What Does Customer Experience Mapping Mean?
Mapping the customer experience is the process of merchants outlining how prospects and customers interact and feel when engaging with their brand. Conducting research to map this process enables merchants to predict how their target market will interact with the brand on the path to purchasing.
6 Steps For Mapping The Customer Experience
Step 1: Identify Business Objectives
The first step is to set clear goals for your business and your customers. Identify whether your company is striving to create a seamless online shopping experience or aiming to introduce a new product or service. Identifying these goals at the beginning of customer experience mapping helps brands know the scope of the modifications they need to make. Creating buyer personas will aid in customizing the customer experience map for each of your targeted personas.
Step 2: Collect Customer Feedback
The next step to mapping the customer experience is to conduct research on your customer base to identify their preferences. This can be done through net promoter score surveys, questionnaires and user testing. Be sure to only send these surveys and questions to existing customers and prospective customers because feedback from people who have already purchased or are very interested in purchasing is the most important.
Below are a few questions to ask in order to collect customer feedback. These questions can change due to the nature of the survey, of course.
How did you hear about our company?
On a scale of 1-10, how easy is it to navigate around our company website?
If you’ve ever needed customer support, how helpful was our support team on a scale of 1-10?
Additionally, utilizing this customer feedback enables companies to make smarter data-driven decisions both internally and externally. The customer feedback questions listed above aren’t comprehensive, meaning that brands can ask their customers a breadth of questions to help them better analyze previous customer orders, improve their marketing metrics and assess their company goals.
Step 3: Narrow Down Target Personas, But Don’t Group Them Together
After you’ve identified buyer personas, it’s time to narrow them down to the two or three that are most important to your business. The most important groups should be the personas that interact with your brand the most. Avoid grouping multiple buyer personas together at this stage because the customer experience map is supposed to reflect the unique path that each persona takes when purchasing from your website. If they’re grouped together, the map won’t accurately represent each persona’s path to purchasing.
Step 4: List Out All The Touchpoints
Touchpoints are the points of interaction between your brand and a prospect, lead or customer. Remember, touchpoints don’t just refer to your website; they include engagement on social media, organic search, paid ads, email marketing or third-party review websites such as Yelp. It’s important that each touchpoint provides a frictionless experience for every individual. List out all the touchpoints that your customers and prospective customers currently use based on the data collected from the customer feedback. Be sure to include additional touchpoints that your team thinks customers should be interacting with.
Pinpointing each touchpoint is one of the most important steps in mapping the customer experience because these touchpoints provide merchants with a top-down view of how prospects and customers interact with your brand. Reviewing analytics information on each touchpoint allows merchants to understand the actions users are taking as well as their emotions and pain points. From there, merchants have an opportunity to streamline the process.
Step 5: Discover Your Advantages & Uncover Opportunities For Improvement
Mapping the customer experience should touch on almost every aspect of your eCommerce business. What we mean by discovering your advantages is to take a look at all of the actions your company takes to create a seamless customer experience. Take note of everything that your business does well in streamlining the purchasing decision process. At the same time, this will help you uncover areas for improvement. If your team is lacking in one area, you’ll see it in the map and become aware of how you can improve what you were previously doing.
Step 6: Test The Customer Journey Yourself & Make Updates
Now that your customer experience map is complete, the final step is to test it out for yourself. The entire mapping process is hypothetical until it’s implemented and tested. Test it out for each buyer persona by taking the journey that they would. This means looking at social media posts, reading and engaging with emails and searching relevant keywords on a search engine like Google.
Once you do this, make the necessary changes to refine the experience. If you didn’t reach the goal that you want the buyer persona to reach, then the real user that matches that buyer persona will not reach it either. Regardless of the scope of the changes that you make, they will affect the customer experience and address pain points. Making these changes on a quarterly or even monthly basis will help you create a frictionless customer experience.
Conclusion
I hope these 6 steps to mapping the customer experience help convert more prospects into paying customers. By focusing on optimizing the map for various buyer personas, you’ll be able to identify areas for improvement and remove friction from the purchasing process.
Do you want to map your eCommerce customer experience? Learn how Groove Commerce can help drive a measurable impact on your online revenue with eCommerce marketing. Get in touch with our team of eCommerce specialists through the form below. We’re happy to help!
What Does Customer Experience Mapping Mean?
Mapping the customer experience is the process of merchants outlining how prospects and customers interact and feel when engaging with their brand. Conducting research to map this process enables merchants to predict how their target market will interact with the brand on the path to purchasing.
