How To Create A Data-Driven Customer Journey In 7 Steps

In today’s competitive business world, customer experience has evolved to be the most crucial differentiator of brands. And that’s what 77% of global brands believe in. 

74% of shoppers are at least interested in taking action based on good customer experience alone. That’s enough to prove why your business needs to focus on its customer journey and offer great experiences to customers. 

The baby step towards ensuring the best-in-class experiences for customers is comprehending their needs and perspective. 

Ever heard of the term ‘you don’t realize the pain until you get hurt?‘ Like the quote, you won’t realize what the customers feel while interacting and engaging with your brand until you put your brand in their shoes.  

You need to think from the customers’ perspective and ask questions like: is the buying process simple and convenient? Will the customer get fast, responsive, and seamless support? Which are the best channels or media platforms to connect with them socially? Where will they find it easy to get delivery updates? Which payment methods will be convenient for them? 

To get answers to such questions and even more, there’s one simple solution. Get started with the creation of a data-driven, insightful customer journey map. 

In this article, you’ll learn what a customer journey map is, why it is essential, the challenges of a digital storefront, and the steps to create a detailed, data-driven customer journey map. So, let’s start. 

Customer Journey Map: What Does It Mean?

Customer journey maps are depictions of the interactions that customers have with your product. It is a mapping activity for tracing a customer’s interaction with an item from beginning to end. 

These maps typically serve as a graphic illustration of the consumers’ ideas, emotions, channels, and modes of interaction with your company, as well as their reactions to various sales and marketing triggers.

Until the end of 2022, around 25% of companies believe they’ll soon integrate customer experience, sales, and marketing into a single best function.

Digital customer experiences make it easier to pinpoint consumer issues that prevent productive product engagements. Companies use this method to examine consumer interactions before, during, and after purchasing a product. The journey map for customers can completely change how firms operate.

Data-Driven Customer Journey: Why Is It So Important?

Do you know that a Salesforce survey reveals that about 66% of consumers expect brands to comprehend their needs and demands?

The actions above all require ensuring the consumer feels welcomed, respected, and connected. Showing them goods, deals, and discounts you believe they’ll be intrigued by is among the finest methods to achieve this goal.

Gathering information on their interests, purchasing patterns, and online activities is the greatest approach to personalize. This eliminates the guesswork involved in attempting to appeal to a certain consumer base segment and instead relies on hard facts to guide your advertising, selling, and even customer support decisions. B2C businesses have several options for gathering this data.

Customer journey orchestration or mapping will help your brand get the most out of its digital marketing strategy. Customer journey orchestration enables marketers to monitor customer interactions across the whole customer journey while delivering pertinent content and messages wherever those consumers may be. 

This is done by employing technologies such as data management platforms to be more data-driven. From the awareness stage to the acquisition, integration, interaction, and promotion, marketers can gain advanced analytics by utilizing a data-driven customer journey map.

Marketers can visually observe how customers interact with a business by creating these customer journey phases. This allows them to gain insight into the platforms they employ and the messages most effective at each level for engagement and conversion.

Customer Journey Mapping: Who Must Be Involved In It?

Your business must incorporate all the divisions involved in the user experience in creating a customer journey map. These divisions could comprise, for instance, customer assistance, sales, and advertising. 

These staff members will provide insightful information on both the channels they operate on and their particular domain of expertise. Customer service, for instance, can be quite active on social media, while marketing might rely heavily on email. 

On these platforms, they can share their customer service experiences and provide input on pressing problems. The customer experience approach needs to be defined globally, even while mapping is still done in silos to give pertinent, useful, and user feedback.

Collectively, these divisions can talk about how to make procedures more efficient and how to deal with customer challenges to provide a better omnichannel approach. 

The most crucial thing to remember is that your map must make it simple for anyone to understand the customer journey from beginning to end, regardless of whether it uses text boxes and charts or visual elements like infographics, symbols, or logos.

Step-By-Step Guide On How To Create Data-Driven Customer Journey Map

Step 1: Decide & Understand Your Company’s Goals & Objectives 

It’s okay to be excited about creating your customer journey map. But what good will it bring if you don’t even know what you’ll achieve using it, right? So, it’s crucial to know that first. Every brand wants to create a relevant user persona. 

However, some fail to do so. That’s because they never give enough time to understand their customer behavior better. 

So, what are you looking for? What are the challenges in your customer support service? Or the buying patterns of your target customers? 

No matter which one, you’re more likely to get overwhelmed or feel out-of-the-line as customer journey mapping becomes intense and extremely detailed over time. Give 100% to each and every task and look for the ones that influence your customer journey significantly.  

Simply answer the questions and get to know the beginning and ending points to follow during the customer journey procedure. This has helped several brands to divert and invest all their team’s focus and attention on some specific objectives or goals. After the mapping is complete, ensure to check your initial goals or objectives to see if they have been achieved or not. 

Step 2: Customer Personas Are Important! Create Them For Your Brand 

There are numerous customer personas available in every enterprise. Brands collect insights on such personals via different mediums, like social media, user analytics, customer support team inputs, questionnaires, and more. Want to know more about your customer like other brands? Start running analytics across multiple channels. 

You may wonder why you waste so much time finding user personas. The reason is simple – it defines the specific target market and helps develop better, enhanced product capabilities that fit such personas. 

Thanks to buyer or customer personas, you can easily resonate with the customer’s version of the story and deal with issues they face during the customer journey seamlessly and efficiently. 

Thus, staying prepared with your user or customer personas while mapping customer journeys is advisable. It will help you learn more precisely what customers think, imagine, feel, or do whenever they encounter a challenge or technical issue. 

The next best decision will be leveraging user analytics to determine which customers’ personas bring in the highest sales for your brand.

You may develop a brand image around this persona and pull forth the right service and company communication by targeting them. You can enhance your company architecture by including the buyer persona preferences and behaviors in your journey map for customers for targeted delivery.

Step 3: Aim For The Touchpoints & Devices 

Emphasizing what we mentioned earlier, ‘customer satisfaction depends on how well you know your customers.’ It only takes a couple of seconds for a customer to shift from one brand to another. This puts more pressure on the brand and makes it difficult for them to comprehend its target audience better. 

One of the most amazing revelations by Forbes is that about 84% of businesses that do everything possible to enhance customer experience witness a significant boost in their revenue generation. 

The more user engagement with your brand items, the better and more seamless the customer experience. Suppose you want to determine where customers go off the sales funnel. 

In that case, you’ll have to use some valuable sources such as behavior analytics, crash analytics, product heatmaps, device analytics, and Google analytics.

All you have to do now is list these insights on touchpoints and devices on your customer journey map. Once done, you can easily plan and strategize on boosting the points of interactivity and engagement via a website, ad channels, social media platforms, or email campaigns. 

One good example is the configuration of the chat option on your application interface and product page to make it easier for users to address their concerns. 

The more successful the user interaction, the stronger the customer’s trust in your brand, which ultimately turns them into indirect promoters of your business. 

Step 4: Understanding Your Customers’ Pain Points Is a Crucial Part of The Customer Journey 

Now that you know your brand’s touchpoints get into the world of data. Use data insights to find out how the touchpoints are being utilized and how well your customers think of them. You can take help from customer feedback like testimonials, reviews, and surveys to collect data (qualitative data, to be precise). What’s the use of collecting such data? Check this:

Customer feedback is much-needed for your business. For instance, it will help you know that your customer service representatives are not-so-friendly or rude with your customers, deliveries are mostly delayed, some products are always out of stock, and more. 

Quantitative information, like KPIs for tech support, may show how effectively agents communicate with customers and how it impacts the user experience. The degrees of total satisfaction among customers and the potential for future devotion is shown by Net Promoter and CSAT Score. In contrast, CES indicates whether your journeys are too labor-intensive and time- and effort-intensive. 

For instance, high call frequencies may signal sluggish operation on digital platforms, causing customers to contact your business frequently to address problems. Assess the customer journey personally and note any potential pain points along the way to gain a deeper understanding of it. 

Be sure you follow these steps for every buyer persona. For instance, you might discover that clients have not received order confirmations after completing purchases on the company’s website.

A customer service rep might request you to sit in line before connecting you to some other representative if you wish to move from social media to the phone while speaking with them. You can determine which components of the customer journey are prompting customers to be satisfied or frustrated by undertaking the customer journey.

Step 5: Additional Resources & Tools Would Be Necessary. Decide Which Ones You Need

Your organization may require additional resources, so identifying client pain areas can be helpful. You can discover, for instance, that clients regurgitate details far too frequently. Perhaps it’s time for your organization to leverage the power of a CRM tool that is linked to your help desk software if you don’t already. 

A solution like this may give representatives a complete picture of a user’s profile and past encounters with your business and ensure they have all the knowledge they require when speaking with customers. You could also observe that some channels require more assistance and staffing. 

Additionally, you could discover that certain technological procedures—like the delayed Text or email delivery of order updates—are not operating as intended.

Step 6: Map Out The Customer’s Journey 

The customer/buyer’s journey comes in multiple stages to offer more personalized and better experiences to the customers. Awareness, consideration, and decision have always been the three main stages of any buyer’s journey. 

Let’s start off with the awareness stage. Here, the buyers will be capable of identifying and addressing the issues they’re facing. 

Ask these questions: How does the buyer perceive such issues or challenges? Is resolving these challenges the first thing that buyers want to do? Does keeping these challenges unresolved have any consequences?

Buyers are constantly pursuing solutions to their problems during the consideration phase. Think about these issues: What choices does the buyer have? How will people look for details about these choices? How will they balance the benefits and drawbacks of the choices at hand?

The decision stage is when customers have chosen a course of action and are just looking for the best service or product, preferably your brand! 

Think about these issues: What parties are involved in this judgment? How will the customer compare the benefits and drawbacks of your brand to those of your rivals? What standards does the purchaser use to evaluate the suitability of a good or service?

Step 7: Map Revision Is The Last Thing To Be Done! 

Once your customer journey map is ready, request your prof groups to propose any necessary changes. Remember that customer path maps and consumer trends are always changing. 

As a result, your organization needs to review its maps to ensure continued advancement periodically. That’s why it’s crucial to build your user information and voice-of-customer polls on your understanding of the customer journey. It enables you to picture your brand in their situation. 

With the knowledge you’ve gained from your map, your business can also choose which modifications need to be done. You might discover, for instance, that customers have to undertake smoother transitions when on their journey. They might exert excessive effort and require a more seamless strategy to accomplish their objectives. 

You can also conclude that you must provide them with greater information by answering their commonly asked queries, improving the specifications of your goods and services, and reaching out to them through their channel of choice.

Conclusion: The Road Not Taken!

If implemented effectively, a customer journey map can have a favorable impact on the user experience, which helps loyalty and profitability metrics. Although it isn’t a miracle fix for all of your user/customer experience issues in one go, it does help to increase value for them. 

As it works with the behavior patterns of numerous demographics, the technique itself is increasingly challenging and demands discipline. It’s possible that your website’s user interface may not operate linearly as you would like. Making people go from one place to another without skipping a stride is difficult, irrespective of how much you try.

As a result, you should invest more time learning about your customers’ objectives and how they navigate your site because doing so will help you keep them satisfied. It will help your company expand and scale at a faster pace. So, in the interim, learn new things!