Turn The Client Journey Into An Experience — What Is A Client Map And How To Build One?
A good tour guide knows that his clients don’t just want information. They don’t only want to know when a building went up or who painted the ceiling. They can get that from a book. They want an experience. So a smart guide plans the tour to make that experience as awesome as possible. From choosing the best stories to picking the times and selecting the places to stop for food and bathroom breaks, he tries to make sure that every moment of the tour is unforgettable.

Smart brands do the same thing. They map their customer journeys on a timeline so that they know how those customers feel at every stop between interest and purchase. Some of those stops will be common to all businesses — such as enquiry, quote, purchase, cross sale and up-sale, claim or cancellation — while others will be unique to that brand and those clients. Smart businesses always plan ways to improve the experience of that journey at every stage.

The mapmaking begins by identifying the customers. Different customers will take different journeys and react to the same experiences in different ways. This is where those personas are so useful. Brands need to know who they’re taking on the journey.

The second challenge is to define the experience the customer will undergo and the steps he or she will take to get there.

So if the brand was a hotel booking site, the destination of the customer journey might be the completion of a reservation. To reach that destination though, the customer might follow a route that takes him from searching other travel sites through browsing image galleries, checking customer reviews and filling in a booking form.

Each stop of that journey has an effect. It impacts on the customer’s emotion, affects the way he feels and defines his experience with the brand.

Score The Client Map
The next stage of mapping a customer journey is to assign a score to each of those stages. It could be a value score from one to ten or it could take the form of a graph showing highs and lows. So browsing comparison travel sites could score a 5; looking at galleries of rooms and vacation destinations, which is fun and aspirational, could score a 9; but using the calendar application to enter the dates and waiting while the website checks for vacancies might only score a 2.

With that map in hand, the brand has an overview of the customer experience. It knows what its customers need to do to make a purchase, and it knows how those customers will feel each step of the way.

More importantly, the brand can then look for ways to lift those numbers and improve the customer experience. Content will play a key role in that task. A good content strategy improves understanding and generates interaction. It turns information into an experience.

A professional tour guide does more than take tourists from the meeting point, through the sites and back to the car park. He turns the journey into something memorable, and when he sees his tourists flagging, he adjusts his map to improve the experience. Brands need to make and use their own customer journey maps.

In the next post, we’ll look at what your map tells you, and how you can use it to improve the customer experience.

To learn more about Customer Journey in content marketing and what it can do for your business, contact us at contact@astelo.com.

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