Journey mapping

In today’s lesson, we’re talking about journey mapping.

Journey mapping is when you map each customer touch point with your company and note their emotions and pain points along the way.

For example, there are several touch points a customer might have with a company:

• seeing a particular ad on Google,
• live chatting with a sales rep on the website, or
• issuing a return with customer service.

Each touch points reveals how the customer thinks and feels.

Once you know how your customers think and feel along their journey, then you can improve overall satisfaction, loyalty, and success. 

By the end of the lesson, you’ll know:

• The customer journey touch points
• What to ask the key people in your company who interact with your customers
• How your customers think and feel throughout their journey

Ready? Let’s dive in…

Video: 

Next steps:

1. Map out your funnel

2. Research the customer’s experience

• Talk to all the people in your organization who interact with prospects and customers
• Ask them the questions listed below (under the “Notes” section)

3. Document your findings

• Update your research document (template)
• See an example research document with journey mapping data

Notes:

What is journey mapping?

Journey mapping involves visually representing a customer’s experience (their touch points, emotions, and pain points) with a product, service, or brand over time.

The goal is to understand and optimize each stage of the customer’s interaction to enhance satisfaction, loyalty, and success.

Map out your funnel and all customer touch points. Here are some examples:

• Advertising
• Social media
• Podcasts
• Website (live chat, forms, contact, etc.)
• Sales (emails, calls, demos, etc.)
• Emails
• Apps 
• Customer service inquires, returns, etc.
• Accounts receivable (billing and invoicing)

Talk to your people:

• Sales team 
• Ad team
• Customer support
• Onboarding team
• Marketing
• Anyone who speaks with prospects / customers

Note: If you’re a solopreneur, journey mapping is still useful. 

Ask them:

• “When you speak with our prospects/customers:
• What are their biggest challenges?
• What are their questions?
• What are their concerns?
• How do you help them overcome these?
• Also, what do they like best?”

Add all feedback in your research document, so you can reference it later.

Comments:

Video transcript:

Introduction to Journey Mapping

Years ago, there was a group of blind men who were taken to an elephant. The first one, went and touched the trunk and said, ah, I know what this is. It’s a snake. The second one went and touched the side of the elephant said, no, no, no, it’s a wall. And the third one touched the tail and said, wait, no, it’s a rope.

The analogy here is that our own experience is rarely the whole truth. 

And when you’re going through your funnel, when you’re looking at your website, you’re only looking at it through your own perspective, you might be seeing a snake, a wall or a rope. When, in fact there’s an elephant in the room and you need to address it.  

Understanding the Concept of Journey Mapping

So what is journey mapping? Well, journey mapping is when you speak to everyone in your organization that talks to your prospects or your customers, so that you can understand all of their viewpoints and it gives you a bigger, better picture of how customers and prospects interact with your business.

So here’s how you want to do this. 

The Process of Journey Mapping

Get out of the building and talk to your people. Talk to your sales team, your ad team, your customer support, or your onboarding team. Anyone on your marketing team. In fact, anybody who talks to your prospects or your customers. Try and get them all in the same room at the same time if possible. And then you can go through the entire process from the beginning to the end, when someone starts becoming a prospect to when they become a customer to when they actually receive your product or service. 

Now, keep in mind if you’re a solo preneur or a mom and pop shop, journey mapping is still a very useful exercise. We all wear different hats, and this is a great process, a great approach for you to take one hat off, put the other hat on and sketch out all of your ideas.

Asking the Right Questions

Once you have your team together, again, preferably all in the same room or on a call together, you want to ask them the following: 

When you’re speaking with our prospects or our customers, what are their biggest challenges? What are their questions? What are their concerns? And how do you help them overcome these? And lastly, what do they like best?  

All of these will help paint a picture in your mind of how prospects go through your funnel. And it teaches you to empathize with them because if you’re talking to your sales team, and they’re the ones who are on the front lines, talking to prospects, they know the exact words that your prospects have, the exact questions that they have, the exact concerns that they have, and they know the words that they’re using. 

They also know ways to counter those objections, which is really, really valuable.

Visualizing the Customer Journey

Take a look at the following image. Let’s say you’ve got your team together. And what you’ll want to do is have a visual representation that shows every step of the journey that a customer goes through. So this is a simplified example. On the left-hand side, you can see we’ve got traffic. Now, traffic sounds simple, but in this case, there’s actually three different kinds, which in your organization may be three different departments or just three different people. You have ads, search results and social media. So that could be your ad buyers. 

That could be your SEO specialist. 

And that could be your social media team.  

The Importance of Team Collaboration

So you want to have members from all of those teams on this call during this meeting.

Now the traffic sends people either to a landing page or to an article. Now, same thing. There might be someone from your marketing team that owns the landing page. There might be a completely different person that owns the articles that you publish on your site.

The landing page also asks for people’s email addresses. So whoever’s in charge of your email campaigns. They should be on the meeting as well.

Same thing with the sales page and the checkout. All of these are different parts of the funnel and all of them may involve different people. So to get everyone together, quite literally in the same room can get them on the same page.

So you can see how, even in this simple example, we want to get everyone on the same page because there may be 2, 5, 10 different people that are involved in this process. And keep in mind, this does even include people that are actually supplying the service. So in this case, if they go to the sales page and the checkout, maybe there’s a customer success team, or there’s somebody who follows up with your customers after the fact you want them on the call as well.

Once you have everyone on the call and you’ve got a visual representation like this. You can then start to go through and ask them the questions that we’ve already reviewed. Ask everyone on your team, how they interact with prospects and customers, what the main objections they have, how they overcome those objections and anything else that prospects and customers, especially like about your product or service.

The Impact of Journey Mapping

This is one of those things that sounds almost laughably simple, but if you dedicate an hour, maybe two, and you sit down with the rest of your team, I guarantee you you’re going to identify parts of the funnel that are broken, or perhaps a certain phrase that works really well for converting prospects into customers that’s not being used in your emails or your websites or your ads or your social media. See how all of this is greatly interconnected. And when you get everyone in the same room, you start to swap ideas with each other based on what, you know, really works.

So don’t discount this process. It’s incredibly valuable and it’s going to give you and your team a chance to sit down and really find out what’s working and what’s not.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Once you’ve gone through all of this, be sure to add all the feedback into your research document that we’ve provided. So you can reference it later.