Customer Journey Mapping software creates visual representations of customer behaviors, perceptions, emotions, and needs that help companies gain in-depth insight into how customers are interacting with their products and services. This process helps organizations understand how customers engage at every step of their journey with a brand, from initial contact to conversion and retention. Generally part of CX software solutions, customer journey maps are designed to provide customer insights, improve and optimize budgets and processes according to customer impact, identify customer issues or opportunities, and improve the customer experience as a whole.
Customer journey maps include information about all the touchpoints a customer makes while interacting with a company online, including email, social media, online ads, reviews, product demonstrations, surveys, subscription renewals, and customer support. These maps can be customized to include the specific touchpoints that companies use to attract, convert, and retain customers for a holistic view of the customer journey.
Customer journey mapping capabilities are available as stand-alone solutions and are also integrated with other tools to enhance the overall customer experience. For example, customer journey mapping capabilities are typically included within Digital Experience Management (DXM) solutions, while also working in close conjunction to Customer Intelligence platforms.
Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping
The benefits of Customer Journey Mapping include the following:
- Observe Customer Interactions with Products & Services: Customer journey mapping helps companies gather insights into actual customer behaviors and visualize customers' processes as they navigate company assets online. This increases understanding and helps organizations provide a more streamlined and positive customer experience.
- Understand the Customer Journey Across Various Touchpoints: Customer journey mapping captures customer interactions across a variety of different touchpoints, beginning with the initial discovery of a brand through purchases and ongoing business retention. Seeing each point of the journey helps companies improve processes, products, and services with real customer interaction data.
- Identify Customer Needs: Customer journey mapping is an important process for identifying customer needs and intent and can help highlight points in the customer journey where needs are not being met. This helps companies remove pain points or friction from the customer journey to improve the experience and drive sales and loyalty.
- Visualize Customer Emotions to Create Empathy: Customer journey mapping helps companies empathize with their customers on a personal level and understand their preferences, emotions, and reactions along the customer journey. This humanizes customers and helps teams create processes and products that serve the needs of real people and not just avatars of typical customers.
- Drive Sales & Increase Marketing ROI: Customer journey mapping provides deep insight into customer behavior and needs. Addressing unmet needs and improving customer experiences helps create more ROI in marketing efforts and drives overall profits for a company through increased conversions and customer retention.
- Gain a Competitive Market Advantage: An in-depth understanding of customer journeys helps companies address customer needs to improve and innovate how customers experience their brand, giving them a competitive advantage in the market by delivering an excellent customer experience.
