What is customer journey? Steps to build an effective customer journey map

Customer journey is a method that helps businesses better understand their customer journeys to come up with business strategies to better reach users. So what are the steps to build a customer journey map to optimize and save time?. Join Viindoo to learn about the concept of Customer journey and the steps to build an effective customer journey map!

1. What is customer journey?

Customer journey is the journey a person takes from becoming aware of a brand before becoming a customer, leading to a purchase and ultimately customer loyalty.

Currently, building customer journey is a strategic business approach that many businesses around the world are implementing. Because this is a way to reach customers to better understand their needs and optimize the customer experience. In addition, businesses can receive a number of benefits when using customer journey:

• Understand customers: Understanding customer shopping behavior helps businesses improve and optimize the sales process and introduce products to users.
• Customer access: Know which sales channels reach the most customers. From there, focus on developing the most effective means and help businesses save time and money.
• Quality improvement: Know which products and services are not popular with consumers. Thereby, improving product quality better to bring different experiences to customers.
• Marketing support: Identify the business's customers and help the marketing department easily promote products to customers.
• Loyal customers: Businesses will have a series of loyal customers if they use customer journey to promote future shopping habits and meet all consumers' desires.

2. Steps to build a customer journey map

2.1. Clearly define your goals before building a customer journey map

Before building a customer journey map, businesses need to clearly define their goals:

• What is the purpose of creating a map?
• What is the goal of the map that the business wants to aim for?
• Who is the target?
• On what basis?

Based on these criteria, businesses can create a buyer portrait and collect relevant information about consumers' demographics, psychology and shopping habits. This helps businesses shape the steps to turn customers into potential customers.

2.2. Clearly identify target customers.

After determining the goal of building a customer journey map, businesses need to clearly identify the target customers they want to target. Businesses need to select the outstanding characteristics of customers' shopping habits that have been analyzed previously and focus on one or two target product groups among them.

If a business reaches too many target groups, the map will not accurately reflect the customer experience with the product. Identifying and focusing on reaching one or two target customer groups helps businesses more easily understand customer experience.

2.3. List all customer touchpoints with the business.

The next step is to document how customers interact with your business. First, businesses need to list all touchpoints and then track how customers interact with the business. For example: texting through the website, notifying that an order has been canceled, searching for products with the company's name on Google,...

This step is extremely important in determining customers' shopping actions. Thereby, businesses should consider and choose which touchpoints are increasing or decreasing to help customers achieve their desires.

2.4. Experience the customer journey from the customer's perspective

Businesses need to put themselves in the customer's perspective to experience the customer journey. Because every customer action comes from emotions and motivation. And each customer's emotions will change with each stage of the customer journey. Motivations are often the pain points that drive customer purchases.

Once you put yourself in the customer's shoes, businesses will know how to provide appropriate content at each time to hit each customer's emotions and pain points. Furthermore, it is possible to identify barriers to purchasing, often high costs.

2.5. Analyze and draw customer journey map

After determining and experiencing the customer journey yourself, businesses need to analyze and draw a customer journey map. Analyzing the results will help businesses see whether customers' wishes have been met or not. This way, businesses can ensure that they are providing valuable services and experiences. Best of all, the company can find solutions to consumers' shopping motivations. Next, draw a customer journey map with 4 necessary elements: Actions, Motivations, Questions and Pain Points.

2.6. Update customer journey map over time

Businesses need to update customer journey regularly because customer behavior and shopping habits are not fixed and often change. Therefore, monitor and analyze data in the customer journey to update customer trends and desires, promptly respond and give appropriate responses to customer needs.

3. Optimize customer journey with CRM software

Collecting and analyzing customer data is an important step in the process of building a customer journey map. To optimize and speed up the data collection process, businesses can combine the use of CRM software in the process of building a customer journey map. In addition, CRM software also gives businesses advantages such as:

• Identify customer segments: CRM will help businesses collect and analyze customer data such as demographics, behavior, and preferences. Businesses can use it to create customer segments based on common characteristics and needs.
• List touchpoints with customers: CRM can identify and create a map of touchpoints where customers have previously interacted with a business such as website, email, social networks, etc. Businesses can use it to determine actions, customer emotions, pain points, and desires at every touch point.
• Track and measure customer feedback: CRM collects and measures customer feedback by reviews, ratings, surveys. Businesses can use it to evaluate performance and identify areas that need improvement.
• Automate communication with customers: CRM automates interactions with customers through sending thank you emails, reminders, confirmation messages, etc. This helps businesses save time, increase efficiency and enhance customer loyalty row.
• Tool integration: CRM helps integrate data and processes with other tools such as communication channels, email marketing,... Businesses can use CRM to synchronize their data across different channels and ensure customer journey go smoothly.
  

To establish an effective customer journey, businesses need to consider and choose a reputable and high-performance CRM unit. And Viindoo CRM - a unit with special features - can help businesses optimize, save time and bring greater efficiency than conventional CRM. So what are the outstanding features of Viindoo CRM?

• The interface is designed in Kanban format, helping businesses not miss information and make operations easier in managing the sales process.
• Store information and all history related to customers.
• Automatically access potential customer files from customer data sources.
• Manage multiple data and integrate multiple features on one platform to interact with customers.
• Evaluate customer segments thoroughly from customer data sources and according to many other criteria. 
• Evaluate customer purchasing trends, habits and needs. 
• Report and analyze data, then make assessments through customer journey map and establish appropriate customer segments. 

Some special features of Viindoo CRM will probably be suitable for businesses that intend or are building a customer journey map. Viindoo CRM can help businesses optimize the process of collecting customer information and increase work efficiency more quickly.  

In short, customer journey is a method that helps businesses better understand customer needs. To better optimize the process, businesses can combine with Viindoo CRM software to build an effective and time-saving customer journey map.