On the surface, the customer journey is a simple concept – you develop a product, and your customer buys it. With advancements in technology redefining the way consumers connect with brands, the customer journey is becoming increasingly complex. That’s why mapping a buyer’s journey is essential to ensuring a great experience – for every individual customer.
As a marketer, you’ll already know that a customer-journey map is an effective tool for understanding customer interactions with your brand across all touchpoints. You’ll also know that every time customers interact with your organisation, they create an abundance of data.
When that data is analysed effectively, it can provide valuable insights. Ultimately, your organisation can use that information to optimise and personalise each customer’s experience – and keep them coming back.
Staying focused on the customer
There are many advantages of customer-journey mapping, but the single greatest benefit is simply understanding your customers better. The deeper you understand their expectations, the more you can tailor the customer experience to individual customer needs.
Here are five key customer journey benefits:
- Zoom out to zoom in. Benchmark the buyer journey compared to what you’d expect it to be to understand your customer’s perspective better. This data can optimise your sales and marketing strategies by alleviating customer pain points.
- Bring teams together. Provide all your teams with the same customer journey data and intelligence to align different departments or perspectives toward achieving a universal goal.
- Identify moments of opportunity. Drawing a journey map lets you identify experience or service gaps in your buying process you may not notice otherwise. This is important because, in the future, it will be why customers prefer your product over all the others.
- Understand and predict customer behaviour. Predict your buyer personas’ behaviour at different touchpoints as they move through the sales funnel. Then, you can find ways to assist potential customers in finding the right products or taking the following steps.
- Create a logical order for your customer journey. Use insights to simplify the customer journey and make it easier for buyers to engage with your brand. Over time, a consistently positive customer experience will benefit your bottom line.
Top challenges of customer journey mapping
While there’s a lot to gain from mapping customer journeys, it has some limitations too.
- Complex web of multiple channels. Consumers interact with brands on various channels which can make it difficult to identify and track the influence of different touchpoints on the customer.
- Mapping different customer personas. Every buyer persona targets an audience set with unique pain points, buying patterns, behaviours and paths to purchase, so mapping every persona into a single customer journey is a complex task.
- Monitoring behaviour across touchpoints. Capturing cross-channel activities through existing technologies, departments and processes and then responding to the customers with relevant and personalised content can be a convoluted exercise.
Getting started: leverage the customer data you already have
Most businesses have lots of data, and some of it can be hard to access. So, leveraging data from across multiple touchpoints to gain insights can be challenging – that is, without the right tools.
Using a Customer Data Platform (CDP) will help you build a Single Customer View by pulling all the data you need from multiple sources into one place. That way, you can create audience segments and share them with your other marketing platforms to gain customer journey insights easily and quickly.
Use Case: One of our customers did not have a single customer view as their data was siloed and challenging for marketers to access. With a Single Customer View, they were able to create and share audience segments with their existing MarTech stack for highly personalised customer journeys. This allowed them to improve the customer experience by providing the right message at the right time and in the right channel, ultimately improving retention and customer perception.
A CDP will help two-fold by:
- Breaking down departmental silos and processes to create a more collaborative model which will support analysis of the customer journey across channels.
- Integrating your existing MarTech stack to create data unification across all touchpoints – digital, web, social and email platforms – allows you can deliver powerful, highly personalised multi-channel campaigns without changing platforms.
Customer-journey mapping simplified
These days, consumers want a highly personalised experience, and customer-journey mapping plays a crucial role in this process. You can have the best marketing team in the world, but without a unified Single Customer View, it can be hard to resolve issues and improve the customer experience.
The n3 Hub CDP delivers marketing and CX utopia by bringing customer data, points-of-sale, offers, sentiment and product information together to easily access and share a Single Customer View. It generates segments and provides relevant, consistent and personalised content for each customer that can be shared over various channels using your existing marketing platforms.
Get in touch today to see how n3 Hub can deliver results to your marketing team.