What is Customer Experience Mapping?

Customer experience mapping is when you outline your customer interactions with your brand by breaking down each strategic stage and steps in the customer's path. Customer journey maps are a great way to map out these experiences and are essential in our current age of multichannel retail. This tool allows brands to see each step their customers take on their websites, opening the path for new fixes. When you use it to map customer experience altogether, you’re on the right track to creating a positive and unforgettable encounter. It’s the kind of practice that will set you apart and turn website visitors into frequent customers.

How to Map Customer Experience

You’ll need to figure out how your visitors interact with your brand and create a customer buyer map. This map is a visual representation of the steps a buyer goes through with your company. It should be all-encompassing and showcase more than what your customers are doing: it should also show what they’re thinking and feeling.

You can base the first layer of your customer journey map on the classic sales funnel, which entails:

• Awareness. The customer becomes aware that the particular product or service exists.
• Research. The customer looks into different options, comparing them to make an educated choice.
• Purchase. After some consideration, the customer buys the product or hires the service.

The classic sales funnel has changed a little bit in the past few decades, as retail became much more competitive. We’d add two new factors:

• Out-of-box experience. A quick YouTube search will lead you to hundreds of videos of influencers unwrapping products. It’s become a shared joy to see attractive packaging or a little extra. It’s certainly an opportunity for brands (and particularly manufacturers) to shine.
• Returns policy. The younger generation is more willing to buy products in bulk, with the idea of returning anything that doesn’t fit or work properly. Companies with a more understanding return policy have an advantage with these customers.

It’s always important to note what are the touchpoints, namely, the moments in which you and your customers meet. These can happen at any point in the sales funnel!

The second layer to map customer experience is a more inside approach into what customers go through. A few key questions you should be asking are:

• What actions are your customers taking at each point of the above sales funnel?
• What motivates them?
• What are their questions on each step of the journey?
• What barriers are they facing?

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