The biggest asset a company has are its customers. All business strategies must revolve around them to meet their needs in the most efficient way possible. And that alone is no longer enough, we must try to surprise them with new and better experiences. That's where the importance of knowing all the points of interaction that our customers have with our brand comes in, or in other words, the Customer Journey.
The most important thing to do if you really want to know how your customers interact with your brand is Analyze the entire buying cycle from your perspective and not from your own as a company. It's an exercise in empathy. From putting yourself in the shoes of others to understanding what they are feeling and thinking at every point in that process.
Table of Contents:
1. What is a Customer Journey and What Is It For?
2. Stages of the Customer Journey.
3. How to Build a Customer Journey?
4. Is a Customer Journey Worth It?
1. What is a Customer Journey and What Is It For?
The Customer Journey is a powerful and very popular tool for Customer Experience, which focuses on knowing each of the Touchpoints or points of contact that a user has with a company. Every buying process (digital or physical) inherently involves a customer journey.
Whether you are going to buy something at the supermarket or a car at a dealership, this buying process is in all cases very similar and goes through different phases that we will explain later. Sometimes this journey It can last from a few minutes to several months. It all depends on the magnitude of the purchase and its influence on your life in the long term.
In each of the interactions, we intend to empathetically monitor and measure the feelings and thoughts that our customers have throughout the purchase process. You have to analyze practically everything: from social media communication, to the usability of the website, to what they say about our brand on other sites that are not even directly related to us, and even going to extremes such as local weather or traffic in the area.
2. Stages of the Customer Journey
To achieve even more with our customers, it is important that we do the different phases in the first person, putting them in the customer's shoes and starting to empathize with them.
1. I discover. This is the first phase. When a customer discovers that they have a need and has a first contact with the brand in an indirect way. This is where resources such as recommendations from friends or family or traditional advertising campaigns come into play.
2. I compare. The customer evaluates different options to compare available options. It is important to have a good brand image and reputation here, since this way you gain visibility and the chances of them contacting our bank will be greater.
3. Contract. The potential customer has already decided on one of the options and proceeds to purchase the service. This is a pivotal moment in the customer experience. It's the first formal contact, so we can't fail here. This first direct interaction may depend on whether the customer stays with us throughout their lives or that they leave after a few moments.
This process can be solved in a simple phone call or require more effort on the part of the client (red tape, paperwork and paperwork). The more simplified this process is, the better.
4. I use. There are the usual interactions of the use and enjoyment of the product or service that the customer has contracted and that usually has the greatest extension in terms of time.
5. Resolute. At this stage, situations that are out of the ordinary arise: management errors, complaints, etc. Resolving them in the shortest possible time can turn a possible loss of a customer into a new opportunity for them to trust the company again.
6. I am loyal. Here all the interactions on the part of the brand are brought together to achieve greater customer engagement. Whether as plans oriented to benefits, discounts or certain privileges for trusting the brand.
7. The finish. Stage in which the client either ends his relationship with the client voluntarily and organically composed the life of the priest or service. An example would be that a mortgage ends or that the customer takes that financial service to another entity.
3. How to Build a Customer Journey?
The good thing about the Customer Journey Map is that it is a very versatile tool that allows it to adapt perfectly to any product or service. The results obtained are tremendously useful, since they are based on qualitative research such as Focus group and in-depth interviews with clients to further enrich the analysis.
Next, we are going to give as an example a Customer Journey of a hypothetical bank called Izo, in which we are going to analyze each of the stages that the consumer goes through.
On the vertical axis we can see the different stages that the person is going through: level of experience, moments of truth, moments of pain, level of effort, the emotions experienced and emotions experienced by the users.
On the horizontal axis we have the different stages that we have described above and they will serve us as a time axis. This is a simplified version, since the looser version would not fit in this post. However, when building it, the model is necessary.
In the example they are considered to be the most significant stages that have an emotional burden on the client, from here you search for information about the bank until you sign up for the service. The objective of this is to know their experience in each phase, in order to understand what they think and what they feel in each phase in order to be able to design personalized experiences that calm those Pain Points During the Moments of Truth.
Once all this has been captured in the graph, each point is joined by a line and you get a customer experience map with which we can start working and transform our business.
4. Is a Customer Journey Worth It?
At a time when information and data are so relevant to decision-making in all companies, a Customer Journey Map is the perfect tool for monitor the emotions of customers to improve their experiences and thereby improve financial results.
If you identify with the phrase “putting yourself in someone else's shoes”, this is the best way to begin to truly understand how your customers are interacting with your brand. Talk to them. Get to know them for real. They will be the first to benefit from a great service in the short term, but you have earned their trust instead. That's priceless.
Finally, I would like to share an allegory. If we are lumberjacks and we see that our axe doesn't cut the wood quite well or not as fast as we would like, maybe it's time to stop. You have to take some time to re-sharpen it, calmly, without haste. In this way, when you return to work, you will notice a substantial improvement that will make you achieve your goals. No time is wasted stopping.
In customer experience, it works the same way. Analyze if what you're doing works to achieve your business goals. If not, try to get to know your customers better, invest time and resources to achieve it, because if you don't, your competition will.
For. Analyze. Think about what's best for your business and start changing things and taking the right path to give your customer the experience they deserve because they trust you.
And if you need our team of CX experts to analyze your specific case and help you improve your Customer Journey, write to us through This form and we'll be happy to help.
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