Mapping customers %%sep%% CTH

A customer journey map is the multi-directional tool that helps you understand the individuals’ experience when visiting your pages and see what they’re trying to achieve.

In this post you’ll discover how online users (fictitious characters) will interact with your online business. Which will help you, and/or your team identify unseen opportunities to enhance their experience.

There’s several mapping examples – we will show you how well the user (UX) experience, customer service is working together within your content structure (sales funnel). This can emphasise and/or differentiate the overall business’s online experience.

Let’s get started…

Mapping your user’s journey correctly can help you

This is ultra important as you get to see where you stand. You can add the steps to you CRM and analytics to show you:

when a user moves from one device to another (touch-points)
show you where the user stopped or left and why
show the channel’s interactivity/ usability

It will also support and encourage individuals across the organization to work their magic. Pushing them to see and walk in the user’s shoes.

Client Journey Mapping — **Example of How to do a Customer Mapping** – **Journey map** **in Saas industry**

Example: how they think and feel and what their questions and needs are.

A good customer mapping will depend on the following:

The content creators, product designers, SEO, internal stakeholders and who ever is involved in creating content for end-users.
Identifying and describing all relationships on the map by answering the questions: What’s the main goal/focus? What do we offer them? How do we present it? Who does what? This map must show you the nearest picture of what you are dealing with.
Have a Persona ready – you’ll need a rich customer profile or persona. Describing his/her personal and business situation, likes and dislikes, needs in the present and the future (ambitions).
Discussing and elaborating how these characters influence the quality of your content work and how a customer benefits (needs) from it.

Why do you need a customer journey mapping?

Drawing a customer journey is an ideal way to view and describe the path an individual takes before becoming a customer of the business. It all starts with a search, a channel and there is a user decision involved to purchase a product or service and become a loyal customer.

The customer mapping may take several forms and tends to focus on the experiential side of the user experience.

Which leads us to ask: What do they wish to achieve soon as they land on-page, what are they looking to solve and what are their expectations?

Why we need to create a customer journey?

One of the obvious reasons, is the more you find out about the individual’s experience the better. There is a decision path somewhere down the middle of each person’s journey.

So learning more about their positive and/or negative experiences will save time, money and will give you a better perspective to create epic content.

Workout the touchpoints: note down every action they take, why, when and (where), itemise channels along with the touchpoints they will face next. This will (literally) let you walk in the customer’s shoes (gives better perception).

Discover the moments of truth: you can or should be able to easily identify the moments the customer encounters blocks or barriers throughout the content you offer. This is super valuable, when you start by identifying those moments to write or present the obvious content.

How to map a customer journey?

We need to think it as a roadmap with trails and stops or touchpoints.
We may draft or list all the actions (as close as possible) the customer takes to achieve his or her goal.

The best way to go about it is to print one or two of your personas out, so you get a visual picture to help you start. To enhance a customer journey map even further you need to evaluate data from your analytics which is another good starting point. if you can collect data from surveys, emails these are beneficial too.

Helps you getting to know the users who already visited your pages.

This will also helps the discussion further on how to improve the quality of your work and how the customer benefits instead suffering from it.

The Personas

We need a rich customer profile or persona. Describe his/her personal and business situation now (present situation) and in the future (ambitions).

What outcomes to expect: A complete description of his/ her desired outcome – what is he/she trying to achieve or solve?

The more information you include the more you can use to design an ideal user/prospect journey. Doing so, will allow you to draw the best possible user profile – achieving a particular goal as quickly and easily as possible.

We need then to think how this translates into your customer experience roadmap phases to transform your business. I mean by this – “Which steps and touchpoints will they take first” as mentioned above. We may list all the actions (as close as possible) the customer takes to achieve his or her goal.

Build the customer journey

Many call it “Customer Service Design Thinking” (trendy name) – I’d rather call it “mapping customer presence“ which is, a step-by-step user path describing the way he or she interacts (to reach their goal) when browsing a website, app, etc.

To do so, you can either create a flow diagram or document it in a Excel, Word.

Hint: Visual information will help you and your team design/improve the ideal user journey much quicker.

Use A/B test pages to test and see reactions or what path decisions they make about their goal.

The overall experience should combine the users and business goals. As such you need to consider:

The individuals who previously bought or use your services.

Having your team to identify and trace what people will do online in a particular scenario. (This can be extracted/documented in personas).

Map out the obvious steps the user/visitor could complete his intended task.

Example: discovering, reading reviews, deciding which to go for, buying the product, delivery time; cancelling it, etc.

Highlight (use post-it) whether the visitor had or could be facing any problems completing a particular task.

Anticipate the unknown: write down solutions to his/her problem (What & how to improve it?) in order to make the user/customer journey easier, simple, quicker and successful.

Align it with your business goals: these need to be realistic and aligned with the user’s goals.

One realstic/possible scenario:
This millennium, normal individuals often start online research on a smartphone, we may or may not move on to desktop to print/download the map or scan a QR code to complete the purchase.

The next possible step is that they eventually share their own experience in Instagram after purchasing the item.

See the steps used. That is the right way to discover, formulate and visualise individual behavioural patterns.

Tip: Create or add your an extra layer by adding a empathy map. ( include: direct interests, feelings, needs…)

From experience you and your team mates should see the business from the customer’s lens – meaning, start well before the moment he/she decided to use your product or services.

We could also call this a “omnichannel experience”.

Read about Omnichannel steps on my Quora post.

Great answer by @Paul_CTH on @Quora https://t.co/yxF65COTGJ pic.twitter.com/CRWMORVajp
— Quora for Business (@QuoraBusiness) February 21, 2019

Customer journey mapping tools

Cxomni is a fantastic all-in-one SaaS customer journey cloud based mapping tool. It offers you a superb overview and perspective compared to many other out there.

Cxomni allows small-medium to big organizations to discover new data, manage buyer personas, customer journey maps, and above all connect and drive the customer experience touchpoints.

Best Features:

Collect and prioritise pain points,
Capture insights for innovation
Customer voices across all departments
CX management platform to analyse CX/UX insights
Monitor sentiments, pain points, emotional journeys, performance gaps, and more
Connect to real-time market and feedback data

Cost: Best part of all, its forever FREE as long you use up to 100 touchpoints and allows up to five users to login.

Canvanizer

Canvanizer is a very effective customer journey mapping tool that enables you and your team to quickly brainstorm many stages in one central place. This tool allows you to run all aspects of the customer journey stages, from early pre-design service to post-service.

Key Features

Brainstorming product/service processes and better generate ideas
Design design thinking or reajust them as you go along
List early pre-services period including: social media, word-of-mouth, past experiences, and expectations
Service journey stage and user experience
Includes customer relationship management, social media, and satisfaction/dissatisfaction.

Try mapping your journey with their online demo free of charge

Customer-journey canvas demo template by Canvanizer — Try Canavizer Customer Mapping Online

Conclusion

Remember that before setting up your sales page or publishing valuable content on your site, you’re better off drawing or checking out your client’s /customer mapping experience.

Before you start, try to be sensitive to, aware and/or experiencing the feelings and experiences of another individual. Start here, and you’ll see how to improve the three stages of your customer journey planning.

The user or client journey maps are essentially focused on each but unique stages that the visitor will experience on your site, app, etc.

Your customer’s journey must capture all the experiences, he or she has with your brand. It goes through his or her’s point-of-view, while connecting your services with the back stage or supporting customer experience processes.

Thanks for reading this post. Feel free to comment and share it.

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Here you’ll find Saas marketing tactics for any Saas business size.

We’ve found that the Saas’s success rate is quite low in the U.K. market.

Why?

Because many Saas lose focus and forget to consult their customer mapping document, and/or marketing tactics, sales.

This is your chance (sometimes unique) to use and apply the bait to get more users. Then think how you could improve the product to keep your customers in.

We will split this into a three-part blog post and we’ll will first look at some free growth tactics.

We’ll then go on to talk in part three with different revenue streams a SaaS business should be looking to add.

Remember nothing in life is totally free and this is even more true in modern marketing.

Only the best Saas businesses that create innovative strategies/tactics will survive and thrive.

The key to succeed:

a) put in place a good marketing/content strategy

b) be customer focussed/centric

c) be agile (redesign your marketing funnel quicker than the competitor).

d) Innovate, test, test and repeat.

Provide value before asking for money. We see quite a few big Saas names betting on this tactic. We’ll see later on which ones are being successful.

So here we go.

Must offer free a 20 to 30 day trial period [Aka subscription model]

Tactic 1: The focus on value and free trials when launching a service/product – is a must. Study your audience inside-out. Then email or call them to suggest your services/product and if they want to try it for free.

This great technique works really well.

You can offer 20 days free trial period up to a full month.

Let me ask you this: What have you got to lose anyway? In my view nothing.

A free trial is your foot on the door, a small opening that will allow you to connect and build confidence and trust with new prospects. Let them play around during that period.

Step 1: Send a first email introduction explaining how it will work going forward.

Step 2: Few minutes later send them those magic video tutorials.

Step 3: Grab your best Faq page to clarify any questions/issues they may have – example: how to fix or get this code/app installed in no time.

Step 4: 4-5 days later offer to come in or setup Zoom call to explain how to maximise the product before they start paying you. If they’re not ready, extend the offer to another week or two.

This is a four fold tactic.

Firstly, you’ve got their attention, secondly you showed professionalism, have them hooked (if they like it), thirdly, a big opportunity to sign them and increase client base; and finally, if they are happy with the service provided they will be your best allies, fans and promoters/advocates.

Saas Customer Service /Support

Tactic 2: The very first thing you should do – write on your to-do list:

“improve customer satisfaction”.

Be clear/specific up front. From day one tell your clients that there is a business SLA in place with distinctive promise.

Example:

Software support response in under an hour.
App is 99% code error free.
Do not charge for extra usage.

Also, tell the client that updates and software speed are a priority and part of your business’s values.

This will increase your clients trust with the brand/product.

Create new tactical marketing channels

Tactic 3: it’s all about the numbers in business. The more users and/or visitors you get the better.

Get your small team to brainstorm and analyse the impact of a new marketing channel. This could be two to three channels. Keep one on standby ready to go once you are getting momentum.

Ensure you invest enough time in the new marketing channels. No need to invest lots of money in marketing to touch significant numbers. There are easy ways to go aboutthis, but we tackle those later on on part two and three.

Saas Marketing Growth hacking Tactic example:

Find and select your best ranking topics and repurpose or convert it into a fun animated video. Then post it on Youtube, Vimeo, etc.

You could also grab your best content and transform it into a colourful infographic.

By being present on these two platforms you could give your business a tremendous boost.

Note: Youtube is the world heavy-weight champion of search engines.

Have you try any of these? Not yet, the why are you waiting?

Go now and give it a try.

Ready for Saas marketing tactics part two?

Thanks for reading it and do share it with friends, coworkers etc.

Image by Gerd Altmann

Why Customer Journey Mapping?