How to Improve Your Digital Customer Experience

Monetizing digital content enables publishers to make their business more profitable. But, at the same time, the competitive environment drives them to create better content and look for ways to maintain users’ loyalty and satisfaction. Here’s where customer journey mapping steps in, allowing the publishers to understand their audience better to provide the content they need and the experience they deserve.

Let’s see how customer journey mapping works and what benefits it can bring to your digital platform.

How can customer journey mapping help?

In brief, a customer journey map is a visualization of a user’s experience with your product. It illustrates touchpoints between a customer and your website, from initial contact, through the process of engagement, and into long-term loyalty and advocacy. It may contain your user’s goals, channels they prefer, expectations, thoughts, emotions, and anything that can provide some insights into your customers’ experience. 

Some of customer journey mapping advantages are:

? Putting yourself in your users’ shoes and seeing not estimated but the real journey they go through with your website. 

? Comparing users’ expectations with what they get.

? Identifying users’ motivations, frustrations, and pain points and understanding what’s better to be fixed and what has to be highlighted during their journey. 

? Detecting the user experience flaws and possibilities for its improvement. 

? Considering to-be and what-if scenarios of your customers’ journeys.

? Coming up with an actionable plan for further product development in compliance with customers’ needs. 

Let’s take a closer look at how to build a practical customer journey map.

How to build a customer journey map?

Before visualizing your customer’s experience, you need to do good old research. Without gathering up-to-date information, you will create a fictional story instead of diving into real users’ journeys. Here is an example of a customer journey map! Discover some ways to get reliable data to include but are not limited to:

? Interviewing former, current, and potential users.

? Conducting surveys and polls.

? Checking out available analytics sources (Google Analytics, Hotjar, and such).

? Collecting customer feedback posted on third-party platforms.

As a piece of advice… don’t try to reach out to all of your users, yet too few respondents won’t be enough too. Your goal is to see the patterns in the sea of users’ feedback. 

Once the data is gathered, you need to organize it and segment the audience by specific criteria. You can’t build a universal journey for all of the users. That’s why you’d better divide them into groups that are called user personas, then focus on a few or just one and follow their particular journey. Thus you will see at what stage this or that persona struggles with your product, what should be upgraded or removed, where something is missing, and so on. 

For example, many digital users have problems at the payment stage. So it’s a good idea to smooth up the process and make going through it easy and intuitive. You can do it with solutions like Dpay that take advantage of Carrier Billing technology, speeding the purchasing process by five times compared to credit card usage. In a nutshell, you will reduce the number of steps a customer should take without risking their payment information safety. And this approach will also help you establish trust between you as a publisher.

Building a journey map might sound challenging, and yes, it’s not a several days task. But the more effort you make, the better result you get. To ease the process, you can leverage professional customer journey mapping tools like UXPressia to create maps from scratch or use ready-made templates that fit your case and personas. 

To enhance your digital customers’ experience, you need to identify what has to be improved by building their journeys and analyzing them. Be ready to invest time and effort in collecting and analyzing clients’ feedback. Try to see everything through your users’ eyes and look for the stages, touchpoints, channels, and other parts of their journeys that require your attention. Enhancing customer experience is an indirect but very effective way to increase sales.

Many professional tools can help build an actional customer journey map, yet its creation is not the final point. Organize ideation sessions, engage your team, and together you will come up with the strategies for customer experience improvement. 

Katerina Kondrenko, a Content Writer, has collaborated with our blog in this post.