What is Customer Experience Journey Mapping?

Find tangible, actionable opportunities to improve the customer experience.

Are you aware of the most pivotal moments in your customer’s journey – the moments where a business can convert their target audience into customers, or for existing customers, better their overall experience?

Brands should be able to ensure they’re meeting customer expectations and provide a meaningful experience across all touchpoints in the customer journey or buying cycle. Every business can do this better with customer experience journey mapping or journey mapping.

Journey mapping is the process of digging deeper into the interactions a business has with its customers across all touchpoints – analyzing those interactions to uncover customers’ thoughts, feelings, and behavior at each stage. The “map” that is created can be used to optimize all parts of the customer’s journey and identify issues that may be interfering with conversions or negatively impacting their experience. To truly understand the journey mapping process and put it into practice, read on to learn more and discover how your organization can benefit.

The basics of customer experience journey mapping

Customer experience journey mapping is a comprehensive view of all the interactions or experiences customers have with any aspect of a company.   It can encompass the entire brand experience, or be limited to any specific department, product, or service experience. The goal of this analysis is to identify what, if any, systemic issues there may be with the customer journey and experience– and to find tangible, actionable opportunities to improve the customer experience.

As you can imagine, this is a lot of data. Below are a few examples of what might be tracked and analyzed – including a customer’s thoughts, feelings, and actions across their journey with your brand:

• How consumers learn more about your products and services.
• Whom they interact with along their brand or buying journey, and who influences the decision-making process.
• The touchpoints that acquire the most customers, and reasons others may be less effective.
• What feelings (both positive and negative) do customers have at various touchpoints?
• Whether or not potential customers compare your products and services to others before making a purchasing decision.
• The success of customer loyalty or satisfaction initiatives.
• What channels do customers use most to reach out with questions or complaints?
• What pain points (whether real or perceived) impact the experience?
• Opportunities to increase sales, boost customer satisfaction, and improve customer retention.

Common tools used in customer experience journey mapping

Due to how extensive journey mapping is, there are many strategies, tools, and techniques that help professional researchers gather all the necessary data. A few include:

• Persona identification
• Customer feedback surveys
• Customer Intercepts
• Contextual customer interviews (remote or in-person)
• Stakeholder interviews
• Data analysis (Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Third-party review sites
• Marketing analysis (Social media platforms, Past email campaigns, and newsletters)

Benefits of customer experience journey mapping

Four benefits of customer experience journey mapping that any company can derive value from, regardless of their size, industry, and what products and/or services they provide.

1. Improved customer experience:  Identifying your customer’s unmet needs and pain points allows you to create better experiences that meet their needs and remove friction from the overall experience.
2. Marketing insights: journey mapping really puts you in your customers’ shoes, which allows you to better understand how they are hearing about your brand and interacting with your marketing campaigns. This allows you to improve messaging, cut ad spend in areas lacking meaningful interaction, optimize personalization tactics, and increase ad spend to touchpoints that see the most positive engagements.
3. Better sales tactics: An extensive customer experience journey map should be able to tell you what resources and sales content are most effective— a boon for your sales team.
4. Increased customer retention: With a better understanding of your customers, you can engage with them better across all touchpoints to boost retention and increase loyalty.

With how much data there is to gather, analyze, and then combined into one visual, customer experience journey mapping can be a difficult undertaking for any company. Paragon’s journey mapping services can help. We’ll tailor your map to the level of detail you need to achieve your goals. Contact us today to find out how our journey mapping services can help you deliver amazing customer experiences!