Customer Journeys

Lutz Rodenberg • 18 December 2021

Sometimes your business doesn't work in the way you would like. The customer does not buy or react to a certain offer. But why? Understanding the customer’s behavior and dealing the key to providing a good customer experience. This is where Customer Journey Mapping helps. With agile methods, this can now be easily implemented in teams with simple means.

Why are customer journeys so important?

Every customer comes to us with different expectations. To decide in favour of us and our offer takes longer for some, for others it is immediate. The sales process (sales funnel) is different. There are recurring patterns and certain contact points that our customers use more often than others. And it is important to find these out - with Customer Journey Maps, which can also be used in agile teams in addition to the classic approach. Customer Journey Maps can help with:

  • The structuring of the business plan
  • The optimization of sales targets
  • Customer satisfaction with the company
  • The increase of efficiency in costs and conversion rates
  • The standardization of key figures
  • The improvement of the external perception of the brand

Step 1: Know your customers

Put yourself in your customer's shoes. If you don't know how your customers behave it's difficult for you to communicate with them at eye level and meet their expectations. That's why it's worth talking to customers as much as possible and learning about their habits and needs. Direct conversation, web evaluations via Google or Adobe Analytics and surveys such as NPS scores help to understand customers better.

To compile the results, it helps to discuss them in the agile group and document them on a metaplan wall or in video conferences and with digital boards. I myself work with Mural ®, a board on which ideas can be sketched and structured. Everyone writes down his own observations on Post-its ® or index cards. These are discussed in the team and then summarized to topic groups. There is no right or wrong. The team can determine the categories itself based on its observations.

Step 2: Develop personas and build up empathy maps

If you know your customers, it is important to group them together. Every person is different, but for our purpose we have to put together recurring patterns of behavior, expectations and lifestyles of them into such clusters, otherwise we are at 1:1 marketing and thus at Big-Data. A tip: Empathy Maps are a good tool, especially in Customer Journey Mapping and in Content Marketing, for getting inside people. If you have the time and inclination, you should definitely take this step before you start with the actual mapping. This also works in agile groups. For example, each group takes a certain persona and defines what they hear, see, feel and think. Templates are available on the web or in agile tools like Mural.

Step 3: How are you in contact with your customer?

Your customers decide for themselves how and when they contact your company. Whether and when a customer uses a particular channel depends on what stage of the sales process they are at and how they usually inform themselves. That's why it's worth taking a closer look at your customers' most important contact channels and analyzing when they use them. There are, for example, tools such as channel cards that can be used both in teams and for self-research. They can be used to classify and plan individual channels (touchpoints) according to frequency of use, customer interest and possible applications within the sales process. Agile teams can also use the channel cards to check their own understanding of the importance of individual channels and discuss together how they should be used within the customer journey.

Step 4: Create your customer journey maps

The Customer Journey Map combines the information collected so far and structures it into an overview of the sales process with the customer. Usually, several customer journeys are defined at once. Depending on the number of personas and the possibilities of the customer to do business with us, different routes should be worked out. This is usually done using a sales funnel (sales funnels). Usually a distinction is made between the first contact, where the potential customer becomes aware of the problem (awareness), the closer examination of possible solutions (consideration), the decision phase (conversion) and the active business relationship with the customer (loyalty). Other phase models, which are specifically geared to the company's workflows with the customer, are also used for this purpose.

The map should include the following categories:

  • The needs or expectations and goals of the customer
  • The frequently used contact points (touchpoints), which he uses in the respective phase of the process
  • Content Formats
  • Key figures

If you like, you can also include, for example, the previous experiences of your customers on a scale (e.g. from 1-10) as well as your future target brand and your own business objectives. There are no limits to creativity here.

In agile teams, it is worth doing this exercise in a joint stand-up and working through the individual phases. A large wall, Metaplan paper and Post-its® are enough to get a result. Of course, this is difficult to do in corona times, although digital tools can produce good results even under difficult conditions. If you are looking for some of these tools, you can get in contact with me.

Customer Journey Mapping - not just a blank theory

Customer Journey Mapping is part of everyday life in marketing departments today. It is not only a theoretical exercise for strategists, but can - if used correctly - significantly improve customer relations, communication and product development. In a study conducted by MyCustomer in collaboration with Quadient, based on a global survey of 248 customer experience experts in EMEA, North America and the Pacific, 67% of respondents said they use customer journey mapping. In the survey, 85% of those using customer journey mapping reported positive or very positive effects on their customer experience. In addition, 71 percent of them reported that mapping projects resulted in higher customer satisfaction. In combination with agile methods, customer journey mapping can become a target-oriented tool for one's own company, motivating teams and leading to good results through the diversity of opinions and skills within a team.

Links

  • Video: How you build up a customer journey map Link
  • Online-Course LinkedIn "Customer Journey Mapping" Link
  • Certified training in Germany (xd-i) Link

The source for the study mentioned above. Der-Bank-Blog.de, Mina Smolej, 5. November 2019 ( https://www.der-bank-blog.de/studie-customer-journey/customer-experience/37658175/ )