How to Build Your Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map helps you understand your buyer’s behavior from the point of discovery through your sales funnel to purchase. Understanding each and every step of this journey is crucial to ensuring that you’re providing your customers’ with the best customer experience (CX) possible and removing all points of friction.

Points of entry

This might include a Google search, social media post, a meeting at a trade show, or even a referral from a friend. Carefully consider the process of your customer from each of these points of entry - how do they get in touch with you, who is the first person they interact with, and what is the process to starting their purchase? 

Points of contact

It’s important to then consider every single point of contact the consumer might have after that entry. These could be both with a member of your team (e.g. discovery meeting) or an automated point of contact (e.g. automated email in a marketing workflow). How many points of contact are there from start to finish, and where might there be points of friction? Friction could be present in a variety of ways, such as lack of ability to reach a human to speak to, lack of visibility into inventory and/or pricing, too many irrelevant marketing emails, or even slow load time on your website. Your goal is to minimize the friction with your points of contact - don’t make it hard for your consumers to do business with you.

Your consumers’ expectations

An important step of this process is to understand what your customers expect of the process. If selling your product is a relatively easy transaction, don’t make your customer go through too many steps or wait too long to complete the transaction. The more complicated the journey is - and the longer it takes - the more chances your consumer has to walk away.

Identify your competitors’ friction

There is a great opportunity to differentiate yourself from your competitors if you can identify where friction typically lies in the process of your competitors’ and eliminate or reduce it. Consumers want the process to be as easy as possible, and if you can provide that better than the competition, then you’ve got a leg up.

Constant improvements

Keep your customer journey map on hand to update it in the future and constantly think of ways to streamline it. Ask your customers about the process and aim to improve based on that feedback. Understanding how the journey is for your customers is an key step towards serving them better and giving them the best experience possible.