When it comes to understanding the behavior of your own customers and understanding their needs, the customer journey is a helpful tool to achieve precisely these projects. Ultimately, it helps to visualize the current relationship with its optimization potential and to continuously perfect it. In addition to individual sub-areas such as services, products or customer segments, the customer journey can also be applied to the entire company.
Building an efficient customer journey is a process that requires a lot of attention to detail, as the individual touchpoints can have different effects on the customer from different perspectives. The right preparation and a strategic structure are therefore the be-all and end-all. This article will explain exactly how this works.
Build a customer journey – in 5 steps!
When building the customer journey, there are of course always individual options, so that you should always adapt the individual sub-steps exactly to your needs and your company. Nevertheless, you can stick to the following scheme as a basic framework:
Step 1: Define the target audience
The first step is to precisely define your customer group. Because this is the only way you can find out exactly how you can successfully design the customer journey. In this context, it makes sense to create so-called personas. Personas are a visual and fictional representation of a sample customer, based on which you can go through a potential customer journey. In this way you get a feeling for the effect of the touchpoints from the most real and most important point of view – namely that of the customer!
Important questions in this context are therefore:
- Who are my clients?
- What needs do my customers have?
Step 2: Identify the touchpoints
Now that you know your target group, you should consider where and how your customers come into contact with the product, your service or your entire company. So it’s about the scope of your customer journey and how extensive you have to design it.
Important questions in this context are therefore:
- Where do I meet my customers?
- Through which channels do touchpoints come about?
In order to be able to answer these questions, you have to carry out another analysis in which you go through the customer journey from the customer’s point of view. Depending on the target group, you may find many of your customers in the social media area. Initial contacts can also be made through rating portals, forums or advertising.
Step 3: Management of the touchpoints
In the next step, after identifying the touchpoints, the individual touchpoints should now be arranged sensibly. This means that you should particularly think about the following:
Important questions in this context are therefore:
- Which touchpoints are of particular importance?
- What is a typical process from the first point of contact to the purchase?
It is important to precisely define the relevance of the individual touchpoints so that you can focus on them. After all, it is mostly these points of contact that convince the customer and ultimately move them to buy. Sometimes it is also a series of touchpoints that achieve exactly this effect, which is why you should also create an analysis here with a model of the customer journey.
Step 4: Measure Customer Satisfaction
Points of contact with your product, your service or your company always reflect the satisfaction of your customers. Because if you can make a good impression with the help of efficiently used touchpoints, then the probability is higher that you will steer these customers to buy. However, each channel with which your target group comes into contact with you has a different mode of action. So not every touchpoint achieves the same level of customer satisfaction.
Important questions in this context are therefore:
- How satisfied is the customer at the individual touchpoints?
- How do I measure customer satisfaction?
Of course, the easiest way is to ask the customer himself about his or her satisfaction. Although this approach produces realistic results, it is also very time-consuming and costly, which is why many companies decide to work with their own estimates from this point of view. This is okay under certain circumstances, but misjudgments can have dire consequences. You could deter or negatively influence new customers by not tailoring your touchpoints to your target audience. So you should always think carefully about how much an optimal customer relationship is worth to you.
Step 5: Mapping the customer journey
Even if it seems that the process of building a customer journey has already been completed in the fourth step, it still makes sense to add a last fifth step, which concerns continuous optimization. After all, customer behavior and needs can change regularly, so that the individual touchpoints also have to be adapted and revised along the entire customer journey.
Important questions in this context are therefore:
- Where are changes over a certain time interval?
- How can I optimize the touchpoints with regard to these changes?
For this, it is helpful to create a customer journey map that visualizes the customer journey in a coordinate system over a certain time interval. This coordinate system measures customer satisfaction at each individual touchpoint of the customer journey. So you always have changes in view and can initiate measures relatively quickly, such as opening up new channels, in order to keep your touchpoints successful.
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