CJM -Customer Journey Map
CJM — Customer Journey Map
The customer journey is something we’re all familiar with. Imagine you want to go out for lasagna with friends. The journey begins. Now you recall restaurant names, check nearby places on a map, remember reviews and read new ones, discuss these plans with friends. And finally, you make it happen: you reserve a table, arrive at the appointed time, settle in, place your order, and already smell the aromas of Italian cuisine.
As with any journey, it’s important not to lose our way and to navigate the terrain well. CJM (Customer Journey Map) is that very map designed to help navigate this entire path with the best results for both you and the client.
If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, then the way to a customer’s heart is through CJM.
Many companies don’t think about what happens before a customer takes active steps. Apparently, they just randomly ended up at the storefront or clicked on a link to the website. The reality is that all users go through this journey in any business.
Sometimes money spent on marketing projects doesn’t bring desired results. Sales departments struggle while consumers don’t change their purchasing decisions. Information about what stages the customer goes through and exactly how they make their choice helps solve this problem.
The customer journey can take years, and all this time we walk hand in hand with them. We search for touchpoints, identify problem areas, and increase trust levels (loyalty). All of this finds visual embodiment in the form of a graph or table. Here we see the goals, motives, desires, and fears of the person with whom we’re taking this exciting journey (unlike the sales funnel, where the consumer’s path appears too linear).
This is a simple way for a company to look at itself through the eyes of those it serves. However, CJMs aren’t meant to fully reflect the actual consumer experience. These maps should be based on data collected during research and directly from customers themselves: interviews, web analytics, observations.
CJMs often serve as the foundation for user experience (UX) optimization programs, identifying new ways for customers to achieve their goals while not forgetting about increasing sales.
Let’s define why we need to create CJMs and what the result of such a project will be.
The reasons can be conditionally divided into external ones, related to consumer-company interaction, and internal ones — inherent to the company’s own operations.
External reasons:
- Understanding real customer needs and their motivation
- Creating a step-by-step interaction plan for the customer and product
- Finding obstacles in current operations. This can lead to improved customer service and increased sales
- Overcoming obstacles that customers face on their path to collaboration
- Increasing loyalty of customers who will use your service or product. The number of returning consumers grows when we’ve designed and implemented a barrier-free service
Internal reasons:
- Increasing company specialists’ responsibility. When we understand their connection to touchpoints, it becomes clear who is responsible for what at each stage of the journey, how customer interaction is structured, and how their actions affect the customer experience
- Determining how coordinated different departments interact throughout the journey. Fragmented structures (isolated departments or divisions) are usually hindered by poor information exchange, incorrect assumptions, lack of common standards, and duplication of efforts
- The opportunity to come up with something new or use previously untapped resources
- Creating your own customer service standard, especially if the company has multiple products or divisions
- Creating a more user-oriented approach to product design, which ultimately leads to improved user experience
Creating a CJM is a complex but fascinating process. The map creator can be not only a marketing or product specialist. It can be a UX designer or CEO — any employee interested in customer opinions, product operational principles, and service delivery.
It’s time to talk numbers. What are the economic consequences of using CJM?
When it comes to measuring the effectiveness and success of the path to purchase, many companies focus their efforts specifically on creating CJMs to help them identify positive and negative customer experiences.
Journey maps can be a good starting point for measuring performance and return on investment, but without related baseline data, journey mapping is nothing more than well-thought-out theories.
Companies that use data collected from a huge number of individual interactions (interviews, surveys), along with mapping the customer journey, gain significant advantages:
- The entire spectrum of paths that real customers actually take becomes visible, allowing identification of the most significant ones
- Companies can view the customer journey not only at the macro level but also have endless opportunities for detailing and identifying specific features
- Marketers can identify opportunities for real-time interaction based on customer behavior analysis
- Actionable ideas emerge that allow companies to deliver the essentials to customers in the right place at the right time
Using CJM can help optimize up to 40% of marketing expenses. Companies using this tool increase sales and customer retention rates by an average of 30%.
Customers who are maximally satisfied with their journeys (and their satisfaction increases by up to 20%) can raise revenue by up to 15% while simultaneously reducing customer service costs by as much as 20%. Improving customer service quality is worth it, isn’t it?
That’s why companies have started studying every touchpoint their customers interact with across multiple channels to provide a unique, inspiring, and personalized customer experience.
Let’s say you’re already quite interested in creating a CJM. What information should you capture on the map?
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First, we need to understand the target audience — those customers who will follow our map. Then, based on the data obtained, we personify the audience or part of it as a persona - a collective image of the “traveler.”
The persona should be represented as a real person with their own character, habits, and behavior. We need to identify customer behavior patterns and describe their main characteristics: gender, age, profession, interests. It’s better to have several personas — after all, everyone has their own path, and this way we’ll be prepared for any surprises along the way. A more detailed map will require even more detailed buyer data: problems, doubts, triggers, and distracting factors.
The more sources, the better. Let’s emphasize again: the method’s success depends not on personal perception or awareness but on data provided by real representatives of the audience that needs to be analyzed. This can be done through surveys, including by phone and on social networks, or by collecting service statistics, up to a full-fledged social survey. Such methods help create a more detailed and realistic picture of users’ questions, feelings, and motivations. Studying search queries allows understanding what specific questions a potential customer might ask and what exactly they’re looking for.
In general, web analytics is one of the most obvious ways to obtain information about where users came from and what they’re trying to achieve. It also helps determine what they abandoned.
A large number of clicks or long wait times aren’t signs of a happy journey. It’s quite possible that customers got lost or confused.
Customer support representatives and sales managers interact most closely with customers - they’ll also have something to contribute when creating the map. But remember, these people don’t see the entire path to purchase. We’ll need to assemble the puzzle by talking to different employees.
You may need the personal experience of a “mystery shopper.” Try to forget everything about the product or service “from the inside.” By tracking the entire buyer’s journey, we’ll gain truly valuable experience that can become the foundation of the map.
What metrics are usually captured at a certain stage of the map? (Caution: lots of confusing terms!)
Where we interact with people between the awareness and evaluation stages, there will be “Reach,” “First Conversion” (C1), and “Purchasing Power Demand” (PPD) indicators. Everyone who reaches the evaluation stage is marked with the letter L -“Leads.”
When the customer has reviewed the assortment, chosen a product, and products have been presented and packaged, you can note “Brand” and “Quality Perception” indicators.
All people who reach the transaction stage are already full-fledged customers, the “Second Conversion” (C2) indicator. However, some customers may drop off at the transaction moment, creating a “Churn” indicator.
Sales managers’ work at the transaction stage will provide us with “Up-sell” and “Cross-sell” indicators (US and CS).
How “Customer Experience” and “Trigger” work will affect the “Number of Repeat Transactions” (Q) and Customer Retention Cost (CRC). Unfortunately, there are also “Returns” and repeated “Churn” on the existing base.
And don’t forget about “Customer Acquisition Cost” (CAC), stretched from awareness to transaction.
“Personnel Costs” will be included in all stages of the customer journey map.
Now we see that essentially, CJM is a graphical profit formula.
What happens after purchase matters because it reinforces the impression of the seller and leads the customer to the final moment of truth-the experience that some customers share with others.
Buyers always pay attention to expert opinions and other buyers. This resembles the so-called “Amazon effect,” when at the very last moment we compare prices and customer service quality on mobile devices.
You reap what you sow: underestimating consumer opinion indicates the seller’s real attitude toward them. Every day, more interconnected customers turn to social media seeking support or expressing emotions about using a certain product or dealing with a certain company. Some try to find answers to their questions from consumers like themselves, others leave comments to pour out their souls. A small portion of customers hope to get a direct response from the company.
People want companies to respond to them on Twitter!
Companies must understand that social media is the new norm of our time. Many social media platforms, whether you use them or not, are now part of digital lifestyle, where Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube, among others, are turning into platforms where customers can connect, communicate, and share experiences.
Research shows that no one admires a product or service just because they bought it. Customers will go through their journey again to check, test, and evaluate what was offered to them.
Accompanying the customer’s next steps will determine whether they turn away from the seller, become their active advocate, or worse, tell the world about their negative experience, which will influence other consumers’ decisions.
It turns out that someone’s past purchasing experience doesn’t disappear but becomes an important argument in deciding on a new transaction. This must always be considered when building the map. The transaction isn’t the end of the journey.
Loyalty Mechanics
In early marketing funnel models, this stage wasn’t even included (which doesn’t reflect well on marketers’ reputation). Companies attracted their customers and thought the buyer’s journey was over. But they didn’t understand that the key to business growth is convincing customers to buy again. How to do this?
Working with CJM allows increasing customer loyalty, meaning reducing churn and increasing the percentage of repeat purchases. Customers who encounter minimal obstacles on their path to the goal more willingly return to the company’s services. But the main thing is loyalty mechanics, which show themselves in all their glory after purchase.
We all know them well: discounts, bonuses, and various points we earn by spending.
There are also slightly more sophisticated techniques. For example, personalization — offers that come to you personally based on your preferences (for example, a personal promo code sent to your email).
Here we need to remember what persona is going through this stage of the journey. If they’re young and adventurous, it might make sense to include them in a prize draw among buyers. If less active -well, instead of a lottery, offer an accumulative discount. All this will help retain the customer and increase their lifetime value.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a term that describes how much your customer is worth to your business from their first purchase to the moment they stop spending on your product or service. This is an important metric to track, as research has shown that profit is maximized at this stage.
Specifically, one study found that increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost company profit by almost 100%. Happy customers spend more on your services and are more likely to tell their friends about you.
It’s important to remember here that people, unfortunately, expect weak support after the purchase stage. Thus, making them feel special with exclusive content intended only for members and sensitively responding to problems can work wonders.
