The customer journey is one of the most vital aspects of any business. It gives you a whole new perspective on what your customers experience with your company. Here are the key factors you need to understand about the customer journey, and how mapping that journey can help your business succeed.

1. You Can Break it Down into Three Parts

The customer journey is long and complicated, even when you have streamlined the entire process, but the entire thing can be broken down into roughly three parts: engagement, connection, and success.

Engagement is how much effort it takes your customer or potential client to go from discovery to purchase. This phase analyzes aspects like the ease of transition from web ads to your website, and the ease of the buying experience at your own site or in-store. Better engagement levels indicate that your customer journey is streamlined, simple, and effective. Poor engagement means there is a problem somewhere along the line.

Connection refers to how well your advertising and customer journey connects with your customers and clients. Are your ads well-targeted to your potential demographics? Are the common landing pages for your site developed in such a way as to create an emotional connection? These are key aspects of measuring the connection aspect of a customer journey. Without the right connection, you won’t attract the right people. And without a consistent emotional connection, even the right people won’t become invested in your products and brand.

The final aspect is success, which is, most simply, the conversion factor. This aspect looks at the entire big picture, analyzing what works, what doesn’t, and where you are potentially losing people along the way.

2. You aren’t Your Customer, But You Can Know Their Journey

They say that women are from Venus and men are from Mars, but in the corporate world, your customers may as well be in a different solar system. Your company, by design, is an authority and expert in what you do. If you sell sporting equipment, for example, then you understand what your customers need for their sports from many different factors, including common league requirements, equipment that can help reduce injuries, and more. Your customers, however, are coming to you because they need a product, it’s up to you to prove that you are the authority, which can be a tricky conversation.

Luckily, customer journey mapping can help you understand why your customers are coming to you, and what they expect from your company and your products. So while you can’t possibly understand the perspective of every potential client, you can understand why they are coming to you, and why some are heading elsewhere.

3. Not Every Factor is Important

Customer journeys are a holistic look at your customers’ and clients’ experiences with your company. They can give you a lot of data about when they came to you, from where, and when they left. This information is absolutely vital, but it can also be extremely overwhelming. That is why the best customer journey mapping is done by qualified research groups, firms that understand the relevant data and can help you make a better experience based on the right kind of data. By filtering through the data and applying proper weighting to weed out biases and outliers, qualified marketing research groups can provide thorough analyses that provide concrete, easy-to-understand information—information that you can immediately use to improve your customers’ journeys.

4. Customer Journey Maps Can Determine What Is Overlooked From a Client Perspective

One of the most frustrating aspects of a multifaceted business is when one of your departments is seemingly overlooked by clients and customers who should, theoretically, be interested in what they have to offer. A detailed customer journey map can actually discover the reasons why these departments are overlooked by examining where potential clients are leaving.

Think of it this way: your sporting goods store obviously appeals to many different kinds of sports. But let’s say one of the most popular sports, like soccer, seems to have little to no traction in your store. A customer journey map of your online experience can pinpoint the people who are looking for soccer equipment to find out when they abandon your company and look elsewhere. Then, you can change the experience to help people get to the products they need.

Customer journey maps can help your business attract more customers and improve their overall experience, turning them from complete strangers to brand ambassadors. With the right marketing research group helping you map the customer experience, you can discover what’s working, and what isn’t, and you’ll see new levels of success based on hard data.