You can comprehend and greatly increase the experience of your customers with the help of a customer experience mapping template. A good mapping template for the customer’s experience will help to keep a record of the users’ experience, from their viewpoint. This will help you to spot out the opportunities for improvement and be able to interact with the users. Even though there is no fixed outline for designing a customer experience map, you will need to design one with top notch principles. You will also need to use such friendly aspects like smiley faces and try all ways to be creative in the entire map.
So how do you start and what will it take to design a template that starts from where the customer makes their purchase decision till where you ensure the relationship is building up?
Comprehend the Channels and Touchpoints of the Customers
You will need to start with the several touch points that the user have with your business when you want to commence a customer experience map. The touch point area is where different stakeholders may be involved actively with various views on ways that the users interact with you or your business.
The stakeholders might be involved in eCommerce, the customer service view point, or satisfaction. To commence the process, you will need to point out chief channels of purchase.
This will help to cover some areas, which might also include areas such as:
- Order Satisfaction: This will involve returns, payments, delivery or any related factor
- Channels of Marketing: These channels may include blogs, telephones, postal orders, the social media or email
- Channels of research: They may include the user forums, the website, customer services or the store
These aspects will focus on the immediate contact with the customers, and not indirect contacts. Such factors won’t focus on sources like customer reviews, word of mouth, or comments/views on social sites. Nevertheless, these indirect contacts can also be important in designing an absolute map that focuses on different touch points.
The Customer Journey Actions/Activities
Once you have laid down your touch points, the user will then fill out various activities and actions that will vary in every business or industry. All in all, the classifications will be based on the following aspects:
- Awareness: This will help to grasp what the customer feels about the business.
- Purchase: It helps to evaluate the rate of purchase of the products
- Discover: It can help the customer to know about any new product or any experience that they have had.
- Use of Product of service: It helps to rate how content the customers are with the product.
- Bonding with the product: It assists to link the user to a given product and ensuring that they are well satisfied with it and rate how they appreciate the given product.
Having these factors laid down and rated by the user will help to touch on essential areas of your business. The map should be kept basic enough in order to be able to map the journey of the initial user and point out any additional actions that have been discovered.
Customer Experience Mapping Template
You now have an idea of the touch points and actions/activities related to the user, you can now design a customer experience mapping template. You will start by using a basic table to map the customer experience journey as you list down the activities and touch points.
Arranging them in a table, you will list the touch points on the left side, going down, while the activities across at the top. You may use this to look at the character of a typical customer throughout their experience. This will be rated right from the awareness, all through the purchase of the product to where they share their fulfillment.
In your initial map, you may let the users make their personal reference frame to describe their journey from how they made their first purchase in your business. By this, you will be pointing out the main points on the customer’s journey and spot the points of influence and decision making. For instance, letting the customer use their own frame of reference will let you know:
- Why they decided to stick to a given product, if they didn’t change from their previous product category
- What influenced them to choose that product
- How and why they decided to purchase the product
The main point here is to comprehend the steps and path every customer takes with the help of a real customer research and feedback.
Significance of the Map
You now have a template that helps you understand the journey of your customer with your business. You can now enhance the user experience in helping you to:
- Reduce the disapproving user experience: This can be done through the recognition of the essential steps and points of decisions to ensure the right info is present and available for each user.
- Enhance the retention of users: You will do this by comprehending the way that they change via every stage in their purchase cycle. This will give room for important, linked conversations to the users, which allows them to make the right decision in the long run.
- Identify the communication gaps: You will get to know where contradictory or no messages are received. For instance, you can use the social media to answer the feedback of the users, whether negative or positive.
- Comprehend the main user journey paths: This will help to point out where extra advancement will offer the largest influence.
- Understand the necessary metrics in order to recognize the progress of the customer and the points that they fall out. This also gives you the chance of recovering the lost customers.
In a nutshell, ensure that you have completed the filling exercise from the user’s perspective and not how you anticipate them to utilize the system. It is also recommended to use actual user feedback when you want to know the path that the users are taking. Even though you might not be able to map the path of every customer, you may recognize the main user character, which will give you the bigger picture. You should ensure that the customer experience mapping template is simple enough for easier understanding.
