The customer journey map is a tool to visualize the experience of interacting with your brand from the customer’s point of view. This map is critical because it forces you to look at how your customers actually experience your brand versus how you think they do. By better understanding your customers, you can better deliver on their expectations.
According to Blake Morgan, a customer experience futurist, “You must invest in becoming an experience-led business, which means optimizing every customer touchpoint. By understanding the customer journey, B2B companies can stay a step ahead of the customer to lead them on the path for a great experience and quality product or service.”
Benefits of Mapping Your Customer’s Journey
Understanding and empathizing with customers lays the groundwork for meaningful interactions and successful business outcomes. It also provides a tangible framework for CX initiatives.
Customer Journey Maps Enable Better Experiences
As you study all phases of a customer’s journey with your brand, you’ll be able to isolate where you aren’t meeting expectations or where you are outright alienating prospects and customers. CEB asked thousands of senior executives at companies around the world to describe the B2B purchase process in a single word. The responses included “hard,” “awful,” “painful,” “frustrating,” and “minefield.” In many cases, these horrible processes are the result of disjointed moments in time that lead to an inconsistent and frustrating customer experience.
By addressing these shortcomings, you can ensure better experiences that empower your prospects and customers to interact with and purchase from your company as they desire. That can translate into faster sales cycles, and more satisfied, loyal customers who make follow-on purchases.