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Images are stored in the human brain in two forms: as an image and as words describing the image. Words, on the other hand, are only stored as words. This is the Picture Superiority Effect. It is widely employed in marketing and advertising. When you use compelling images in a graphic ad, for example, you’re leveraging the effect to make your communications more impactful and memorable for your audiences.
A customer journey map is like the Picture Superiority Effect. It is a visualization of the touchpoints in the customer journey. And just as the effect makes information easier to recall, a customer journey map allows marketing and other teams in a business to retain key insights and develop a shared understanding of the customer experience. This shared understanding, facilitated by visuals, helps to keep customer-centric strategies in alignment.
In this post, we’ll take a detailed look at the process of mapping customer interactions, the key steps to create a customer journey map, and the positive outcomes your business can realize through effective mapping. (Spoiler alert: The biggest potential benefit is more conversions!)
Customer journey tracking is the process of monitoring and analyzing the journey a customer takes with your business, from first awareness all the way through to making a purchase and even becoming an advocate for your brand. The goal is to understand customer behavior, preferences, and pain points at every step of the journey, so your business can improve the customer experience, personalize interactions, and optimize marketing and sales strategies.
To track the customer journey, you can use data analytics tools, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and AI-powered solutions to gather insights about customer interactions. These tools can capture data from social media, email, website visits, in-store visits, customer support interactions, and more, including phone calls.
By compiling and analyzing this information, you can gain a comprehensive view of how your customers move through the buying process and what factors influence their decisions.
Isn’t it enough to get a consumer started on the journey to becoming your customer? Do you really need to track the customer journey fully and continuously? The short answer is yes, and here are four reasons to underscore why this process is so important.
The more a marketer or salesperson knows about a customer, the easier it is to reach and engage with them effectively. Customers typically interact with a business or brand multiple times during their relationship. The consumer might visit a webpage, click on an image in an ad, or pick up the phone and ask a question.
These touchpoints are all discrete data points that, when collected, consolidated, and analyzed, give sales and marketing teams a clearer understanding of their leads’ behaviors, preferences, and pain points. These specific insights can be used to tailor ad personalization, refine marketing strategy, and improve customer engagement.
When you know how to track the customer journey, you can more readily identify the key touchpoints that lead to conversions, and that can help you drive more conversions.
For example: Your financial services business finds leads are responding favorably to a blog on the general economic outlook. This results in more sign-ups to a monthly newsletter that you offer. You might push leads further through the sales funnel if you include investing service recommendations in upcoming newsletter content that focuses on preserving wealth in an uncertain economy.
Customer journey tracking also allows marketers to pursue more personalized and targeted campaigns because they better understand customer behavior at different stages in the journey.
Here’s what this can look like in action, especially if you’ve been tracking a customer’s journey for a long time (maybe years!) and have developed a deep understanding of their behavior, needs, and preferences:
Say you run a hotel chain, and you have a longtime customer who lives in Chicago who tends to book vacations to Florida during the winter. When the weather starts to turn chilly in the fall, you could start targeting them with ads for winter getaway packages at your resorts in Florida that they’ve visited before or perhaps at similar properties they have yet to try.
If the customer decides to book one of the deals you’ve offered, you could then promote add-ons they might find enticing based on their known interests and previous activity, like spa visits, chef’s table dinners, or fishing charters.
One of the top benefits of effective user journey tracking and mapping is that it helps identify pain points and areas of customer dissatisfaction that might lead a customer to cut ties with you. Customer churn is bad for business, but effective customer journey tracking can help improve retention because if you can identify the pain point, you can ease or eliminate it.
For example, if the data shows you have a specific webpage that customers visit before they abruptly end their journey with you, you may find that the page’s layout is confusing or has a broken link. An easy fix in either case — you just need to know about it!
It’s not too challenging to create a map of the customer journey, though it will take some time and effort. Fortunately, there are plenty of software tools and apps available to help you create your customer journey map. You’ll also want to take a structured approach to the process to help ensure your customer journey map is comprehensive. Here are seven steps that can help.
You must first have clearly defined and detailed customer personas to make your customer journey mapping effective. Customer personas are based on what you know about key segments of your audience, like their age and gender, marital status, annual income, where they live, interests, buying preferences, and which products they’ve purchased in the past.
Customer personas can guide your journey mapping by helping you understand how each persona behaves, their goals and expectations, and their pain points or problems. (Note: It is likely that you’ll have more than one customer persona in your target audience.)
Key to the customer journey map is the process of identifying and logging every single touchpoint with your customers. Where do you interact with them
If you run a series of TV ads, that’s a touchpoint. If you have a physical store for customers to visit, that’s a touchpoint. If you send out campaign emails, that’s another touchpoint. Website visits, social media posts, and online reviews — these are touchpoints, too.
One often overlooked touchpoint is the phone call. Sales agents make outbound calls to leads, but customers make inbound calls, as well, to customer service or help desks, to inquire about stock availability, and even to your company’s main number when they have general inquiries or questions. So, it’s important to capture these touchpoints and understand where they occur in the customer journey and what impact they have on conversions.
One way to spice up your customer journey map is to track your customers’ emotional journey and the specific actions they take at each touchpoint. You can use sentiment analysis tools for this. Sentiment analysis is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) tools using neural network models that can be trained to “read between the lines” of customer conversations to determine if they are positive, negative, or indifferent to your brand.
In this way, sentiment analysis can help to reveal the emotional side of the customer journey, including signs of customer satisfaction, dissatisfaction, hesitation, and frustration. Mapping where customers are frustrated in the customer journey can help your business remove barriers and create a smoother path for customers to move further along the sales funnel.
Customer journey maps must be data-driven, so gathering data from as many relevant sources as possible is a must to inform your maps. So, gather data from multiple sources, such as online analytics tools, website tracking, customer feedback, phone conversations, and behavioral data, to ensure you have a robust and reliable dataset you can confidently trust.
You can employ various tools to analyze this data and identify trends, patterns, behaviors, and bottlenecks that occur during the customer journey. You can use this information to segment customers and personalize your outreach. Invoca’s conversation intelligence software, for example, can help bridge the gap between a customer’s online and offline journeys. It uses AI to analyze phone interactions at scale to provide key insights into the customer journey.
Once you have your data assembled and analyzed, you will be ready to create your map.
Maps are appealing visualizations, and your customer journey map shouldn’t be any different. Make it clear and use visual tools like flowcharts, diagrams, and images to make it interesting and attractive so it captures the attention of your marketing team and other key stakeholders. (If you need some inspo for your map, simply conduct a quick internet search on “customer journey map examples” to find ideas.)
Take care to capture and address every meaningful touchpoint in the customer journey, including offline interactions like phone calls. If you’re using a tool like Invoca, it will be much easier for you to bridge the gap between customers’ online and offline activities.
Once you have a visual representation of the entire customer journey, it’s time to put it to use. The first thing you should do is scan the map for points where the customer experiences friction. Perhaps the data suggest a problem with response times from your customer service team or customers who’ve moved far along the sales funnel only to be disappointed to find a product is unavailable. Here again, these are pain points that can be easily fixed once you know they exist!
Many of these issues surface in phone conversations between the customer and your business. For example: The customer who calls to complain because they’ve been told they must wait six weeks or more to receive their purchase.
You can reveal issues at scale in real time using AI-based conversation analytics like Invoca. Quick discovery of issues leads to quick fixes that can help you optimize the customer experience and increase customer satisfaction.
Congratulations! You’ve developed your map and it’s already paying dividends for the business. However, your work is not done. You must regularly review the data and update the map to reflect any changes in market conditions, business strategy, or customer behavior.
Make sure the data sources you use to inform your map are always relevant and help you create the fullest picture possible of your customer’s journey. That means you must continue to gather data about customer interactions that occur online and offline. In our omnichannel world, the modern buying journey is incredibly complex and always evolving, and if you want to track and optimize that journey, you need to identify and connect all the dots.
Invoca is a valuable partner to companies wishing to connect online and offline engagement and draw an accurate, actionable map of the entire customer journey.
Invoca’s AI-powered technology starts to deliver before a customer even places an inbound call to your business. It starts tracking the customer when they arrive at your website. When the customer does pick up the phone, Invoca’s intelligent call routing (ICR) then uses its knowledge of the customer’s online activity to ensure the call is passed to the right agent. Invoca’s AI can also provide agents with details they can use to personalize each call — things like the caller’s name, likely reason for calling, which web links they clicked on, and which pages they reviewed — to optimize the conversation and make the call as efficient as possible.
Invoca’s ability to track, record, and digitally transcribe every phone call placed to or from your sales or marketing department creates a vast data set rich with customer insight. Using AI to analyze this data quickly and at scale, Invoca provides invaluable visibility into which marketing campaigns and collateral are driving calls, where those calls get connected to, and if the call is answered.
Invoca’s conversation analytics software also helps marketing teams with attribution by connecting the source of each call to each conversion. Invoca even uses AI to capture sentiment analysis directly from the VoC during these calls.
With all this information at their fingertips, your sales and marketing teams will be well-equipped to successfully deliver more conversions and set your business on the road to higher revenue.
Interested in learning more about customer journey tracking and how AI can help your business achieve a better conversion rate? Check out these resources from Invoca:
As a next step toward customer journey tracking, why not contact Invoca today to set up a customized demo to see how our technology can help you enhance your tracking and mapping and drive better marketing and sales outcomes?
