Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Customer Experience in 2021

Using customer journey maps can be a real useful instrument for retailers. It helps better understand how customers interact with the company’s touch points. It makes complex numbers easy to understand in the form of a diagram.

The customer journey can be simple and easy or complicated and frustrating. Usually it’s somewhere in the middle for most companies. Few, such as Apple or Amazon, stand out when it comes to A-class customer experience .

Using customer journey maps to improve experience both online and in store

What most companies don’t really have yet figured out is how customers interact with the company across different sales channels. What exactly do they want and how they use the multiple channels the company has set-up. Are customers buying online? Probably. But what do they do afterwards? Or before that? How is the offline shop integrated in the customer journey? Is the customer satisfied with the current sales process?

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All these questions and more can be answered with a few carefully crafted studies and journey maps.

To do so, retailers need to use customer journey maps for separate customer types. These maps have to take into account the customer profile, different purchase scenarios and possible bottlenecks.

When customer journey maps are developed, several key aspects need to be taken into account:

1. See the company from the customer perspective
2. Research customer satisfaction
3. Build separate customer profiles for different market segments
4. Look for bottlenecks
5. Try to understand customer feelings

Once you’ve done the research, integrate the customer feedback on separate customer journey maps, focusing on different paths customer take and what it takes to improve their experience.

Here are some examples:

Example of customer journey maps that  improve customer experience

Bellow you’ll find two of the most popular examples of customer journeys in the retail world. Such maps outline the integration of four channels: the offline store, online operations, mobile apps and devices, the call center and social media. Of course, brands can choose to expand their sales operations to include other channels such as interactive kiosks, live stream shopping or technologies not yet discovered. But the five mentioned above will do just fine right now.

Example customer journey map no.1: The customer travels across four channels to finish the order and at the end shares his experience with his peers on social media.

Example customer journey map no.2: The customer discovers the product in the offline store, researches the product on the smartphone (showrooming), pays the product on the web store and the product is shipped home. After the purchase, the customer contacts the call center to activate the purchased product.

Customer Journey Map Template

Of course, such customer journeys differ from retailer to retailer. If you need to outline your company’s specific customer journey map, you can use the example below and ad specific customer journeys to it. Click the photo below to open the diagram in a new window and download the full resolution image.