What is Customer Journey: Definition, Benefits, and Steps to Create One

As an important asset in a business, you must be able to understand what a customer journey is in order to know the needs and characteristics of consumers.

How consumers interact with your brand, their characteristics, to the interests and problems they face when interacting with the brand are important factors.

Through the customer journey, you will be invited to understand the consumer experience at every stage and interaction with the brand.

Definition of Customer Journey

Quoted from Hubspot, a customer journey is a collection of consumer interactions with a brand, product, or business that occurs because they are starting to be interested and want to make a purchase/use a service.

The customer journey is different from the buyer journey. The buyer journey only focuses on the general process of purchasing a product/service from a brand. Meanwhile, the customer journey is part of the buyer's journey itself.

When wanting to make a purchase, a consumer will do research first.

The customer journey is an action taken by a brand on the steps taken by consumers when conducting research and these considerations.

Benefits of Customer Journey

Here are some of the benefits you will get if you implement customer journey mapping correctly:

1. Better Company Focus

Creating a customer journey will help your business better understand what makes consumers interested and what they don't like.

Knowing consumer needs can help inbound marketing. Then, it will be easier to create content and focus on appropriate marketing when you know consumer needs.

2. Creating a New Target Market

Through the customer journey, you can see consumer demographics and their interest in the business.

Marketing with a target market that is too broad and general is a waste of time and budget. This consumer demographic can help map what kind of consumers are interested in your business and determine new target markets

3. Proactive Customer Service

Customer journey is part of defining customer experience. Mapping it will help you identify what obstacles and consumer interests are in the brand.

Knowing data related to this faster will allow you to create the right customer service strategy and of course improve the customer service experience better.

4. Increase Customer Retention Rates

To create brand loyalty or consumer loyalty to a brand, you must know their needs.

Through the customer journey, you can immediately find out what parts need to be improved to increase consumer retention and make them loyal to your brand.

5. Create a Consumer-Focused Business

Not all departments of a business can directly focus on consumers or be customer-based because each department in the business has different goals.

To make your business focus on consumer needs, start by sharing a customer journey map with all departments.

That way, each section will get a clear picture of the process that consumers go through. Starting from interest to after purchase because this process affects marketing, sales, and service.

Steps to Create a Customer Journey Map

After knowing the importance of the customer journey, here are the steps that must be taken to create a customer journey map quoted from MindTools.

1. Determine the Objectivity or Purpose

Determining the goals and objectives from the start will help you focus more on determining the touchpoints in the customer journey map.

If you set goals that are too general, of course the mapping process will also be too broad and unfocused. The reason is, there are too many processes that may require different customer journey maps.

2. Data and Information Collection

After finding the goals and objectives you want to achieve, the next step is to identify what makes consumers interested and interact with your brand.

By asking these basic questions, it will be easier for you to collect basic information about consumers and identify customer behavior better.

How you do this also varies, from market research, interviews, discussions, data analysis, email, and others.

The results of this research can be used to form buyer personas that will help you understand consumer needs and what kind of service they want.

3. Identifying Touchpoints or Interaction Points

Touchpoints or interaction points are important in forming a customer journey map.

The forms of touchpoints also vary, such as activities in stores, online searches, social media, telephone, blogs, help desks, email or newsletter campaigns, chat services and others.

Once you have identified the touchpoints, think about how they will affect the consumer. That way you can identify how the appropriate customer journey map is.

4. Determine the Key Stages in Customer Experience

With the information you get from the research in the previous step, the data can be used to identify what processes consumers go through.

A simple example, customer experience usually consists of several processes such as interest, research, purchasing, delivery, after-purchase support, and providing reviews, ratings, and sharing information.

These processes will of course vary depending on the type of consumer and the type of product/service offered.

However, knowing these important processes will help you make the customer journey map easier to understand and implement in your strategy.

5. Start Mapping

After all the important data and processes have been identified, the next step is to do the mapping itself.

There are many ways to create customer journey maps, it can be in the form of diagrams, timeline tables, pie charts, even videos.

The thing to note is that each map must represent the steps/processes experienced by consumers and there is a touchpoint column as a fixed variable.

You can also add emoticons with emojis to describe consumer feelings at a certain stage.

6. Map Analysis and Periodic Evaluation

After completing and applying the customer journey, you must conduct an analysis and answer the goals and objectives that were created at the beginning.

Make a list of challenges/obstacles that arise in this analysis process so that you can then evaluate them periodically.

The goal is to stay focused on the goals of the customer journey while helping you analyze better.

In order for consumers to be satisfied and loyal to your business, there's nothing wrong with learning more about the customer journey as one way to achieve customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

One way is to take the Customer Satisfaction and Relationship Program class at the Prasetiya Mulya Executive Learning Institute.

Starting from learning, concept applications, to workshops and group discussions, this class will help you develop your business more effectively.

Register for the class here, now!