Creating a customer experience map helps you determine the shortcomings, strengths, and opportunities. It also identifies where your company stands out in the market and customers’ views. This customer map also gives critical insight to refine and focus the customer experience and help you reach your business goals and desired outcomes.
This map consists of numerous touchpoints where a customer and organization interact and the interaction that takes place at that touchpoint. The customer experience map is similar to the customer experience journey map. Still, the customer experience map lets you analyze the customer-brand interaction and behavior on each touchpoint and channel.
Customer service includes a company's marketing, branding, and sales process, but don’t forget that customer experience and journey mapping are different. If you are confused about both, here’s the difference between both.
Let’s go ahead and crack how to create a customer experience map!
Customer experience VS. customer journey
As beginners, most people think that customer experience mapping is the same as customer journey mapping. Although they are quite similar, they aren’t the same in any way.
A customer journey mapping is about the consumer experience touchpoints from the first sale exposure to all the essential post-sale interactions. The customer experience map is somehow the same thing but a little forward and one step ahead - it examines a complete picture relevant to the brand, behaviors, interactions, and channels.
Customer experience mapping is in no way a linear path. Instead, it provides a complete guide and understanding of your target customer's process while interacting or organizing with your brand.
The author of Mapping Experiences, Jim Kalbach, states that these user experience maps provide deeper insight into human behavior and its broader context. These maps represent how an organization can fit into a person’s life.
The best way to understand the customer experience map is by considering it an all-encompassing visualization for a bigger picture of the business idea. In contrast, the journey map primarily focuses on specific buyer interactions and direct post-sale loyalty. That can also be called customer attrition in most cases.
Benefits of using a customer experience map
The most significant benefit of using this experience map is to improve the company's sales and increase revenue.
With the improvement of these factors, a company can also boost up drastically from beginning to end.
The key benefits that are included with a customer experience map are:
Improved marketing
If you understand your client’s interaction points with your materials, you can improve your messaging to target the client appropriately; meanwhile, you can also reduce your unwanted area and weak areas of the ad.
That can also improve your overall marketing strategy.
Better sales training
If your reps and sales team figure out the resources and sales content that works well, your company’s sales and revenue can reach your dream.
Better sales training can improve buyers' personas and become an edge for improved interaction between the buyer and team.
Improved customer retention
Creating a customer map helps to comprehend how a buyer interacts with you after becoming a customer.
This stage lets you retain your customers and sales by motivating customers to become net promoters.
What are the tools and elements of a customer experience map?
The company has numerous touchpoints, and figuring them out is immensely helpful. For instance, if a company has an Ad channel (say Facebook ads), that ad makes the viewer/customer land on the primary landing page; this page can let the buyer make a potential decision.
Many businesses have complex funnels that include multiple channels:
Current Customers/Referrals
Inbound Marketing
Outbound Marketing
For the most accurate customer experience map, you can document every lead, site visitor, and customers who see your material and brand.
What tools can you use for a customer experience map?
If you want to find all the data, you would need tools. These tools used to generate customer experience maps are categorized as software, outreach, and records. Standard tools for gathering customer experience data are:
Analytics: heatmap tools, Google, customer engagement analytics, speech analytics, etc.
Past communications: short interactions, email campaigns
Social media: brand mentions or interactions
Reviews: from third-party sites
Outreach: surveys or personal interviews
How to create and use a customer experience map?
There are plenty of helpful ways to create and use the customer experience and some of them are:
Visualize the data
The first step toward creating and visualizing the customer experience map is to visualize the data. For this, you can focus more on functioning instead of designing and can get the best essence from all the information you previously had.
In the same analogy, you can use a spreadsheet to visualize and collect all the related infographics. Remember, how you organize and compile all the information directly affects the progression of the customer profile.
For instance, this map includes how your customers feel and ideas for improvement.
Tip: If you want to know how the customer feels about the touchpoint, you can use different tools. For instance: if a particular element is converted perfectly, it means your customers’ response is good.
Assess the data
Using different things for feedback can give you an accurate idea of how a visitor sees your touchpoints.
If your sites take time to load and show data in delay, the visitor will get frustrated; thus, you need to improve the site speed for a better experience. Many times, customers get annoyed by the late response from the company.
It shows that you need to improve your data access and customer support.
Use the data
One of the most valuable benefits of creating an experience map is the ability this map provides to the creator for potential improvements.
The process of visualizing where your organization interacts with its customers creates an obvious picture.
What are some customer experience map examples?
The examples can help you understand the customer experience maps more efficiently. Here are some examples of your inspiration:
ProductPlan - For those who are a beginner at user experience map
Niall O’Connor- If you want to learn how to build an experience map technically
Behance - The Lancome Brand Journey for an unmatched experience
Once you seek out a complete map including all the information regarding customer interaction with the brand and process, it becomes easier to consider implementing these changes. It also helps to create a kind of map that you and all your buyers would love.
What are customer experience map prerequisites?
So, coming toward another essential question, what do you need to start this overwhelming customer experience mapping? First of all, take some time to gather and aggregate your customer and employee feedback. For the next, here are some significant prerequisites;
Taking an inventory of all touchpoints
These touchpoints include the website or all the social media channels in use. Also, it accounts for other traditional or digital advertising methods in use like radio, TV, print, social media advertising, etc. Other than these forums, one can also consider telephone services for sales, customer service, technical support representation, retail stores, or any physical location in use that can foster direct mail, invoices, or other receipts.
Consider customer goals or map prospect
You can also consider all the map prospects concerning the touchpoints. In simpler words, the purpose of this interaction can prove helpful in identifying major interaction types that a customer may have with your brand at some time. These interactions may include gathering some information or solving a problem related to customer support. Other sales interactions and comparisons can also be part of customer goals.
Categorize touchpoints phase by phase
The buyer’s journey lets the consumers or customers pass through several phases. So, along with addressing the core purpose behind interactions, you also need to identify the customer’s touchpoints through which they may interact sometime with your business in between the phases of the journey. These touchpoints can be categorized considering everything from awareness to evaluation, decision-making, purchase, or the final post-purchase experience.
Identify the business’s existence and mine your data
The business purpose has a direct link with the touchpoint it serves. So, though you can rely on Facebook for one awareness-building stage, you must also establish other channels like LinkedIn and Twitter to support your customer service initiatives.
You can use various methods to mine your data to gather your customers' feedback. For example, you can consider mining the data from your employees or customers. In contrast, you can collect all the additional data from other forums, including surveys, one-on-one interviews, call center logs and analytics, web analytics, buyer persona, blog comments, product or service reviews, testimonials, social media interactions, forums, customer support communications, etc.
Find the purpose of every touchpoint
Evaluate the purpose of each touchpoint from the customer’s perspective and try to find the impact it may have. For example, evaluate if it strengthens the competitive advantage by delivering or explaining the benefits to the consumer. Also, try to find if your touchpoints encourage cross-selling, repeat purchases, or up-sellings. Overall, it’s crucial to understand the answer to all the “why” from your potential customer’s perspective and perspective.
Evaluate the worth and effectiveness of all touchpoints
What your customers' expectations from your company are are the essence of all the touchpoints you have. Evaluate whether you know about all those touchpoints and whether you meet your customer’s expectations. If there are any that you are not fulfilling, they can loosen your relationship with your customers. In addition, a valuable insight into all touchpoints can keep you updated for evaluating the overall effectiveness.
Conclusion
A customer experience map is a challenging and sensitive part of any business, but those who know its roots can win the market. Creating a customer experience map by considering all the touchpoints from the idea to post-sale interactions can arm you with the quality of winning the competitive market and the customer profile. The article mentions everything you might need to know to create a customer experience map.
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