Map Customer Journeys to Create Great Customer Experiences

Customer journey analytics interprets data from various touch points and interactions that a prospect or customer has with a company from end to end. Insights into the customer experience, behavior, and points of friction in sales and service help optimize the customer journey to improve customer satisfaction and drive better business outcomes. However, to derive these benefits you’re going to need a tool to give you a holistic understanding of customer engagement: the customer journey map.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of stages, touch points, actions, and experiences that a customer goes through while engaging with a company’s products, services, or brand.

Stages of the Journey

The customer journey map reveals the stages that a customer progresses through as they engage with a company both before and after becoming a customer. Common stages include:

• Awareness: The customer recognizes a need.
• Consideration: The customer compares options to meet the need.
• Decision: The customer chooses the best solution.
• Retention: A company’s ongoing marketing, service, sales, and communications with a customer post-purchase to promote loyalty and encourage additional purchases.
• Advocacy: A satisfied customer becomes a vocal supporter of the brand.

Touch points: Touch points are the interactions or points of contact that a customer has with the company, from start to finish. These can include advertising, website visits, social media interactions, customer service calls, virtual and in-person events, emails, texts, physical store visits, and more.

Customer Actions and Experiences: Alongside each touchpoint, the customer journey map highlights the actions a customer takes and customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction during each interaction.

What Insight Does a Customer Journey Map Provide?

Analyzing data from the customer journey map helps uncover patterns, trends, and correlations within the customer journey that may otherwise be overlooked. You’ll get a better understanding of how customers behave, where they engage and convert, why they might leave, and what’s next on their wish list. This data-driven approach helps you make informed decisions that optimize the customer journey.

Know Your Customers Better: By understanding customer behavior, preferences, and the factors that influence their decisions, businesses can craft more effective messages and marketing and sales campaigns.

Assess Touchpoint Effectiveness: Identifying which touch points are most influential in driving conversions, engagement, and customer satisfaction can lower customer acquisition costs, optimize revenue, and increase customer loyalty.

Prevent Customer Churn: With knowledge of customers who have had poor experiences, a company can identify customers who might leave and take proactive measures to retain them.  The company can also take steps to ensure that customer-facing processes work better in the future.

Anticipate Future Needs:  Businesses can apply predictive analytics to their customer journey data so they can anticipate what their customers might need in the future and create proactive solutions or strategies to meet those needs.

Getting Started on Your Customer Analytics Journey

The Actian Data Platform can help you get started on your customer analytics journey.  It provides everything you need to unify data across customer interaction touch points, bringing together data from call center and website logs, social media interactions, customer relationship management, customer service applications, third-party data, and more. Using the Actian platform, you’ll have greater confidence in the data you use to inform your customer journey.

Watch our webinar for more pointers on how to build a 360-degree view of customers to provide more meaningful experiences throughout the customer journey.

About Teresa Wingfield

Teresa Wingfield is Director of Product Marketing at Actian where she is responsible for communicating the unique value that the Actian Data Platform delivers, including proven data integration, data management and data analytics. She brings a 20-year track record of increasing revenue and awareness for analytics, security, and cloud solutions. Prior to Actian, Teresa managed product marketing at industry-leading companies such as Cisco, McAfee, and VMware.