by Arleen Atienza
Customer journey mapping (also known as buyer or user journey mapping) provides a visualization of the stages that customers go through when they interact with your company. It may include several branches that depict the different paths the buyer will take throughout the interaction. This visual representation enables you to get a better understanding of consumer experience, identify flaws in your customer service, determine opportunities for improvement, and even help you in workforce development.
However, you can run into some mistakes when you first start creating a customer journey map. These problems will impact the outcome of undertaking this task, which can lead to trouble in improving the customer experience and even affect your branding. The first step to avoiding these blunders is knowing them. This article will discuss the five common mistakes when creating a customer journey map and how you can prevent them from arising.
Absence of Credible or Complete Research
Conclusive research is the foundation for every successful project, including customer journey maps. However, unseasoned mappers are likely to believe that they already know their customers inside out and will skip this part altogether.
That’s the first mistake you can make. Using non-existent or incomplete research means the outcome of your customer journey map will be based on assumptions and unreliable data. This fickle basis then leads to failure of reflecting the actual journey of your customers.
This blunder also affects customer experience when you implement the results of your mapping. You could make things worse at points where the experience was initially fine, or fail to improve areas that needed crucial development.
What you should do: Conduct your research first before creating a customer journey map. Ensure that this study is complete and provides solid data that you can work with.
Conducting interviews, requesting customer reviews from different platforms, reading industry-related research, and running surveys are some of the research methods you can undertake to gather reliable data.
Weak Goals and Customer Personas
Failing to establish a concrete set of goals is another mistake you can make when creating a customer journey map. An inexperienced mapper will only take on this project for the sake of it, which could result in a failed or weak outcome that may not even be usable.
A poorly developed customer persona is another common mistake for journey mappers. This composite representation is crucial in user journey mapping because it can help you predict consumer behaviors, reactions, motivations, objectives, and even feelings.
Without a well-established goal and buyer persona, you risk failing to connect with customers and fall short of defining actionable insights that could otherwise help you improve their experiences.
What you should do: A successful customer journey map starts with identifying your goals. What do you want to accomplish with this? Who is your target audience? What experiences do you want to highlight? These are the type of questions to ask yourself to determine the objective for customer journey mapping.
You can create your customer persona based on the answers to these questions. The information you get from these queries should be added to the other basis of developing a buyer persona (e.g. demographic data, career information, habits, purchasing behavior, etc).
Limited Touchpoints
Touchpoints are defined as places of contact or when interactions between customers and your company occur. Since customers interact with your company at various stages, there will be different touchpoints across the customer journey map.
On average, consumers will make seven interactions with your company before they make a purchase. Considering there are a lot of points, you might be tempted to cut that number down and focus on places you believe have the most influence on the experience.
This is a mistake and doing so can affect how you understand your customers’ journey and improve the consumer experience later on.
What you should do: Consider all touchpoints and make sure to include them in your customer journey map. Start by listing off all points of interaction and categorize them whether they are made before, during, or after availing your product or service.
Taking all your touchpoints into account allows you to enhance customer satisfaction at every contact and build brand loyalty.
Mapping From the Wrong Perspective
Another major blunder common in customer journey mapping is creating from the wrong perspective. The journey map should reflect the experiences of the customer, given its name, but some mappers make the error of creating it from the viewpoint of the company.
Mapping from the company’s perspective disregards the experience and feelings of customers since it will only include the formal process.
Doing so yields results that do not recognize the needs and wants of your customers — and you cannot improve the service experience for the clients unless you are aware of their demands and preferences.
What you should do: A customer journey map should be developed around the consumers’ experiences, thoughts, expectations, and goals. So, creating an effective map means you have to put yourself in their shoes and think like a customer.
Mapping from their point of view also means starting the map even before the customers interact with your business. This allows you to discover and use numerous chances to enhance the customer experience even before the client engages with your products or services.
Slow Follow-up Actions
It will feel incredibly satisfying finishing your customer journey map, but the work doesn’t stop there. Your company should act upon the results of your journey map to improve customer experience.
However, many organizations fall short of this step. That’s because any business changes go through lengthy and laborious approval processes before they can be implemented. This tedious procedure can slow down or even derail a good effort, thereby preventing the company from making valuable changes.
What you should do: After completing and analyzing your customer journey map, make a list of initiatives to launch based on the results. Take action and implement changes as soon as possible to reap the full benefits of your efforts.
Conclusion
A customer journey map is vital in helping you better understand your clients and improve your business at every point of interaction. However, you will face many challenges as you create a buyer journey map that could throw this initiative off track.
But by knowing these mistakes, such as the ones listed above, you can avoid or immediately rectify them when they come up. Doing so will enable you to succeed in gathering results to help you implement customer-focused changes and enhance the overall experience for consumers and your business.
