Salty Social Media Vocabulary: Mapping Your Customer Journey
Welcome back to another edition of Salty Social Media Vocabulary. After a couple of weeks of Instagram hashtags, we’ve decided to bring it back to customer experience. One of our favorite tools we use with clients is a customer journey map. A customer journey map is a visual representation of every point of contact between your brand and your customers. In some instances it also maps potential interaction outcomes between your brand and customers, contacts between your brand and outside organizations (e.g., shipping company, printing company, and so on), and your customer’s post-purchase experience (tech support, warranty, and so on). A well-built customer journey map can help your company in several ways:
- Understand your business flow.
- Illustrates the process customers experience when they interact with your brand.
- Creates an aerial view of your business model.
- Highlight any gaps in your customer service and communication processes.
- Outline department tasks and responsibilities.
- Identify opportunities for growth and improvement.
Put differently, a customer journey map can increase your company’s efficiency and improve your customer’s experience.
To illustrate the usefulness of mapping your customer’s experience, we’ve attached an example of a map we recently began for one of our clients. To help you understand it, we’ll provide some context:
Our real estate client has three main channels of business: buying homes, selling homes, and courting investors. We had three main objectives:
- Help them understand the current customer experience, and solidify and improve the processes involved therein.
- Identify opportunities to improve the customer experience and create more points of contact.
- Create procedural roles for each department for every point during the customer experience.
Accordingly we built a customer journey map and a social media content plan—the latter of which we’ll discuss in an upcoming edition of Salty Social Media Vocabulary. Check out the sample above or the full-sized image below and tell us what you think. Until next week!
