Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Experiences (Part 3)

There are four major types of journey maps that you can design to understand various scenarios your customer may encounter: Current state, Future state, Day in the Life, and Service Blueprint. There is no need to chart all four, but it can be helpful to understand each depending on your customer experience goals.

Customer journey map illustrates all the places and touchpoints customers come into contact with your brand, online or offline and they help you look at your brand, product, and processes through the customer’s lens so that you can visualize the literal customer journey through the funnel. Our Ezidebit payment solutions often help our clients to mitigate their customer's pain points. 

According to Baymard Institute, nearly 70% of online shoppers abandoned their cart.

Every product or service has been designed with the intention of fulfilling a particular need, yet often we see prospects come to us with outdated solutions that doesn't meet their or their customers' needs. When a payment solution doesn't fulfil customer's need it often reflects poorly on the brand and can directly influence cart abandonment. Your business works way to hard to loose customers due to an outdated payment solution. Payment processing can be a complicated job for businesses but that doesn’t concern your customers. They want fast and easy payment processing and about 56 percent of online buyers want to see multiple payment options.

How to identify what to improve

The easiest way to decide where to spend your energy (and time) first, is to look at which particular improvement will have the greatest impact. For example, there’s no point spending time improving your “New Client Welcome Email” if you don’t have any new leads in the pipeline yet.

Instead, focus on something higher up the funnel – such as a new piece of content to bring in new leads and then, as these people start to convert and filter down the funnel, you can keep ahead of them and work on content that they’ll get later in their lifecycle. That way you’re putting effort into areas where it’s needed most, but still remaining ahead of your customers as they move through your customer journey map.

Once you’ve made changes and published the new content, it’s also very important to measure and test your changes. Use tools such as Google Analytics and Hotjar to (literally) ‘see’ what people are doing on your website and with your content, and make further improvements if required.

You may also find that customers aren’t locating your content, because it doesn’t describe their problem in a familiar or relevant way. In these instances, use Google Search to find related search phrases and be sure to weave these into your content so you’re capturing as many potential customers as possible. Similarly, Google Trends is a great tool to find out what people are searching for on particular topics at certain points in time. As long as it’s relevant, writing about a trending industry topic is another good way to get traffic.

Testing your changes is also an important part of the process. Try different titles on your content, different button colours on your lead-generating web pages, etc – and compare the results to a previous iteration to see which performs better. Of course, only change one variable each time, so you can ensure the test is accurate.

From there, simply chip-away at the remaining changes with a view to implementing and testing each one as time goes on. Good luck!