Customer Journey Map and its role in Marketing
By: Thanasis Papadopoulos
Tags: Maps, Marketing, Customer Journey, Artificial Intelligence, Technology

Customer experience can be also described as a battleground. A good experience will make customers return to a store a couple of times, a bad one however will make him leave and never return. Customer journey map can be a strong ally in this battle.

According to L. Abbott the true desire of customers is not to just buy a product, but to buy an experience. In that manner, we understand that decision making and customer experience should be based on human behaviour instead of focusing only on selling a product.

The design and the good management of a customer experience from the brand, are two necessary factors in order to survive in the marketing field. Companies should design an experience for the customer, in order to create an emotional connection between brand and company. Customer journey mapping is an essential tool for this procedure, as it combines creativity, brand awareness, and a huge influence on customers. In addition, the map can create the story of a client. A map can help the client meet the brand, get involved with it, and finally create a long term relationship with it.

As companies create maps that need more and more data, experiences and models, they are in need for even more tools that can help function their ideas. Artificial intelligence can automate hundreds of decisions involving customer’s journey, which allows them to create constantly new content and campaigns.

Customer mapping journey’s goal is to create a representation of experiences that a company has with its clients, brand and products. Apart from that, an important function that mapping does, is to show the key points that a company needs to change, in order to see the client’s perspective. That way, companies will create experiences that clients actually want, instead of creating something that they think that clients would like.

The unique ability that customer journey mapping has, is that it can collect every separate consumer’s goals, desires, mentality and preferences. This is achieved by collecting his touch points, and main interactions. With this method, the mapping system will be able to recognize customers’ future purchases through patterns, and it will fulfill his needs with speed and precision. By using data, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing techniques, the map will recommend products on its own, even before the user searches it.

In order to create a customer journey map, there are some factors that should be considered. Personas for example, which are archetypes that companies develop, so they can find more information about the target audience. Each persona has different personality, habits, needs, attitude but also pain points. Pain points have to be solved through journey maps, as these points represent people’s goals, emotions, beliefs and expectations.

Apart from that, there should be given attention on the timeline. As it is widely known, timing is everything and this does not differ on customer journey mapping. In order to keep a good timeline, brands should take note on the points that determine the acts of customers and their interaction with the company, and their social media channels, or contact forms.

In order to have the best possible customer journey map, algorithms need a huge volume of data. For that reason, maps filter out some information according to customers’ location and similar behaviour to other people, demographics, previous purchases, and many more. Maps are enhancing personalization’s value, and create a great experience that will help to improve a brand’s image to clients.

The IKEA Example

One of the most interesting customer journey maps that uses its touchpoints in digital form, in advertisements and in physical stores, is none other than IKEA. If you’ve ever been to an IKEA you will have probably seen that everything is following a labyrinth pattern.

This is not a random pattern, but it is laid in that way in order to engage customers instead of just securing their sales. As every room and product is set in a particular way, customer knows that he is about to do a journey, experiment, try some of the furniture or even purchase something that he didn’t plan to at first. This map promotes every single product available to the customer but doesn’t pressure them into buying, since they can just follow the arrows and head to the cashier.

As clients are usually using more than one device, this results to customer journey mapping being a continuous process, until the ideal product is created. Dynamic Pricing, interactive experiences, but also the Intelligent Personal Assistants, are helping to create the best journey mapping experience.

IKEA’s example is a perfect example of how to turn your digital customer journey map into a physical one, and be successful. What you need to do is eventually the same, create a story for the customer, and fulfill their needs. To make your digital experience a physical one, it is important to have data on customer behaviour by your touch points and main interactions. You need to know who are your customers, what do they expect from your brand, and what will make them satisfied. Your map has to be tailored to your customer personas, be able to tell a story, and fulfill their needs.