Module 5-8: Customer Journey Mapping

## Module 5 It is striking how many entrepreneurs misunderstood the market and why they failed to get the right customers. They are too busy chasing for quantity rather than the quality. One of the reasons why this happens is because entrepreneurs have a very hard time understanding their customer p...

## Module 5 It is striking how many entrepreneurs misunderstood the market and why they failed to get the right customers. They are too busy chasing for quantity rather than the quality. One of the reasons why this happens is because entrepreneurs have a very hard time understanding their customer personas. Here are some customer persona’s that must be avoided by an entrepreneur: - Ideal customer - Most entrepreneurs have an ideal customer in mind, as who they think is their ideal customer. But many times that ideal customer does not really exist. - Average customer - This is where an entrepreneur thinks that they must cater to everyone which is a mistake because not all customers are the same. - Impacted customer - An entrepreneur must not be blind to the impacts of competitors. - The largest consumer - This can be dangerous because competitors have the opportunity to snatch the customers, while the entrepreneur is focusing on the largest consumer. - The customer who buys everything - It does not imply that whoever buys everything is the best customer. - The customer who always asks for discounts - These are customers who always want to have discounts and may not be willing to pay the full price of the product - The customer who always demands more - These are customers with the habit of asking for more even if the entrepreneur has already fulfilled all their demands. - The customer with unreasonable requests - These customers may have demands that the entrepreneur cannot cater to. ## Key Components Of A Journey Map A journey map is a customer-centric document where the entrepreneur’s perspective journey maps the following five elements: 1. **Persona** - Come from the data gathered, and the story that the person is telling. It consists of the demographics which include age, gender, occupation, or income. In order to create a simple story which captures their personality these demographics must be detailed. 2. **Touchpoints** - The customer is simply a manifestation with relation to the company, and the journey map should be able to capture all the touchpoints using the journey map. 3. **Emotions** - During every phase, the various high levels that comprise a customer’s emotional journey from pre-purchase to post-purchase should be identified. However, plotting emotions can prove to be a challenge because it requires empathy. 4. **Actions** - The specific tangible behaviors and thoughts involved in, and by , this journey. 5. **Opportunities** - These are insights that are obtained from mapping the customer journey and identifying the points or steps in the journey where the customer can be helped to optimize their experience. ## Importance Of Customer Journey Map A journey map is a very useful tool since it can help in identifying problem points or steps in a journey, but importantly it also helps in visualizing and understanding the experience of customers to identify opportunities to improve his ways of measuring customer satisfaction. ## Steps To Craft A Customer Journey Map 1. **Set clear objectives for the map** - Before creating a map, an entrepreneur should know the goals he is directing the map and the experiences it is based upon. In other words, he may create a buyer persona. As presented earlier in this chapter a persona is a fictitious customer with all of their demographics and psychographics who embodies a typical customer. With a distinct persona drawn an entrepreneur he may direct each phase of his customer journey map towards them. 2. **Profile personas and define their goals** - The next step is to make researches by getting valuable customer feedback using questionnaires and user testing. Here only actual customers or prospects are reached out to make feedbacks. Feedback must come to people who had shown interest in buying the entrepreneur's products and/or services and those that have dealt with the company already or plan to do so. 3. **Emphasize the target customer personas** - Although an entrepreneur must know those customer personas that interact with his business, he needs to narrow down his focus to one or two of them. Each customer has his own journey map that takes a definite path with his experience in the entrepreneur's company. Grouping excessive number of personas into just one journey may result to inaccurate disclosure of the customers' experience. For an entrepreneur drawing his first journey map, the rule of thumb is to select the most common customer persona and study the path he normally takes when doing business with the company. A marketing dashboard may be created to make comparison of the different personas that would fit in with the journey map. Personas that have been eliminated could still be reconsider through a new map. 4. **Write down all the touchpoints** Touchpoints are those places in the website that customers may use to interact with the company. An entrepreneur must write down all the touchpoints his customers and prospects are presently using and those that they must use based from research. This step is vital in creating a customer journey map since the insights into what action his customers are doing are revealed here. The touchpoints are tools that can help an entrepreneur understands the comfort and purposes of customer journeys. An entrepreneur may consider others way in which a customer may come across his online such as social channels, paid ads, e-mail marketing and third party review sites or mentions - **Actions** - An entrepreneur may write down all the actions his customers are doing as they interact with his brand or company. He may Google search for the keywords or may click on an email sent to him. It is alright to have a long list of actions. - **Emotions and motivations** - Every action that a customer takes is triggered by an emotion. Said emotion/s may change based on which part of the journey a customer is at. Normally, what drives the emotion of a customer is a combination of **actions** that have been planned to drive the customer to buy. - **Opportunities** - This gives an idea of external layers that are obtained from mapping the customer journey and identifying the points or steps in the journey where the customer can be helped to optimize their experience. - **Needs** - It needs to be checked with knowledge of the ways of optimizing for the customer’s problem, and how to ensure that their needs and expectations are properly completed. - **Ways of Imporving** - These have to be developed and implemented, in maximizing his ways of measuring customer satisfaction.