Customer Journey Mapping

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

Journey mapping is a visual representation of a customer's steps when interacting with a company, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. It provides a holistic view of the customer experience, highlighting key touchpoints, emotions, and pain points along the way. Traditionally, journey maps have been static documents, often created through workshops and interviews with stakeholders. While this approach has its merits, it can fall short of capturing the dynamic nature of modern customer journeys.

1. Journey Mapping Redefined for CX Excellence

In today's hyper-competitive market, customer experience (CX) has emerged as a critical differentiator for businesses. Companies that excel in delivering exceptional customer experiences often enjoy increased customer loyalty, higher retention rates, and a stronger brand reputation. At the heart of this CX revolution lies journey mapping—a strategic tool that helps businesses understand and optimise the customer journey. However, as customer expectations evolve, so too must our approach to journey mapping. In this article we will explore how journey mapping is being redefined for CX excellence.

2. Understanding Journey Mapping

Journey mapping is a visual representation of a customer's steps when interacting with a company, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. It provides a holistic view of the customer experience, highlighting key touchpoints, emotions, and pain points along the way. Traditionally, journey maps have been static documents, often created through workshops and interviews with stakeholders. While this approach has its merits, it can fall short of capturing the dynamic nature of modern customer journeys.

3. The need for redefinition

The digital age has transformed the way customers interact with brands. With the proliferation of channels and devices, customer journeys have become more complex and non-linear. Customers expect seamless experiences across touchpoints, whether they're browsing a website, engaging on social media, or visiting a physical store. To meet these expectations, businesses must redefine their approach to journey mapping.

Embracing data-driven insights

One of the most significant shifts in journey mapping is the integration of data-driven insights. By leveraging data analytics, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of customer behaviour and preferences. This data can be sourced from various touchpoints, including website analytics, social media interactions, and customer feedback. Companies can identify patterns and trends that inform the journey-mapping process by analysing this data.

For example, a retail brand might use data analytics to track the online and offline interactions of its customers. By understanding how customers move between channels, the brand can optimise its marketing strategies and improve the overall customer experience.

With a sudden wealth of options and opportunities available to us, we know consumers have resorted to coping mechanisms – mental shortcuts and techniques that help us cut through to what matters most to make a choice. Consumers have activated mental processes to deal with the abundance of the web. Consumers now deal with scale and complexity using cognitive biases encoded deep in our pre-digital history. Understanding how consumer decision-making has changed will enable any business to win more business from its competitors.

Google researchers embarked on a project to answer the simple questions: what motivates a consumer to make a purchase, and what makes them decide who to buy it from?

The two-year project by Google to answer this question uncovered what they term "the messy middle". The messy middle is a space of abundant information and unlimited choice that shoppers have learned to manage using a range of cognitive shortcuts.[1]

The behavioural scientists identified that when consumers are faced with all the complexity offered by the Internet, they resort to behaviours to try and make it simple for themselves and reduce the effort required to make a decision.

Google's researchers and behavioural scientists researched guest behaviour to identify the reality of consumer decision-making. The two states that consumers fluctuate in are the Exploring and Evaluating stages. Exploration is an expansive activity, while evaluation is inherently reductive in nature. When exploring, consumers will look at brands and categories, but when evaluating, we narrow down the options. The best way to think of it is that between the two poles of trigger and purchase, there is a messy middle where guests bounce from one to the other in an endless loop. 

This process takes place against an ever-present backdrop of exposure – effectively a substrate representing all of the shopper's thoughts, feelings, and perceptions about the categories, brands, products, and retailers.

According to Google researchers, consumers explore their options and expand their knowledge and consideration sets, then – either sequentially or simultaneously – they evaluate the options and narrow down their choices. For certain categories, only a brief time might be required to move between these modes, while habitual and impulse purchases may bypass the loop altogether. But other purchases, typically more complex, encourage or even oblige us to engage in lengthy exploration, generating a healthy number of options to evaluate.

Contrary to traditional journey mapping thinking, the consumer does not move in a linear journey. Instead, the consumer flips and flops between the exploration and evaluation stages in an asymmetrical loop. By taking a traditional customer journey map and superimposing the messy middle, we end up with a journey that resembles the diagram below:

[1] The Messy Middle of Purchase Behaviour – Google, 2021 P.7 

The question for marketers is how to break the loop so that the consumer selects your brand as the winner. In other words, how do you persuade someone to stop shopping around and actually buy what you're selling? The goal is not to force them out of the activity they have chosen to pursue but to provide them with everything they need to feel comfortable making a decision.

Creating dynamic journey maps

Traditional journey maps are often static documents that quickly become outdated. To keep pace with the ever-changing customer landscape, businesses are now creating dynamic journey maps. These maps are continuously updated with real-time data, allowing companies to respond to changes in customer behaviour promptly.

Dynamic journey maps can be created using journey mapping software that integrates with existing customer relationship management (CRM) systems. This integration ensures that journey maps are always up-to-date and reflect the latest customer interactions. By having a real-time view of the customer journey, businesses can identify opportunities for improvement and make data-driven decisions.

Focusing on emotional journeys

While data is essential, it's equally important to understand the emotional aspects of the customer journey. Emotions play a significant role in shaping customer perceptions and influencing purchasing decisions. To redefine journey mapping for CX excellence, businesses must focus on capturing and analysing emotional journeys.

This involves identifying the emotions customers experience at each touchpoint and understanding how these emotions impact their overall experience. For instance, a customer might feel frustrated during a lengthy checkout process or delighted by personalised recommendations. By mapping these emotional journeys, businesses can identify pain points and opportunities to create positive emotional experiences.

Incorporating customer feedback

Customer feedback is a valuable source of insights for journey mapping. By actively seeking feedback from customers, businesses can gain a better understanding of their needs and expectations. This feedback can be collected through surveys, interviews, and social media listening.

Incorporating customer feedback into journey maps allows businesses to validate their assumptions and make informed decisions. It also demonstrates a commitment to customer-centricity, as customers feel heard and valued. By acting on feedback, companies can enhance the customer experience and build stronger relationships with their audience.

Collaborating across departments

Journey mapping is not a task that should be confined to the marketing or customer service departments. To achieve CX excellence, businesses must foster collaboration across all departments. Each department plays a role in shaping the customer journey, from product development to sales and support.

Businesses can gain diverse perspectives and insights by involving cross-functional teams in the journey mapping process. This collaborative approach ensures that journey maps are comprehensive and reflect the entire customer experience. It also promotes a culture of customer-centricity, where every department is aligned in delivering exceptional experiences.

The benfits of redefined journey maps

Redefining journey mapping for CX excellence offers several benefits for businesses:

1. Enhanced Customer Understanding: By leveraging data-driven insights and customer feedback, businesses gain a deeper understanding of their customers' needs and preferences.
2. Improved Customer Experience: Dynamic journey maps allow businesses to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement, leading to a more seamless and satisfying customer experience.
3. Increased Customer Loyalty: By focusing on emotional journeys and creating positive experiences, businesses can foster stronger emotional connections with their customers, leading to increased loyalty and retention.
4. Data-Driven Decision Making: With real-time data and insights, businesses can make informed decisions that drive CX excellence and business growth.
5. Cross-Departmental Alignment: Collaborative journey mapping promotes alignment across departments, ensuring that everyone is working towards a common goal of delivering exceptional customer experiences.

In the quest for CX excellence, journey mapping is a powerful tool that helps businesses understand and optimise the customer journey. However, journey mapping must be redefined to keep pace with evolving customer expectations. By embracing data-driven insights, creating dynamic maps, focusing on emotional journeys, incorporating customer feedback, and fostering cross-departmental collaboration, businesses can elevate their CX strategies and deliver exceptional experiences that drive loyalty and growth.

Kinetic CX is a customer experience consultancy that takes a tailored and unique approach to designing CX solutions. No two clients or their desired customer experience are the same, so we take the time to understand our client's objectives before developing practical solutions within their budget.