A business journey in your customer’s shoes

Nadia is a 26-year-old employee who, despite her average pay, is obsessed with fashion, and constantly browses for clothing and accessories online. Since she is not interested in one specific item, she makes sure to check different websites and brands. She, however, prefers local brands, proudly produced in her home country.

While looking at a particular website that sells many of her favorite items, she noticed that the items she likes are all featured on its homepage, with great pricing compared to many other local fashion brands. She notices that she can easily afford what she wants, and that the material is exactly what she was looking for.

She considers buying many products off this specific website but while browsing through her Facebook profile and chatting with her friend on the phone, Nadia came across an advertisement for another fashion brand that captured her attention. She browses through the other website and finds that, it too, had a clean and organized display, a fast shopping experience, and great pricing with the exact material she was looking for.

Where will Nadia shop, which brand will win her over and what will make her decide to choose one brand over the other?

The answer is simple. The brand that Nadia selects is the one that is able to keep her attention from the very beginning of her shopping journey, when she comes across it, all the way through until she receives her shipment.

Understanding the customer journey map is a simple process, one that takes some time and effort but that is crucial. It is a road map that puts you through the customer’s shoes from the minute they are first introduced to your brand.  When Nadia checked the first website, what did she search for before? Which websites did she visit before? What did she click on and was she easily directed to your website easily or was it a complicated process of filling a form to be able to browse the products? How did she find the overall experience? Was her package received on time?

CJMs (customer journey maps) are established to allow one to fully understand how their brand is performing across online and offline platforms, whether the brand’s core values and objectives are in line with those of their target customers, and how to seize any potential opportunities to help give the customers a better overall purchase experience.

As a business owner, you should put yourself in the customers’ shoes before performing any promotional activities and follow these simple steps to guarantee that your business is not only moving forward but climbing upwards.

• Understand your customer’s persona:

Gather as much information as you can get about your target audience, meaning their geographic locations, demographics, psychographics, etc. This will help you visualize what kind of people are most likely to purchase your products, what their lifestyles are, and how they tend to behave or react towards different situations.

 

• Do your research:

After identifying your customer profiles and getting to know more about their persona, you now have to undergo major qualitative and quantitative research. This can be done through online data analytics tools and reviewing your audience’s feedback about your product/service on social media platforms (all owned media assets). This can help you understand and know more about your target audience. Your research can also be done through offline channels such as surveys and focus groups, both internally through your employees or externally through potential customers.

 

• List all of your brand’s touch points:

At this point, you need to list all the channels through which your brand is available both online (social media platforms, website, etc.) and offline (retail stores and branches). Showcasing where you are available and highlighting which platform brings you the most traffic/profit is important, as it will help your brand hammer on new and more developed strategies to further capitalize on that platform. Moreover, you should identify your competitors, where they are in the market as well as what their touch points are. Start comparing your brand’s activities to those of your competitors to see what your brand is lacking and what you’re doing well in.

 

• Map the customer’s journey:

Now back to Nadia’s story, after you have all the needed information about your target audience, your brand and your competitors, step back and put yourself in Nadia’s (your customer) shoes. Draw a visual map of all the steps she could take. What could motivate or stop her from purchasing your brand’s products/services during each step in her purchase journey?

 

All these questions can be answered through creating a visual customer journey map that will help you make educated decisions about your brand’s promotional activities. Make sure to always put yourself in your customer’s shoes to guarantee that they will always choose your brand over others.

 

• Monitor and measure:

The last and most crucial step is to know that your audience’s behavior throughout the journey map is bound to change. The persona that was attracted to your product a few years back might no longer be the same. Try to set a specific date each week where you monitor your sales results closely, check the data gathered on your set of buyers and compare them to your existing customer journey map. This is the only way you can guarantee that your customer journey map is effective and up to date.

 

Interested to know more about customer journey maps? Check out these links:

 

https://clevertap.com/blog/user-journey-map/

https://www.digitalcurrent.com/blog/customer-profiles-and-buyer-personas-defined/

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/customer-journey-map