If you really want the best results from your website, you need to think like your customers. Put yourself in their shoes and start making a customer journey roadmap around your site to ensure that the user experience is up to scratch and suitable to your viewers. The better the user experience on your site, the higher the potential of conversions will be. So let’s take a look at how you create your customer journey mapping, helping consumers to achieve their desired outcomes and ensure the best UX on your website.
What is customer journey mapping?
Customer journey mapping is really a visual representation of what and how your customers interact with your brand or product. With this visual representation, you will be able to determine how customers see your brand, how they interact with your products and gain insight into the pain points they’re facing which possibly prevents them from purchasing.
Understand your customers
First step is to understand and know what your customers are looking for. What would be the type of products or services they would be searching for on your site? What sort of questions would they have regarding your products or services? Once you can determine most possible questions customers might have, you can gear your site to contain the relevant answers.
It is equally important to know more about what age group, interests, gender, vocations, demographics of the people that are going to be interested in your site. Once you have determined these factors, the design of your website should be created in line with the select audience you want to keep engaged.
The four phases
There are generally four different phases which need to be addressed with customer journey mapping.
- The initial Discovery phase is all about understanding what your customers are feeling, what questions they may have, and what information they would likely be looking for.
- The next phase would be Consideration. During this phase, the prospective consumer will now be aware of your brand and products or services, and will be weighing up the pros and cons of purchasing from you. It is essential in this phase to ensure that your brand stands out from your competitors. It is at this stage that perhaps more information will be required by the consumer and listing their touchpoints in your site is necessary for mapping purposes. The user experience still needs to be smooth and enticing till this point.
- Now it’s the Purchase phase and hopefully a conversion for you! This is where they have weighed up all their options and probably compared products with yours. It is vital that a smooth purchasing experience is now achieved, it is at this very point they could pull out of the purchase. Consider and map the flow of the purchase, reasons which motivated them to purchase from you and the touchpoints while making the purchase. Map out what their challenges may have been while making the purchase and any questions about fees, returns and delivery. Was the process easy to follow?
- Lastly the Retention phase, this is the part of the process where you get to keep your customers satisfied with follow up news and information, special offers or interesting information. Mapping out if they had new touchpoints while on your site and how they communicated with you, whether by email, social media etc, is vital to how you communicate and retain your customers.
Tools available for User Experience Design
Digital tools are available for you to create your customer journey mapping, for example Microsoft Visio or Freshworks CRM. It is vital that you complete the purchase experience yourself if you are doing the mapping. Check across all platforms that your information is fresh and correct.
Smooth experience
When customers access your site, the expectation of a smooth experience is what will keep them engaged. To ensure a smooth experience, you have to think like a customer and ask yourself the most difficult questions related to your products or services.
Sticky notes – believe it or not!
Yes even in this digitally driven world, there still can be a use for the good ol’ tangible sticky notes on a board. They can be used to make visual sense of a complex system in a low fidelity manner. Designing the ultimate UX process for your site can boil down to sticky notes being used to itemise the flow and customer experience, used as a tool in the service of a bigger goal. Go for it! Once they have been created and moved around for hours, days or weeks on a board, discussed and analysed, then go ahead and digitise.
What’s a touch point?
Touch points are where users interact and take action with a product or service. All touch points across every media platform that you use need to be taken into consideration when creating your customer journey mapping.
It is important to consider the emotions that are involved with your products. In driving people to make a purchase from your business, it is necessary to connect on a human level throughout the user experience. Nearly half of Gen Y and Z say they prefer brands which make them feel part of something bigger and help to connect people around common causes or beliefs.
At Digital Noir – we have the know how and experience to help with creating your customer journey mapping and improving the UX of your website.