Hello, this is Brian Lewis. I want to talk a little bit about today customer journey map. You know our websites can do a great job of helping to grow our businesses and one of the keys is to create a great visit experience that engages visitors and guides them to accomplishing their objective. Now one of the ways that we could do that is to identify the obstacles that are keeping prospects from converting and removing those roadblocks.
A customer journey map is one of those. So what is a customer journey map? Well it’s a map of the journey your customer goes through in order to accomplish their goal. What are they doing, what are they thinking and how are they feeling at all touch points during the research and decision making experience.
Let’s first talk about the journey. Your prospects go through various stages typically beginning with an awareness stage. That’s where they realize they have a problem and don’t necessarily know what the right solution is. Next to consideration stage where they’re learning about alternatives and important aspects of those alternatives and then finally decision stage. That’s where they’re finalizing the key information that’ll guide them to making that purchase decision.
The key is we want to understand what your visitors are doing, thinking, and importantly how are they feeling at each of those three stages. So now that we’ve talked about what a customer journey map is let’s talk about how to create one. You’re going to want to conduct both quantitative and qualitative research including a deep dive into your analytics, your CRM, chat logs if you have chat, social media and field and internal research.
In closing, although there can be a sizable effort involved in producing customer journey maps, the benefits can far outweigh those costs and some benefits might include improving that user experience on web and other touch points, better understanding of visitor intent, and increasing relevancy, alignment of your entire team as they’ve been through the customer journey map. It can also be a basis for decision making on new initiatives for your company and presenting visitors with a best fit content throughout their visit experience.
So as you think about how you can improve the effectiveness of your site, consider customer journey maps. They can be a great resource for insights into your web visitors.
