There is a belief that you cannot understand someone until and unless you have walked a mile in their shoes, and that is precisely what customer journey maps do. They help you put yourself in the different shoes of your customers and understand your business from their point of view.

Why should we need to do it? How should we do it? I know you have so many questions in your mind right now. I guess that’s why you are here! Here is a detailed guide on customer journey mapping.

What Is the Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map, or CJM, is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touch points. By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience while navigating your website, a CJM helps you better understand them and identify the pain points they encounter. Knowing your customers thoroughly is essential when you want to implement informed, customer-focused optimization on your website.

Why Do You Need to Map Your Customer Journey?

As we know, CJM is a visual representation of how your customers interact with your brand, website, and product across different stages, from external touchpoints like social media, ads, and events to internal touchpoints like website landing pages, CTAs, signup forms, and onboarding processes.

To know users’ experiences, desires, and pain points, you must do a customer journey map by gathering qualitative and quantitative data from customer interviews, surveys, and product experience (PX) insights tools. A well-researched customer journey map helps you understand your users’ jobs to be done as they engage with your site or product and what they are thinking and feeling as they navigate.

Let’s take a look at how customer journey mapping can benefit your company—and your customers.

1. See What Your Customers See

Collecting user-based insights helps you dig deeper into how customers interact with your brand, which makes it easier to empathize with their experience. A strong customer journey mapping process lets you challenge your assumptions; you will see customers don’t always act or think how you expect.

Notice where users struggle to complete actions, get frustrated, or drop off; it helps you prioritize website and product improvements to give them a smoother experience. You have to change the CTA position, adapt smooth navigation, categorize pages, etc, so customers can find important information easily.

2. Identify User Needs

Understanding your customer needs across different interactions allows you to identify gaps in the journey so you can improve existing ones, which means no guesswork. Mapping out how customers navigate your website lets you pinpoint the hurdles that stop users from engaging or completing an action they want to take.

You must increase the awareness of what your customers need to minimize frustration by providing the right information and features at specific stages for a better user experience. For example, if you see customers struggling with onboarding, you must fix an explanatory video or pop-up message of steps.

3. Identify The Complex User Journey

Users come to your website or brand from various platforms like Google search, social media platforms, Cookies, etc., which creates highly complex, non-linear journeys with various customer touch points. These touchpoints vary by customers: GenZs typically come to your website from social media and want video content, while millennials may arrive directly from Google searches and want comparative content, charts, facts, etc, before making a purchase decision.

Many decision-makers are often involved in B2B businesses. They all have different viewpoints on conducting research and choosing a solution. This complexity makes creating an excellent customer experience across the board difficult.

Customer journey mapping here visualizes all these different experiences in a single place and shows you what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage so you can provide the right information at the right time, in the right place, and through the right channel.

4. Visualize Emotions, Not Just Actions

Buyers' journeys are often emotional, and turning feelings into concrete data is challenging. It is even harder to know what your customers will actually feel while designing your product and website. A well-researched customer journey map helps you visualize what your customers are thinking, feeling, and doing. The key to knowing their needs and providing them with better service is gathering insights into customer emotions and acting on them.

5. Create Personalized Experience

If you want to provide a great customer experience, even with self-service products, customers value brands that understand their unique needs. CJM provides insight into user intent and interactions, allowing you to create personalized experiences across all touchpoints.

For example

• Show relevant social media ads to potential customers browsing online
• Provide personalized support over various channels
• Improve the onboarding process by declining the steps
• Customize the pos-onboarding steps according to the needs
• Create targeted landing pages with use cases for various customer segments

6. Align Cross-functional Stakeholders

Customer journey mapping works best with the perspectives of UX, marketing, product, sales, customer service and success, shipping, management, and other teams. This clearly means getting a different role physically in a room together or collecting feedback from various teams about the product or website design. These insights help speed up the process of solving customer journey issues so users see improvements faster.

This cross-functional collaboration allows teams to work together on the same page and gives all stakeholders a holistic, coherent view of the customer experience. Aligning different teams reduces politics and guesswork around what the customer wants and clarifies areas of ownership, accountability, and points of head-off between teams.

7. Improve ROI

Paid ads, marketing, and sales are costly, but customer acquisition costs will rise more than any cost, so retaining customers is important to help boost your ROI. Customer journey mapping provides opportunities to improve onboarding and feature adoption, increasing customer loyalty, satisfaction, and product advocacy.

PX insights tools like Heatmaps can be used to learn the technical glitches that prevent users from signing up for a trial or identify points when e-commerce customers abandon their shopping carts, which boosts conversions and revenue generation.

8. Get a Competitive Edge

Customer journey mapping tells you exactly how to improve customer experience to make your product stand out. Using CJM, you can reveal product strategy to differentiate your brand by identifying new ways to provide customers with additional value.

These insights (PX and user interest) help your brand stay relevant, adapt your product and business model as customer needs change, and gain a competitive edge in a moment where having a great product is no longer enough on its own.

9. Improve Marketing and Product-led Growth

Many companies believe the customer journey begins when someone visits their website or blog. But it starts much earlier, often with customers searching for solutions or researching in professional groups and online forums.

By mapping the journey from start to finish, you can better understand your users, join their conversations, and create content tailored to every stage of the buyer journey, helping turn visitors into paying customers. This is especially important for businesses with longer, more complex buyer journeys, such as SaaS or B2B companies with high-value products.

Creating a customer journey map (CJM) also eliminates guesswork and helps validate decisions, from identifying the right channels and messaging to building trust and credibility with customers.

Using tools like riyo.ai to gather PX insights can reveal where users face challenges. This data helps you improve your product, making it more intuitive and user-friendly, positioning it for growth. The ultimate goal is to create a product so good that it becomes a marketing asset in itself, which is what every team aspires to achieve.

10. Minimize Future Roadblocks

Customer journey mapping takes some time and effort initially, but it boosts efficiency and saves resources in the long run.

By conducting customer interviews and using PX insights tools, you can gather both qualitative and quantitative data. This helps identify and minimize customer roadblocks early on, reducing assumptions within your team and allowing you to anticipate and prevent potential challenges.

Who Should Map the Customer Journey?

Every company, no matter the size or niche, can benefit from customer journey mapping. It is particularly important to give a competitive edge to startups and SMEs. Aligning yourself more closely with your customers by getting to know and understand their needs and blockers will allow your company to give customers exactly what they want and differentiate you from the competition.

What Are the Challenges of CJM?

Customer journey mapping can be a quick and straightforward process, but it does come with a few challenges:

• First, you need an in-depth understanding of all your customer profiles and user groups to ensure no one is overlooked. Avoid relying on assumptions—conduct customer interviews and gather user feedback to shape your personas and map accurately.
  
• Involving multiple teams can also be tricky to coordinate. You can integrate the user behavior tool with Slack or other platforms to share product experience insights and align everyone. To get executive buy-in, prepare a presentation highlighting the benefits of CJM and explaining how their participation is crucial.
  
• It can be frustrating if you lack the resources to act immediately on the insights CJM reveals. However, a well-constructed map helps prioritize efforts and can even aid in securing additional resources to drive necessary changes.
  
• Collecting enough data for a thorough CJM can be tough, but riyo.ai's PX insights tools simplify this by offering a detailed understanding of the online user journey.

Mapping the customer journey gives you a clear view of how users engage with your brand, website, and product at various touchpoints, revealing what they are doing, thinking, and feeling at each stage.

Your CJM is a dynamic resource. Revisit it often throughout your product’s design, testing, and launch phases to ensure you are meeting your customers’ needs and expectations. This essential process improves your understanding of the customer experience, improving satisfaction, higher adoption rates, and increased loyalty.

FAQs

(1) What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is a way to visualize and understand your customers' steps when interacting with your business. It helps identify their needs, pain points, and key moments during their experience.

(2) Why is customer journey mapping important?

Customer journey mapping is important because it helps businesses understand how customers feel at every stage of their experience. This insight helps improve services, increase satisfaction, and create a more customer-focused approach.

(3) What are the steps in customer journey mapping?

The steps in customer journey mapping include the following:

1. Define customer personas.
2. Outline customer goals and touchpoints.
3. Map out the customer’s journey stages.
4. Identify customer emotions and pain points.
5. Analyze and optimize the journey.
   

(4) Why is PX needed while mapping customer journeys?

PX (Product Experience) is needed because it focuses on how customers interact with a product. Understanding PX during the journey helps improve product usability, ensure customer satisfaction, and build loyalty.