7 Proven Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping for Your Business

Customer journey mapping sounds like a lot of work, and not to be a downer, but it can be. This is because it involves a lot of researching and analyzing, along with some back and forth with customers, sifting through feedback, and so on. It’s a big task that requires more than one or two teams in your company. However, the payback can be overwhelmingly positive, and your business may end up reaping the rewards for years to come.

If done properly and periodically, the benefits of customer journey mapping can be seen and felt, not only in your revenue. You’ll also see changes in the turnaround time for closed sales, an increase in target audience engagement, and better employee morale. If you’ve been scratching your head, wondering what else you can do to have your marketing plans pay off, or if you want to elevate your customer experience, this is the article for you.

How customer journey mapping can benefit your brand

Before you get started, find out what your goal is. Customer journey mapping is a very nuanced exercise. You’re dealing with their emotions, actions, and questions, whatever they may be. You also have a lot of other teams in your company working together to define a goal and achieve it. It’s a must if you really want to gain a deep understanding of what motivates your customers to look into your brand, engage with your business, make a purchase, and come back for more.

Perhaps you've been considering starting the process of customer journey mapping to harness its benefits for your business. However, you might be uncertain about how to begin. Here's a guide to assist you. To further convince you of its importance, let's delve into the guaranteed benefits your business can reap from effective customer journey mapping.

1. Improved approach to customer support and service

Because companies and teams are able to collect actual insight into how customers interact with staff, they are better able to understand what causes the customer’s frustrations, disappointments, and concerns. One of the benefits of customer journey mapping is giving companies the chance to analyze the customer’s thought process while communicating with them. Taking into consideration their emotions at the time, along with the actions they’re taking. By doing this, businesses can then formulate an improved way to approach customer support and service.

The ability to see, understand, and predict customer behavior in this way enables your teams to do the following:

• Empathize better

• Build rapport a lot easier

• Prioritize addressing the customer’s needs that have not been met before

• Create stronger bonds with prospects and leads

• Increase customer retention

• Improve customer experience

Customer service and sales teams should regularly conduct customer journey mapping to continuously improve the processes and procedures they already have in place. A customer’s journey through a number of touchpoints, even within the same company, can be complex. People are ever-changing creatures, and if you want to ensure that your customers are faced with the best that your company has to offer, schedule the practice as soon as you’re able.

2. More effective marketing strategies through learned customer behavior

Customer journey mapping brings to light the customer’s needs and pain points. Because they are brought into sharper focus, you are then capable of formulating a marketing plan that hits all the right spots. Another one of the benefits of customer journey mapping is that you can position your products and/or services to answer the customer’s requirements. This is because you better grasp the customer’s needs and wants.

Part of customer journey mapping allows businesses to tailor their approaches to varying customer segments or types. Leads and prospects can be classified based on a number of factors to make way for a more customized sales and marketing approach. These include:

• Personalized support across multiple channels

• Customized prospecting, selling, and aftersales care

• Targeted content and communications through social media platforms

• Tailor-made emails and SMS messages

You, along with your sales and marketing team, will find that your content will feel more genuine and less forced. This happens the more you get to know your customer through the benefits of customer journey mapping. Since you’re able to predict customer behavior, you will also notice that connecting to them, as well as your sales efforts, becomes a lot easier.

3. Targeted marketing leads to audience growth and increased engagement

Thanks to the benefits of customer journey mapping, your company will be able to make realistic changes to your website and business social media accounts. This will drum up more interest in your business from customers and investors alike. The changes that make your business more accessible, showing that your brand is more than capable of meeting customers’ needs will encourage visitors to engage with you more and more.

You can start the targeted marketing practices to grow your reach by:

• Making landing pages specific to particular kinds of website visitors

• Providing omnichannel support and marketing

• Having a contact center ready with every means of communication open for use

• Removing redundancies within the sales cycle

• Preventing silos by aligning different departments on the same page

Providing them with concrete solutions and viable options with your products and services will be second nature. This happens when various teams within the same company make an exerted effort to meet the customer where they need you.

4. Higher conversion rates, faster sales cycles, and bigger revenue

When you know your customers, everything happens at a quicker pace. Since your marketing content is a lot more focused, your sales efforts will get more rewarded. It becomes a less strenuous part of the cycle, and you will find the task of relating to customers and closing a sale more enjoyable. You won’t even need a lot of persuading. Since you already have all the leads’ and prospects’ information in your CRM, you can go back to the drawing board and redo your marketing approach anytime.

Once the sales start coming in from the benefits of customer journey mapping, your team can then provide post-purchase support and care of higher quality. Repeat customers have a lot of sway in how a business attracts new prospects and secures a solid reputation in the industry. You won’t have to worry about topping your revenue from the previous year. The sales will pour in as long as you put the customer experience first and foremost.

5. Omnichannel marketing and support based on customer research

Like it or not, people have preferences even when it comes to the communication channels that they always use. For some, phone calls get the job done a lot faster. For others, it’s not fast enough, and live chat is a better fit. Some prefer sending emails, and so on. For a business that wants to cater to a wide spectrum of customers whenever needed, you should always be ready to do so. Get your hands on a communication tool that will allow you to assist your customers through whichever app or tool they choose.

One more of the benefits of customer journey mapping is the facility to provide the customer with options. When you have the means to reach customers and convert sales across all channels, you’re taking advantage of any amount of exposure to the buying public. Whether it’s someone viewing your Instagram reel or another commenting on your TikTok content, you need to be ready to connect with prospects on the platform they choose. This way, they’re comfortable enough to ask questions, research your brand on their own, and peruse your website for insight.

6. Enhanced communication and understanding through customer feedback

Other businesses find it easier to put systems and protocols in place and leave their teams to it. To them, having to deal with customers, especially the difficult ones, is time-consuming and they’d rather focus their energies somewhere else. Sometimes, though, difficult customers have reasons to keep coming back in the hopes that the company will do something to turn their experience around. A winner is always up to the challenge. They seek to comprehend where the customer is coming from, what is causing the dissatisfaction, and what they can do to set things right. Although, sometimes, a resolution is not something that will satisfy both sides, at least they can come up with a compromise.

Insight is one of the valuable benefits of customer journey mapping. When you get your facts and qualitative data straight from the customer, you have a bigger chance of having them continue on their journey with your company or convert to a sale. Seek to clarify which areas in your website confuse them, for example.

Ask open-ended questions to get as much information as you can. You may use some of these examples:

• How do you feel about the way your last issue was addressed?

• What, do you think, is missing from our website?

• How did you hear about our brand?

• Do you have any questions before completing your purchase?

• How likely are you to recommend our brand to family and friends?

• What can we do to make your shopping or browsing experience a bit better?

• On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest), how do you rate your interaction with our team?

• If you did not make a purchase today, what would be the reason?

Surveys, feedback, and suggestion forms are great ways to really get into the emotions and mentality of a customer. This makes putting these questionnaires together of utmost importance. Take your time in formulating questions and make sure that all of the results are encoded and stored safely in a central team drive for future study.

7. Better overall team collaboration

Since you’ve eliminated the blockades among the teams in your company and given them all the directives to achieve one common goal, you can expect better collaboration. This is not only within your customer service team or sales. But this also covers how a team cross-functions with another to work seamlessly as one. Because you’re able to clearly define each one’s job to enhance the customer journey, there will be no room for miscommunication or misunderstanding. All that will be left for everyone to do is to ensure customer satisfaction and get the sale, referral, or repeat business.

Peace and harmony – as corny as it all may sound – can be expected, being one of the benefits of customer journey mapping. Because your customers are happy, your employees will be happy. Since you now can retain customers better, your staff will choose to stay with you a little longer. Lastly, because your customers are happy, they will keep coming back to your brand. You will then have more to reward your employees with for all of their hard work.

Mapping the customer journey is a never-ending venture

Customer journey mapping is a continuous process. Since it’s meant to help you visualize how customers interact with your company at varying touchpoints, it should be treated as a live record that needs to be updated from time to time. Their actions, the words they use, and overall behavior paint a picture of their emotions, thought processes, and motivations that can be easily determined. You need to use powerful software to aid you every step of the way.

Bitrix24 has all the tools that you need in customer journey mapping. Easy to use, affordable, and efficient, Bitrix24 is more than capable of making sure each mapping exercise is a success. But don’t just take our word for it. Sign up today and enjoy the benefits of customer journey mapping with Bitrix24!

FAQs

The key benefits of customer journey mapping are:

• Improved approach to customer support and service

• More effective marketing strategies through learned customer behavior

• Targeted marketing leads to audience growth and increased engagement

• Higher conversion rates, faster sales cycles, and bigger revenue

• Omnichannel marketing and support based on customer research

• Enhanced communication and understanding through customer feedback

• Better overall team collaboration

Customer journey mapping improves customer experience by showing companies how customers feel and think at various touchpoints. This helps them avoid potential bottlenecks, causes for dissatisfaction, and overall loss of interest.

The best practices for analyzing touchpoints in a customer journey are:

• Identify these contact points between your company and the customer

• Highlight the crucial points of contact

• Get feedback from customers at each interaction point

• Meet with your teams to discuss how to improve satisfaction, retention, and overall experience

• Apply the changes and retest the response