What is a Customer Journey and How Does it Work for Business

Table Of Content

• What is a Customer Journey?
• Understanding Consumers with the Customer Journey Map
• How to Create a Customer Journey Map (CJM)
• Example of a Customer Journey Map
• Conclusion

What is a Customer Journey?

A customer journey is a consumer’s journey when interacting with a company or brand. Usually, the customer journey is always related to the customer journey map or CJM. The customer journey is buyer interaction starting from seeing the brand, viewing the product, and making a purchase until the transaction is complete. 

So the conclusion is that by understanding the theory of the customer journey, you can find out the mindset of your customers. As you genuinely connect with clients and employees, you can better understand customer pain points and needs.

Maybe in the past, transactions were only limited to consumers seeing your product or brand, then they became interested in buying it. But for now, the occurrence of the transaction has more complex details.

Understanding Consumers with the Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map or commonly abbreviated as CJM is a description of the customer journey itself. CJM has functions to track or find out the steps consumers take in interacting with your product. CJM is not always 100% accurate, this is because not all customers have the same nature and behavior.

But with CJM, you can get to know your customers broadly and more clearly. You can create CJM by taking all potential customer data. From that data, you need to process it back into a picture so that it can be easily understood by anyone.

This data can be useful for asking consumers through surveys, and research on social media, or you can also use analytics tools on websites on google analytics. By Partnering with a web design company, you can efficiently use Analytics tools. With this, you can improve your sales.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map (CJM)

Here are the steps in making CJM:

Create a buyer persona

CJM is a solution for determining the mood and mindset of your consumers more deeply. Therefore, it is very important for you to know who your customers are. The best way to find out is with a buyer persona. The buyer persona is a representation of all the behavior of the target consumer that you can get from research. So you need to create consumer profiles and make them seem real.

Define persona

You can determine this from the type of business you run because there are many types of buyer personas. Therefore, the next step you need to take is to focus on one or two buyer personas. You need to do this because CJM will observe the actions of your consumers in detail when these consumers interact with your brand or product.

If you enter too many buyer personas, the results will be unclear and confusing. For that, you need to choose a buyer persona that is most common and can describe most of your target market. If you want to use another buyer persona, you can create a new CJM later for a more specific buyer persona.

Expose all touchpoints

Touchpoint is the point where consumers have interacted with your product or brand in the customer journey. An example is when potential customers first know your brand, perhaps from an ad, or when a customer calls a customer service feature. Exposure of all touchpoints is an important step because it can help you provide a smooth journey on every customer journey you make. When a customer passes a touchpoint that you create, it may have several causes and problems can occur. If you know these obstacles, then you can minimize them.

Determine the type of customer journey map to be displayed

There are several types of CJM that you can choose according to your needs, namely:

• Current state 

This type is useful for companies. This type can describe the actions, thoughts and feelings of customers when they interact with your brand.

• Daily conditions (day in life)

This CJM describes the actions, thoughts, and feelings of consumers in their daily activities. So, it is not limited to interactions with brands only.

• Future state

This type of CJM describes your beliefs about future consumers’ thoughts, actions, and feelings when interacting with your brand.

• Service framework

CJMit contains simple summaries of other types. After that, this type describes the factors that can underlie your consumer experience. These factors include the types of people, technology, policies, and various processes your consumers need to go through.

Try applying the customer journey to yourself

You can find out that the customer journey you have created is right by trying to apply it to yourself. With this, you can find out whether there is a possibility for a change to occur or not. After that, when you apply the customer journey later, your CJM already has the perfect form and can provide solutions. When you get the perfect CJM, consumers will achieve their desired goals.

Make the changes you need

The previous steps will be in vain if you don’t apply the changes already provided by CJM, as the main goal of CJM is to provide changes aimed at increasing customer satisfaction, as highlighted in the Customer Satisfaction Survey. You need to know that the changes you make on the basis of CJM always have good value. Therefore, there is no need to be afraid to do and make changes.

Apart from that, you can also make changes to your business finances with the Accounting System from HashMicro.

Always develop

Once your CJM is done, you can take a break. Because consumer behavior is always changing depending on the surrounding conditions. There could be new technology that makes it easier for consumers to shop. Or suddenly there is a pandemic like the one currently happening that can change consumer behavior. Therefore, you should always check CJM regularly. With it, you can add or subtract CJM from the current state of your business.

Example of a Customer Journey Map

Conclusion

In creating a CJM, you need to know the consumer’s state of mind in detail so you can know what you need to do. What’s more, you will face many obstacles in running a business and many competitors. You can also interact with consumers in finding out the buyer persona. If this goes smoothly and meets your expectations, then consumers will be satisfied and loyal to your brand. Therefore, create a good customer journey so that potential customers are interested and loyal to your brand. After having a good CJM to grow your business, you can also grow your business with the ERP System from HashMicro. You can make accurate decisions with the help of advanced business management software. Schedule a free demo to implement this system in your business immediately.