Identifying a Customer Experience Map
Satisfactory customer experience is essential for any company and entrepreneur, from a small beauty product retailer or essay writer to an international corporation. After all, you arrange all of your business aspects to satisfy your clients’ needs and generate sales. Or do you? We will help you find this out with customer experience maps.
But what is CX mapping in the first place? The customer experience map is a visual presentation of all the touchpoints through which your clients deal with your business.
Some may confuse the CX map with a customer journey map. The latter defines all the stages people go through when communicating with your business, from research to the post-purchase phase. The CX map does the same but adds analysis on top.
The Purpose of Customer Experience Mapping
As mentioned before, mapping your customer experience is crucial. But why should you create a customer experience map? It comes in handy when your business does not make progress, and you don’t know why. In fact, 32% of consumers stop purchasing from a company they find useful after only one negative experience.
CX mapping allows you to attract and retain the audience. It aims at analyzing consumer behavior, revealing existing shortcomings, and providing efficient solutions.
It helps you determine how customers see your business and how it differs from what you expect them to see. A well-made consumer experience map will help you adjust your customer experience strategy to let your clients receive the services and products they need.
Thus, customer experience mapping is an efficient tool for restructuring your business approach and implementing the necessary improvements to increase conversions and sales.
How to Create a Customer Experience Map
Generating a customer experience map is a complex process that consists of several stages. It may take much time, and the larger the company, the more effort it requires. So, let us describe each part of creating a CX map in detail.
1. Determine the Touchpoints
The touchpoints refer to the ways your customers deal with your brand. Let’s assume you sell protein powder. What do your customers do in the awareness stage when they meet your brand for the first time? They may get to your online shop to read the description of a product they searched for. Then, they may contact your customer support team to find out additional info about a particular protein powder brand.
Or, they may visit your brick and mortar shop after noticing your billboard ad while driving home.
You have to determine all the touchpoints from the very beginning to the very end of your customer experience. They may include:
- Social media
- Your website
- Advertising
- A physical store
- Customer support
After that, you need to establish links between touchpoints and customer engagement phases. For example, your social networks might aim to increase brand awareness and customer loyalty.
2. Gather Customer Data
After enumerating and classifying the touchpoints, it is time to gather feedback. You have determined what purpose each touchpoint has, but your vision may be drastically different from the actual situation.
To find out how your customers view your business, you need to collect information about them. You can do it by conducting surveys, consulting with the customer service team, using web analytics tools and collecting feedback from review platforms, forums, comments under social media posts, etc.
3. Analyze the Data
Getting enough customer data will help you understand how your touch points work in practice. For instance, you want social media channels to generate more sales, but your customers seem not to follow your online shop’s links as actively as expected. Or, you have discovered that some of your website pages have a very high bounce rate.
Evaluate the efficiency of each customer touchpoint and try to figure out whether consumer behavior matches your goals.
You need to analyze what your customers think about each point of interaction with your business. Once you determine each touchpoint’s strong and weak sides, you will come up with the improvement suggestions much easier and put these findings on your customer experience map.
4. Create your Customer Experience Map
After analyzing customer data, you need to visualize all the findings and suggestions. The customer experience map may contain the following elements:
- Stages of consumer engagement
- Consumer needs
- Touchpoints of each interaction stage
- Customers’ feelings and thoughts about each touchpoint
- Improvement suggestions
Conclusion
The CX map allows you to reveal the challenges in customer service experience and both clearly and understandably share the findings across all company departments.
The map will help you improve your marketing strategy, enhance work approaches and eliminate non-profitable ones. Finally, optimizing consumer experience through all the stages of engagement with your business will allow you to generate more conversions, improve brand awareness and customer loyalty, which will altogether result in skyrocketing sales.
About the Author
James Baxter is professional writer and editor at write my essay online and blogger, who loves sharing his experience and knowledge with readers. He is especially interested in marketing, blogging and IT. James is always happy to visit different places and meet new people.
