better understand customer needs, emotions, and behaviors at specific points during the customer journey.

Customer journey mapping is similar to customer experience mapping in that it’s all about understanding how customers interact with your brand throughout their customer journey. You’ll thus want to start by identifying customer touchpoints, the customer-facing interactions you have with your brand. These can be anything from customer service phone calls to customer support chats on social media to partners who partners sell your products.

What’s the Point?

Customer journey mapping is all about improving the customer experience. The more positive customer experiences people have, the more likely they are to become repeat customers and evangelists for your brand.

Customer journey mapping is about better understanding customer needs, wants, and behaviors so that you can more effectively meet those needs. It’s about figuring out customer pain points and customer satisfaction—what do they think of your customer service? How are they feeling when they’re trying to navigate the customer support website?

Customer satisfaction is the customer’s satisfaction with your brand at a particular customer touchpoint. High customer satisfaction means that customers think you’ve done a great job and they’re happy to continue doing business with you. High customer satisfaction can be correlated with customer loyalty and customer advocacy. Customer experience mapping will help you understand how people feel about your customer service, customer support, or whatever customer touchpoint you’re tracking.

The best thing? You get to experience the customer journeys through the customer’s eyes. Sometimes, we can get too close to our own business to think about the customer experience.

When you understand customer needs and customer behaviors, you can better identify changes that need to be made to improve customer satisfaction and overall customer experience. You can use customer journey mapping tools for this kind of research.

Tools for Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping can be done with customer experience mapping tools that come built into some customer relationship management (CRM) systems, but there are also free customer journey mapping tools created specifically to help you better understand customer touchpoints.

Try Hubspot’s How to Create an Effective Customer Journey Map.

Know the Customer Journey When You Talk to Customers

Customer journey mapping can be a useful tool for customer experience research, whether you’re doing customer experience management or customer journey research. If you’ve never done any customer experience research before, customer journey mapping will help you understand what people are thinking about at different points in the customer journey.

Now that you know what customer journey is and why it’s important, you’re ready to get started mapping. Need help with creating your customer journey map? Try a customer journey workshop.

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