Essential Customer Journey Mapping Tools to Use in 2023
Essential Customer Journey Mapping Tools to Use in 2023
Research shows that 75% of millennials would accept a pay cut to work for responsible businesses.
In the modern business world, you must focus on connecting with customers and giving employees a welcoming work environment. But how do you get to know your customers better?
With the help of customer journey mapping tools, you can monitor reactions to new products. As well as record loyal customers who keep using your services and buying items.
Before you can benefit from mapping the customer journey, you need to know about what tools to use. And how to use them in your marketing plan.
So, here is everything you need to know about finding the perfect customer journey mapping tools this year.
What Is a Customer Journey Map?
To keep it simple, customer journey mapping is when you collect information in a visual form to record customers’ experiences. Without a clear customer journey map, you can’t grow your business and stay relevant.
Focusing on the “journey” aspect of customer experiences is the key to understanding what motivates buyers and provides insight into their way of life.
You can get insights from customers from different areas of marketing, like social media, email campaigns, and payments. The aim is to develop a clear outline of how a customer contributes to a company goal.
For instance, you need to compare engagement rates with the number of sales and customers that are coming back to a business.
If customers are engaging but not buying, you need to improve your customer experience.
Understanding the Process
You can use customer journey mapping tools to create visual charts of customer experiences. These apps allow you to see the individual journey of buyers. This allows you to spot weak points and identify successes.
Plus, it makes it easier to keep all the information together when compiled into a visual map.
The process begins with visualizing the current customer process. For instance, from the first to the final pion. Then, you evaluate the patterns and see if they are reaching goals or not.
This allows you to find marketing solutions that will engage your customers and provide a better experience.
So, what is included in a customer journey map?
Making a Customer Journey Map
First, you need to include the buying process, which refers to the stages that a customer will go from being a browser to a buyer.
For instance, what marketing will get a user interested online, or how can you highlight your product as a valuable addition to their lifestyle? This information will change depending on the customer and service or product.
User Patterns
The next stage is to note user actions in the customer journey map. This is where you detail all the steps a customer will go through before buying a product.
For example, they might talk to their friends about finding a product, researching potential companies, and making a final purchase. All of these stages are part of the overall journey of a customer.
So, you want to ensure that your company is doing everything possible to win over a potential new buyer.
Emotions
Even though the business side of a customer journey map is vital, you can’t forget about the emotional aspect of the experience. You must consider customers’ feelings, whether happy or angry.
If your buying process is long and complicated, it could demotivate your customers, and they could look elsewhere.
Likewise, if your customers are looking for relief and a quick solution, you need to make your process straightforward.
When you carefully consider your customer’s emotions, you will avoid getting a negative reputation, which will help build better brand loyalty. The key to connecting with your audience is to take the time to consider their feelings.
Even though you can overlook this when business planning. It’s important for customer journey mapping and creating a strong relationship.
Customer Problems
Similar to understanding customer emotions, you need to pinpoint customer problems if you want to brand yourself as a solution to their problem. This is why you need to research what is causing frustration in customer lifestyles.
Your brand must be seen as valuable and practical to your customers. This will ensure that people feel you care about their problems and actively want to solve them.
Create Solutions
This is the part where your team needs to brainstorm and come up with solutions for your customers. You need to consider all of these phases of customer journey mapping to succeed with your brand.
But first, you’ll need to use the right tools. Otherwise, all of your efforts will be lost in disorganized and lost information.
You Need These Customer Journey Mapping Tools
Tools for customer journey mapping range from whiteboards to brand equity pyramids. Depending on which stage of the visualization you’re focusing on, you’ll need different tools for each phase.
To start, it’s important to brainstorm concepts and ideas on a blank page. Traditionally, a whiteboard has been the most common way for businesses and other organizations to brainstorm ideas.
But, in the modern world, not everyone has a physical whiteboard…
Thankfully, you can use a whiteboard online and on devices.
Online Whiteboard
Whiteboards are an easy way to begin your customer journey mapping planning. You can share the online whiteboard with up to 3 member accounts and three separate whiteboards.
Therefore, you can use a whiteboard for different stages before finalizing details and adding new information during customer research. For instance, you can also use whiteboards to give presentations during meetings.
A whiteboard tool is also ideal for drawing diagrams and charts to display information for your customer journey. Plus, this is an excellent feature for receiving feedback from your team.
You can use the whiteboard for educational purposes like making polls for marketing decisions or educating about a new product and service. This will allow staff teams to get precise information to move on to the following stages.
And you can refer back to previous whiteboards if you miss a detail or want to return to an original concept.
Strategic Planning Templates
You’ll need to use strategic planning templates when creating a timeline for your company goals. The 666 Roadmap tool is excellent for planning your customer journey in timelines.
For example, this tool allows you to break goals into time sections like the next six years, the next six months, or the next six weeks. This will enable you to plan carefully in time blocks.
If you have a long-term goal for your customer journey mapping, this can provide a clear visualization of your timeline, making it easier to stick to a strategy over months.
Another great strategic planning template tool is the Brand Equity Pyramid, which allows you to outline all the features of your brand and marketing that will attract your ideal customer.
This tool will give you the template for delivering relevant and personal messages to your customers. You can use the Brand Equity Pyramid and 666 Roadmap to start your customer journey mapping process.
Research & Design Templates
When you’re visualizing your customer journey mapping, you need the right tools to observe research findings and design the map. For this stage, you can use the Concept Poster tool or Business Model Canvas.
These tools will enable you to combine your concepts from brainstorming into visual aids to look at customer patterns and emotions. You can use these around your office and share them with colleagues.
Of course, the Customer Journey Map tool is the ultimate tool for 2023.
It’s impossible to remember all the information about the customer experience from memory; you need a reliable tool that has features for your customers’ wants, needs, and pain points.
In combination with the Customer Journey Map tool, you can use the Customer Persona template when creating individual profiles for your brand. This is where you can write down emotional features and solutions.
Problem Solving Templates
Finally, you’re going to need resources to help with the problem-solving side of customer journey mapping. If you want something simple and clear to use, the Cause & Effect feature is ideal.
Once you have the cause for the problems in a customer journey mapping, like poor communications or lack of relevant social media content, you can work at finding the solutions.
It’s an easy template that’s separated into two sections so you can simplify the problem-solving phase and reflect on your weak areas. Plus, you can use it in meetings to share information quickly.
If you need something focused on emotions, you should also use the Empathy Map, which aims to develop and identify feelings in the customer experience.
You can have several templates for the various processes in customer journey mapping to create clear distinctions between the business elements and the personal details.
This way, you can have a cohesive brand and produce content that targets different parts of your customer’s personality. But, it might take a few trial and error moments to find the right tools for your organization.
Therefore, you can experiment with the whiteboard and try other customer journey mapping tools.
Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping Tools
The future of marketing is about personalized marketing and visualization, so you must start with customer journey mapping tools when developing a brand.
Although, not everyone is aware of their unique benefits. One of the main benefits of customer journey mapping tools is you can focus your company on the inbound perspective.
Instead of producing generic content and generalized marketing, customer mapping tools allow you to focus on areas of your brand that are often overlooked, such as individual emotions and pain points.
You can’t treat all your customers in the same way. You need to find what they enjoy and what is frustrating them in their life. So, even though that will take more time, it will benefit your company in the long term.
Better Customer Service
Another reason that customer journey mapping tools are essential is you can improve your customer service protocols.
Not only will your online content be more relevant, but the language you use to speak with customers will be more successful. You can create stronger connections with your audience when you understand their lifestyle.
Plus, you can learn about what aspects will improve your customer service by looking at customer responses and working on improving them.
This means you can find solutions for long wait times on phone calls or quick email replies after talking with a customer service team. All of these actions will add up to a better ROI for your brand.
Everyone Is Thinking About Customers
Using these customer journey mapping tools will ensure that everyone on your team is on the page. You can create a cohesive environment when everyone focuses on the customer experience.
If your team of staff is all working to find better solutions for customers, people are going to notice. Your brand will stand out from the crowd if you use these informative tools for organizing and brainstorming.
You can’t leave the customer journey mapping process until you’ve released a product. At this point, you can’t change irrelevant elements or alter communications with customers.
Therefore, you need to use the right tools from the beginning. This is how you can stay ahead of your competition and learn more about your customers to achieve a better retention rate.
So, you can put less investment into constantly attracting new customers. You’ll have a loyal, committed customer base!
Online Tools for Both Customers and Businesses
The best customer journey mapping tools will provide customers with a better experience and improve workplace productivity. Most of these tools are designed for efficiency and flexibility.
So, you can use them in between work meetings and quickly look over information during an online session. Plus, you can bring online tools everywhere you go on different devices.
The good news is that we have all these tools available for you. Get in touch to find out more about our customer journey mapping solutions to get you started.
We’re looking forward to chatting with you!