What is Customer Journey Mapping?

Customer journey mapping details the process of analysing each segment or section of your audience and outlining the stages and processes they go through in order to purchase your product or service. A customer journey map will detail which channel they used at each stage, the customer mind set at each stage and what content is required to move the customer through the purchase funnel.

Understanding how customers interact with a company’s digital assets is vital to developing a strong digital strategy and the process of developing a customer journey map ensures that any digital strategy is customer centric and linked back to the needs of your target audience.

The starting point for developing a customer journey map is interaction with your customers which can be done in a number of ways. Any existing research available on your customers and how they interact with your product is reviewed to understand existing segments, behaviours, and any trends in their digital usage.  This can be supplemented with available industry research around key consumer groups and how they use digital channels.   In depth analysis of your current digital platform provides insight on how different customers use your current assets and what elements are the least and most engaging.

The core of customer journey mapping however, is interacting with your current customers particularly those recently gained to understand the role that digital played in their search for your product and which channels they used as part of the process of becoming a customer.  This can be done using a range of different techniques including; email questionnaires, surveys targeted at your website visitors, traditional focus groups and phone interviews, all the way through to ethnographic studies.