Customer Journey Maps, Customer Profiles and Touch Points

Customer journey maps are a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through in engaging with your company, its products and services. The journey map is a tool to measure your customers’ satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy to create sustainable long-term revenue.

Consumer behavior is driven by the innate human need to satisfy identifiable as well as subconscious needs and desires. Journey maps connect consumers’ motivations to their behavior – and help us learn what rewards will get your customers to change their behavior.

Journey maps help us learn why people do what they do and help companies leverage such insights to improve the lives of their customers. Journey maps help us identifying barriers and solutions to influence consumer behavior.

Two things to consider when developing a journey map is the type of customer and type of interaction or “touch point:”

Types of customers: There are prospective customers, new customers and long-time customers. Prospects and new customers go through a “honeymoon” period where you can “wow” them and get them excited about what you can do for them. Next, if the honeymoon works out, they stick with us and we nurture the relationship with renewals, up-sells, cross-sells, etc. and they move from satisfied to loyal (less likely to switch). The final stage is advocate – where they tell everyone how great we are – our customers become our best sales people.

But what are the various profiles of these customers? Should we look at this by type of industry or by purchase power. Region is a factor, too – how you sell to someone in Brazil is much different than how you might sell to someone in China or Australia– there are all kinds of cultural issues to consider.

Touch Points: We must think of these touch points in terms of how the customer sees them – NOT how we see them. It is only when we can see ourselves through our customers eyes that we can truly begin to measure and improve our customer experience. Once we settle on the profiles, we can assume those “personas” and determine what the actual touch points are and logically group them from our customers’ perspective.