Understand your customers’ needs with customer journey mapping

At Sapien, we’re about people. We believe a great customer experience lies in having a deeper, richer understanding of your customers and their needs and motivations. In today’s current climate, it is more important than ever to understand how customer behaviours have changed—and what customer needs are triggering interactions with your business processes and practises.

What is customer journey mapping?

A customer journey map is a powerful visual tool that identifies the crucial moments—or touchpoints—when a customer interacts with your business. Having one allows you to develop a deep understanding of your customers and help you:

• Identify customer triggers and motivations.
• Uncover behaviours and touchpoints at each step of their journey.
• Understand customers’ feelings and needs—met and unmet across the journey, enriching your understanding of why they do what they do.
• Identify the best moments to connect with customers and influence them.
• Explore the best ways to connect at each moment, from the medium to the message and customer motivation you respond to.
• Understand the critical tasks to fulfil at each touchpoint to make the customer’s experience smooth and seamless.

Why develop a customer journey map?

Keeping customers happy helps the bottom line. Happy customers are more likely to repeat purchase, they’re less likely to complain and more likely to talk positively to others about you.

A 2018 global research report on customer journey mapping found that 85 per cent of businesses that used customer journey mapping reported a positive or very positive impact. This included increased customer satisfaction (71%), Net Promoter Score increases (53%), fewer customer complaints (48%) and reduced customer churn (40%).

A customer journey map identifies what makes your customers happy. It helps you better understand them, their buying journey and how to communicate with them in trustworthy, relevant and meaningful ways. By identifying the critical touchpoints between your brand and your customers, magnifying its strengths and shoring up any weaknesses, you improve your overall customer experience.

“Understanding customer pain points and identifying ways in which a customer experience can be made more intuitive creates powerful experiences and strengthens emotional connections,” says Mark Vincett, Director of Research at Sapien. “As a customer, when a brand pre-empts your needs to a point where you aren’t confronted, surprised or challenged by any of the steps to a purchase, it makes the act of buying feel very comfortable—natural even.”

“A customer can walk away feeling elevated by the experience.”

How does it work?

Mapping out your customer journey requires a rich understanding of your customers’ needs and motivations. The most common methodology used to uncover these is in-depth, one-on-one interviews face to face or online, the richness of this approach helps uncover not just what they did, but why they did it and what they needed from the experience.

Once the research is completed you’ll gain a detailed report that brings your customers to life, including individual customer experiences at key journey stages, highlighted opportunities taken from customers’ real-world and desired experiences, and video vignettes (where available), photos and verbatims to bring you closer to your customers’ experiences and their journeys.

At Sapien, we also provide a designed customer journey process map. This is a visual representation of your overall customer journey that will allow you to better understand and share the findings across your business. From illustrating your customers’ mindsets, behaviours and needs at each stage to identifying priority areas to focus on and variations in the customer journey by different customer types, it is a powerful tool to have in hand for your future business planning.

Interested in conducting customer journey mapping research with us? Get in touch.