Customer journey mapping is widely used in the B2C world, but it can be even more essential in B2B, where purchases are complex, involve different teams of people and a longer period of time. Used well, a Customer Journey Map that unearths the authentic experiences of buyers throughout your process is an invaluable tool for business performance and growth.
What is a B2B Customer Journey Map?
Customer journey mapping is a visual, unified, narrative journey of your customer’s interactions with your company. It’s the human layer to the data you’re probably already collecting about your customers, celebrating what works and identifying challenges.
Most importantly, it’s told from the outside in – the customer’s point of view, not yours or your organisation’s.
The Customer Journey Map is researched and validated with actual customers to help avoid assumptions and ambiguities.
A Customer Journey Map is the view from the outside-in - not your business perspective. Click To TweetWhat goes into a Customer Journey Map?
There are three key inputs to a Customer Journey Map – Lens, Experience and Insights.
The Lens is your customer perspective, and the scenarios they go through on your buyer journey.
The Experience is what they’re going through as they progress from one point to another – what are they thinking, how are they feeling, what phases do they pass through?
The Insights are the reason we do the work – what does the map tell us about those scenarios and quality of experiences? What can we fix or improve?
Read more: Why user research matters for B2B organisations
Benefits of a Customer Journey Map
- Maps are a mechanism and a space to gather both the human (stakeholders) and non-human (services, touch-points) elements of your business
- They do a powerful job of communicating complexity in an understandable manner
- Maps allow you to synthesise and structure research and persona creation around business processes and outcomes
- They build awareness and empathy for your customers’ real-world experiences
- The process of creating and sharing them prompts conversation and reflection across hierarchies and departments, around the pain-points in the delivery of a service and inevitably within the organisation itself
- Once complete, Maps are accessible to groups at various levels of engagement and, in many cases, give staff a new perspective on how their organisation functions as a whole
Making a better Customer Journey Map
A perfectly-created Customer Journey Map is only the start of your own journey. Once it’s been made visible, the job is to look for target areas to enhance and improve, starting with the most urgent – where are the most serious blockers and impediments for the customer, and how can you alleviate them?
Customer Journey Maps build awareness and empathy for your customers' real-world experiences. Click To TweetWith a watching brief on your customers’ movements and interactions, you’ll be able to improve customer experience, inspire loyalty and lift revenue.
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