What is the Customer Journey? And How to Visualize it
To understand our customers, we map out the route they take through our marketing, advertising, and sales processes. This is your customer journey. It’s a way to understand how it feels for your customers to deal with you at each step along the path.
Customer journey mapping is a valuable tool. It is sometimes also known as the Buyer’s Journey.
Watching this video is worth 3 Management Courses CPD Points*.
🔎 See below for details
Marketing for Managers
This video is part of course module number 8.3.2
Program 8: Managing Customers & Clients
Course 3: Marketing for Managers
Section 2: Marketing Strategy
Other videos in this section include:
🎬 What is Market Research? https://youtu.be/a9wa1-_2R9E
🎬 What is a Marketing Strategy? https://youtu.be/cpPjuKfswOo
🎬 What is Market Segmentation? https://youtu.be/7FtiPAlBdto
🎬 What is a Customer Persona? https://youtu.be/DJWftQwPtAk
🎬 What is Multi Level Marketing (MLM)? https://youtu.be/u7rRVM_eTo4
LESSON NOTES
The customer journey represents how the customer progresses through stages from recognizing they have a need or desire, being a loyal customer.
A customer journey is the set of experiences your customers have with you. It is often represented visually, as a Customer Journey Map. It helps you understand their experience of your brand from their first engagement with it to the mature phase of a loyal, long-term relationship.
This is valuable in:
• Determining how to market and sell your products or services
• Understanding where some customers bail out of active consideration or a decision to purchase
• Spotting pain points where customers find it hard, uncomfortable, frustrating, or downright awful to deal with you or your agents
• Gaining insight into how your customers make buying decisions and what stops them from saying ‘yes’
• Seeing their experiences of your products – particularly as they start to use them
• Identifying what interactions strengthen or damage their relationship with your brand
How to Map the Customer Journey
1. Know who your customers are. Define your buyer personas https://youtu.be/DJWftQwPtAk. Then map out the experience each one will have.
2. Identify the stages of their journey with you. Here are some examples:
• Recognizing they have a need
• Becoming aware of your product or service
• Taking an interest in your offering and starting to consider it
• Evaluating your product or service
• Perhaps testing it with a trial
• Making a purchase
• Experiencing your product or service as a paying customer
• Enjoying it and becoming a loyal customer
• In the ideal world, being willing to advocate for your product or service
3. Identify every touchpoint where your customer interacts with your business, brand, or partners, at each stage in their journey.
4. At each touchpoint, find out:
• what do they do?
• how will they feel?
• what are their intentions?
Then, use what your customer journey map has taught you to address any pain points and problems you have exposed.
Types of Customer Journey
The marketing company, Hubspot, usefully classifies Customer Journeys into four main types:
1. Current State
2. Future State
3. Day-in-the-Life
4. Service Blueprint
RECOMMENDED EXERCISE
1. Think about a customer or service user for your own organization. From your own experience and knowledge, create a current state customer journey map (3 MC CPD Points)
2. For extra CPD points, create a future state customer journey map and highlight the places where you identify improvements. Why not discuss it with your manager? (3 MC CPD Points)
DOWNLOADS
Free Resources
🧰 CPD Tools – https://gum.co/MC-CPD
Paid resources
🧳 Management Courses Onboarding Kit – https://gum.co/MC-ObK ($3)
RECOMMENDED READING
📖 Very quick overview
Marketing: A Very Short Introduction https://geni.us/ozSJF
📖 Good general overviews
Kotler on Marketing https://geni.us/JNeVHy
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind https://geni.us/kGj4KCA
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing https://geni.us/RVU1
Marketing For Dummies https://geni.us/sZXAw
📖 Small business marketing
The 1-Page Marketing Plan https://geni.us/Xb4wBk
📖 For a textbook, you can’t go wrong with Kotler’s name on it!
Marketing: An Introduction https://geni.us/q4gzVOw
Principles of Marketing https://geni.us/gsFeMT5
Marketing Management https://geni.us/i3FO
⭕️ Links to our book recommendations are affiliated through Amazon
Managers Need a Basic kit to do your job well. Here are my top recommendations: https://kit.co/MikeClayton/manager-s-work-kit (the links are affiliated)
MANAGEMENT COURSES CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT (CPD) POINTS
You can record your Management Courses CPD points on our free, downloadable CPD record log.
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Each video has two levels of MC CPD points. For this video:
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– If you also carried out all of the recommended exercises, score a total of 9 MC CPD points
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