A Customer Journey Map, or interaction with a product and brand, is an important tool for visualizing customer motivation. Any business wants its product or service to solve a customer's problem, but there is not always an understanding of the essence of the problem.
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| 6 steps to create a customer journey map when interacting with a product and brand |
First, clients themselves often do not understand what exactly is their problem. Second, their decision-making process is complex, as it is often based on emotions rather than facts. Thirdly, most often a business does not keep under constant control all how customers interact with it.
It is the map of user interaction with the product and brand that can give very valuable information to your business to improve business processes that you can keep under control. It can also help you understand customer problems as opposed to just interacting with them. The map is a true reference book that contains customer descriptions that anyone in your company can read.
Given all the advantages of a customer journey map, the logical question is how difficult it is to create one. There are several approaches to working on a map, the choice of which depends on the needs of the business, its goals, and its target audience. Next, we will cover all the main aspects of working on a user interaction map with a product and a brand for your own business.
Key Elements of a Customer Journey Map
Before we start working directly on the map, it is important to understand several key terms and concepts.
A customer journey map is a timeline that shows the actions a business customer takes to find a solution to a problem. It does not pay much attention to the interaction with your business and the emotions from this process throughout the search for a solution to the problem.
Client activities include thinking about a problem, doing research, and testing products. For you and your competitors, these are very important things, because they are the ones that stand in the way of the target action: buying, subscribing, or reading any content. A user interaction map with a product and a brand is essentially a diagram that links customer actions to the desired outcome.
The customer journey (sometimes referred to as the sales funnel or customer lifecycle) is itself a sequence of specific stages that a customer goes through during their interaction with your business. How exactly this sequence looks depends on you and your wishes: for example, you can make the map more or less detailed, etc. Usually, the map has three key stages:
- Awareness stage. The client realizes that he has a problem.
- Consideration stage. The client is looking for a solution.
- Decision-making stage. The client chooses one of all possible options and stops at it.
Since your target audience is a collection of different people, marketers often use the collective image of your customer - a fictional "avatar" of the buyer to refer to a group of target customers with similar needs. Both the client avatar and the map itself as a whole act as a tool for visualizing the available data.
The customer persona gives you a hypothetical character to work with statistics on your target audience, and the customer journey map places that character in a “story” in which we imagine their daily life and interactions with other “players”.
A customer journey map defines touchpoints with your brand. They may be direct or indirect. So, for example, direct interaction is usually under brand control. This could be an advertising campaign controlled by your employees or intermediaries. Indirect interaction takes place without your control and usually looks like, for example, a review of your company on a third-party site or “word of mouth” when one of your clients recommends your company to your potential buyer.
Touchpoints vary widely in their importance to you and your prospect, but each touchpoint, significant or not, contributes to the customer's opinion of your brand.
Sometimes touchpoints can become points that show customer pain, i.e. obstacles to making a purchase. Pains can include everything from too high a price for your product or service to a website that is too slow and confusing company policies. Customer pains can also refer to the problems that they have when interacting with your competitors, and studying them will help you improve your service or product.
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| 6 steps to create a customer journey map when interacting with a product and brand |
Algorithm for creating a customer journey map
Let's see how to create a user interaction map with a product and a brand in just 6 steps.
1. Decide on the purpose of creating a CMJ card
There are no hard and fast rules about how a map should look. It all depends on what information you want to focus on and why. Therefore, it is important to start by setting goals on the map of user interaction with the product and brand.
In general, the purpose of the card in the broadest sense is to explain to the employees of your company the behavior and motives of customers. In a more specific sense, the purpose of the card is for the client to take the actions you want. Let's give some examples.
For example, it can be an increase in the conversion to a sale, i.e., the conversion of potential customers into real ones. It can also be an improvement in the quality of customer service: for example, work on a script. It can also be customer adaptation to change, such as when you are introducing new products or testing a new business model.
Sometimes it makes sense to map the customer journey when developing a company's positioning. This can be an additional tool when creating a brand platform.
In life, problem-solving is sometimes not entirely transparent. It's different with a card: it should serve as a solution to a specific, measurable problem that you notice, whether it's a high number of shopping cart abandonments on a shopping site or an increase in customer support calls.
Note that the cards help to understand what you are doing right and what is not. This is especially true when, for example, you're comparing the sales performance of two products and can't figure out why one sells better than the other. User interaction maps with the product and brand are designed to explain the motives of customers to purchase and make a more effective product that will help to replicate success in other products or business processes.
2. Focus on a specific customer segment
Once you decide on the purpose of the map, move on to choosing the segment or type of customer you want to focus on. The target action (for example, a purchase) for all categories of customers may be the same, but the ways to achieve this goal will vary depending on the motivation of different customers. Taking this into account, you need to make a map that focuses on one, not several customer paths and fully visualize it.
A user interaction map with a product and a brand is a story where narrative consistency is key. This means that you need to avoid a lot of branching of this story and motives that lead the client to the wrong place: all this creates confusion. Instead, you can create several separate cards for each audience segment.
Creating the specifics of each audience is where the personalities show up. These are the main characters of the story, who have a name, a way of life, and other characteristics. Of course, all this needs to be supported by market research.
Deciding which audience segment to start with involves connecting the purpose of the map with the pains of the audience segment. We will consider this point in more detail in the next section.
3. Find out the pains of the audience
Maps are built on interactions between customers and something or someone. Therefore, you need to start developing the customer journey with a specific problem that he encounters. At first, he may not even know that the situation he is facing is problematic and related to your business, product, or service.
Let's take an example. Your potential client has started to pay more attention to how much he spends per month and decided that it's time to cut expenses: for example, on food or a car.
As with most map-building factors, the more realistic the problems, the better. What's more, in addition to identifying the things your customers don't like about your competitors, you need to figure out what they like about them.
To find out, you need to interview real customers who will describe in detail how they came to your services or products. Here are some standard survey methods:
- survey of several segments of the target audience;
- analysis of the records of calls received by the customer support service/sales department;
- analysis of the behavioral factors of your website;
- survey via pop-ups, email, or SMS.
In addition to such general feedback, you need to take into account specific pains at all stages of passing the customer interaction map with you, especially when requesting feedback. This will help you track the emotions of the client. So, for example, they will be completely different in the following two situations: visiting your site by a new potential client and receiving a refund from your existing client.
Once you have a good understanding of customer pains, you can focus on what exactly you can do to solve the problems of the audience. For example, you can think about what can be done if the client's budget is limited or he is not able to come to you in person.
4. Write down all customer interaction points with your business
As your potential client looks for solutions to their problems, they will begin to intersect with your business. They may see an ad or see a review of one of your products or services on your website that suggests a solution to their problem. All such points of interaction between the client and your company must be written out.
At this point, organizing your touchpoints should be as simple as making a detailed list with all the information you need. However, you should not evaluate how well your business interacts with customers at one point or another: neutrally approach the process. Any touchpoint is an opportunity, no matter how well your business uses it today.
Touchpoints become delimiters of the customer's journey, breaking it down into stages based on their needs.
For example, when a client is under consideration, they are looking for a lot of information to compare and contrast different solutions to a problem. Here, the point of interaction can be an explanatory video from your company or a blog article. Touchpoints can be related to customer pains: for example, a person on a budget might stumble upon your promo code that gives them a discount on your product or service.
There are touchpoints to consider after a customer has completed their journey to your product or service. And this must be done regardless of how successful his “journey” was. For example, a client might not end up purchasing a product, but you have his email or contact phone number to which you can send mailouts, thereby maintaining your brand recognition for the client.
5. Make a table
Once you have all of the above information at hand, it's time to map. Usually, it is done in the form of a table.
In the columns of the table, set aside a timeline that will show how the client moves towards the product. You can leave here the three stages of moving towards the ultimate goal: awareness, consideration, and decision, or define any other stages.
It all depends on the type of your business. If you are selling some physical product, then track the physical location of your customer, for example: “parking lot”, “a certain department of the store”, “checkout”. If in your map you are considering customer maintenance, then the stages may be the first contact of the customer with technical support, conflict resolution, and resolution of the situation.
If your product is something your customers use throughout the day (such as software), then you can use a literal timeline that divides the table into "morning", "afternoon" and "evening". Such a card is also called “One day in the life of a client”.
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| 6 steps to create a customer journey map when interacting with a product and brand |
Let the rows of the table be variables that affect the quality of customer service. Some of them are already known to us: these are the actions of the customers themselves, their pains, and points of interaction with your company. Of course, there are many other factors that you can also include in the table. It all depends on how detailed you want the map to be. Include in it:
- Client's goals at each stage;
- Emotions of the client;
- Employees who are responsible for the successful implementation of a particular stage;
- Suggestions for improving stages, etc.
Keep a balance: yes, more detailed maps will give more information and more context, however, too much-cluttered information will make it difficult to analyze the map. Keep in mind that the map is intended to serve as a simple and understandable guide for your company's employees to understand the motives of the client. Keep the information on the map relevant and concise.
When describing a client's actions or emotions, keep in mind that the card is essentially a story. Use the customer persona and customer feedback analytics to create a concrete, realistic, and clear scenario for this story. The actions and emotions of the client form the trajectory of the journey, while facts such as points of interaction create the full context of the situation.
Improve the overall look of your CMJ map
It's time to talk about design. Although the map is essentially a graphic, a table that is effective at the same time, but still a little creativity will not hurt. It would be nice to design it in your corporate style and proudly display your logo.
Let's take into account that the purpose of the user interaction map with the product and brand is to visualize the customer journey. Therefore, the map will look much clearer if you use infographics than a simple table. In the future, such a map can become a guide for employees who are not very well versed in marketing terms, and that is why it is so important to take a responsible approach to visualize the client's path to a product or service. For these purposes, you can hire a graphic designer: he can make a full-fledged understandable presentation instead of a boring table.
7 Customize the user interaction map with the product and brand for your business
Yes, the map is linear, but it has no real end. After a purchase, customers' impressions of your business or product may change and they will periodically reconsider their attitude towards your company. For the same reason, even if a customer chooses your competitor's product, in the future he may again return to the stage of considering ways to solve the problem, thus giving your company a second chance.
To really be successful after the map, your next step should be to improve all the points of contact with the client while working through their pains. As soon as the necessary changes are implemented in the business processes of your company, be sure to return to step number 1, i.e. update the map. The map is a “living” document, and it is constantly changing as well as the path of the client himself.
Instead of a conclusion
A user interaction map with a product and a brand is more than just an experiment or a business exercise. It can become a bridge between you and your clients, revealing the secret of their pains, needs, and challenges. This is a full-fledged communication tool within the business, allowing all employees of your company to understand customers.
The last point means that the map should be not only informative but also understandable. Everyone should understand it: both the trainee and the head of the business. The map can be done in the form of a simple table, however, be sure that your business can implement all the changes that you plan in it.
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