Last updated - November 23, 2023
When a customer visits your eCommerce store, it’s probably not their first contact with your company, and when they make a purchase, it’s not the end of their journey. Along the journey, they’ll encounter several touchpoints.
Tracking your customer’s journey isn’t only retrospective; you can proactively map their journey to better understand your customer’s experience with your brand and create a smooth and seamless transition from one stage of the journey to the next.
What is Customer Journey Mapping?
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the process customers go through from the moment they become aware of your company to becoming a customer.
Creating a customer journey map can help you understand your customers’ experience before, during, and after buying your product or service and highlight where friction interferes with their experience.
Why Customer Journey Mapping Matters
Customer experience statistics show that:
- 96% of customers say customer service plays a big role in their loyalty to a brand.
- Companies with superior customer journey experience generate approximately 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience.
A customer journey map helps you gain insight into your customers so you can see where your customer service excels and where customer service challenges exist. Based on this, you can adjust your customer experience strategy to help boost customer retention rates and grow your revenue.
Is the Customer Journey the Same as the Buyer Journey?
These two marketing processes form a part of the customer experience, so it’s understandable that some people mistakenly use them interchangeably. However, there is a difference.
The buyer journey is the path a person follows from the time they are aware of a need or pain point to the time they make a purchase that solves their problem.
The customer journey starts with prospecting and flows through to post-purchase support and continued nurturing of the relationship with the customer. It includes the stages of the buyer’s journey.
As an eCommerce business, you should track your customers’ entire journey with your company and not just their buying journey.
The Different Stages of Customer Journey Mapping
In the “awareness phase”, your potential customer becomes aware of your company, product, or service. They may see an online ad, a social media post, or read about your company or product in a news article.
In the “consideration phase”, the customer researches various solutions and weighs your product against competitor products. They may compare product specifications or prices and check customer reviews.
In the “purchase phase”, the customer has all the information they need to proceed with the purchase. This is an important stage because should there be any friction, like an onerous buying process or a transactional glitch, they may revert to the consideration phase to pick another brand.
In the “retention phase”, you do what you can to keep the customer and encourage them to buy again. This can include requesting feedback on their shopping experience, sending promotional newsletters, and providing excellent after-sales support.
In the “advocacy phase”, you’ve gained a loyal customer who will voluntarily promote your brand to others. They may post glowing reviews and testimonials or recommend your brand on social media.
Getting the customer to stage five requires a clear plan that maps out exactly who your ideal customers are and how to make their journey with your company enjoyable so they’d want to return.
The Four Types of Customer Journey Mapping
Every customer is an individual with a unique set of circumstances and pain points. Well-crafted customer journey maps help you understand your customer personas, buying behavior, motivating factors, expectations, and brand engagement.
It also helps you identify internal inefficiencies that could be addressed through marketing automation tools.
Generally, there are four common types of customer journey maps:
- Current state map
- Day-in-the-life map
- Future state map
- Service blueprint
Let’s unpack what these maps involve and how they can benefit your eCommerce business.
1. Current State Map
This map presents the existing experience customers have with your brand and how they feel about each touchpoint. Current state maps are a good way to peel away all the layers of the customer experience to uncover what works and what frustrates the customer.
You may discover that customers find it hard to navigate your website, resulting in high bounce rates. You can take steps to improve your site’s user interface so it’s easy for customers to find the information or products they are looking for quickly.
2. Day-in-the-life Map
A day-in-the-life map describes what happens in a customer’s life as they go through their day. Here’s where buyer personas are helpful.
Let’s say you sell precooked meals delivered to the door. If you’re targeting working parents, you can create a detailed persona of this customer, including where their pain points are. For example, they may have little time to cook healthy family dinners.
Your journey map could detail what this customer is likely to be doing at different hours of the day. You may conclude that the best time of day to place a radio or podcast ad is late afternoon when they are driving home from work and listening to their favorite radio or podcast show.
On the other hand, if they worked from home, their day may progress very differently, and you’d take a different marketing approach.
3. Future State Map
A future state customer journey map envisions what the ideal consumer journey will look like. Your current state map will influence your future state map to address existing inefficiencies.
In your future state map, you can be creative and visualize new and innovative ways to enhance the customer experience.
Suppose you’re a real estate company. You could add a touchpoint that features virtual or augmented reality where the customer can take a digital tour of a property and add furniture or change wall colors to see what a room would look with those updates.
4. Service Blueprint Map
The first three customer journey maps focus on the customer experience. This all comes together in the service blueprint map, which is designed to address the shortcomings in your service delivery and various touchpoints.
So, if your customers are experiencing poor customer support, your new service blueprint map may include continuous monitoring of customer service agents’ performance or improving help desk processes.
Here’s an example of a comprehensive customer journey map for an online grocery store.
How to Create Customer Journey Maps
Follow these five steps to creating customer journey maps:
1. Establish your objectives. What do you want to achieve from customer journey mapping?
2. Create customer personas so you are clear about who you serve.
3. Identify your touchpoints from a customer’s initial awareness of your brand to becoming a customer.
4. Perform an audit of your processes and technology. Is your technology negatively impacting your customer experience? Automating many of the processes of your customer journey can lead to greater customer satisfaction.
5 Choose the right customer journey tools. Spare yourself the pain of trying to create customer journey maps on spreadsheets. There are plenty of great software apps that make it easy. Here are a few to consider:
Zendesk. A full-service CRM software with free downloadable customer journey map templates.
Smaply. An easy-to-use tool to create visual presentations of customer journeys and buyer personas.
SuiteCX. A robust customer journey mapping tool that features persona development, strategic scenario planning, integrated survey data, and UI design.
Autonom8. A workflow automation platform that helps you design end-to-end automated processes across all your customer journeys.
Conclusion
Customer journey mapping plays a big role in shaping the customer experience. The smoother your customer experience journey is, the greater the chance customers will do repeat business with you.
It all starts with understanding where you’re excelling and where you’re falling short. Customer journey maps help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and create a plan to address them.
