When a potential customer becomes a purchasing customer, it becomes critical for organisations to track their relationship with the buyers. The beginning of a customer-organisation relationship is called customer journey and tracking this path is known as customer journey mapping.

What are Customer Journey Mapping Tools?

A company needs to assess a customer’s experience, their needs, pain points and behaviour patterns. To do so, CX professionals need the help of a tool. These tools are known as customer journey mapping tools.

A customer experience journey mapping tool is a software built to track the buyer’s journey with an organisation. It is the visual showcase of the routes your customer takes when interacting with a particular brand at various touchpoints. These touchpoints need to capture customer satisfaction metrics These metrics include net promoter score, CSAT scores, customer effort score surveys. These surveys can be launched at different active touchpoints. These metrics can track customer engagement, identify key performance indicators and trace positive or negative experiences.

What is the other benefit of a CX mapping software tool?

Every organisation sells its products and services to its own target audience. So how do you know who your target buyer persona is going to be? A user journey mapping tool helps you create customer personas. Customer personas are fictional characters that represent your ideal target audience. In the business scenario, your ideal buyer persona will contain all the features and behavioural aspects of your target consumer. There are 4 ways to segregate buyer personas. This includes geographical segmentation, behavioural patterns, demographic segmentation, and psychographic segmentation.

Why is A CX Journey Mapping Tool Required?

A mapping software is a visual representation of your customer’s journey with the organisation. This can empower businesses to make customer-centric yet data driven decisions. Here are 5 reasons why it is a must for companies to invest in a buyer mapping software:

• Marketing and CX decisions impact customer expectations, satisfaction and retention rates. You need to track detractors/ unhappy respondents and map users who are at a high churn risk. Data can help you smoothen out high friction touchpoints and keep current promoters happy.
• Customer experience is more than just selling a product. It involves after-sales service, post-purchase survey and capturing a customer’s emotions. This also includes providing ongoing support to the existing user base.
• A great tool provides serious insights to the product development team. They can identify pain points, enhance user experience, push latest upgrades or improve on existing high friction touch-points.
• People often become brand advocates when they get memorable customer experiences. While a good product might bring a customer, better customer experience can convert a buyer to a brand advocate.

The customer support team can track deviations of a user journey and make improvements. Marketers and sales departments can identify rough CX moments, complaints and offer faster solutions to avert reputation damage.

Difference between Customer Journey Analytics Software and Customer Journey Mapping Software

A customer journey analytics software takes on the heavy duty task from a customer journey mapping tool. The main focus of the customer journey analytics tool is the management and automation of customer experiences across every active channel. This analytical software will monitor and analyze complex conversations/sentiments, capture leads and identify consumer behaviour on multi-channel platforms. It will track interactions over time and alert the business to reach out to prospective audiences in real time.

The journey mapping tool will create a visualization of every user touch point including websites and social media platforms. Stakeholders and various team members from marketing, sales, product managers can view this chart and allocate resources to maximize active communication channels.

3 Types of Customer Journey Mapping Tools

Choosing a specific type of mapping software depends on business goals, technical requirements, budget allowances and market size.

Google spreadsheet type tools:

Any user can create a simple journey map over a spreadsheet or Google excel. Google offers simple drop functionality, easy access across teams and files can easily be stored over the Google drive.

Visual diagram based tool:

Softwares such as Microsoft Visio, Lucidchart and ClickUp offer a visual representation of user journey maps. The user interface is interactive and diagrams are colour coded just like any project management activity.

Analytics tools for activity:

Google analytics offers a comprehensive view of every touchpoint- organic or paid campaign. It showcases footfalls based on dates and timelines. However, there are other softwares such as Qualtrics XM, Salesforce to name a few.

Merren As A Robust Customer Journey Mapping Tool For CX Professionals 

Merren is a well-equipped CX mapping platform. A marketing manager will have access to various satisfaction feedback survey templates. Using Merren needs no technical expertise. Any marketer can utilize our satisfaction survey templates, automatically trigger surveys, publish feedback surveys at multiple channels with one click. These channels include WhatsApp messenger surveys, AMP email surveys, Facebook messenger, website chat bot and can efficiently capture the voice of customers. You can also view real time data and journey on the Merren CX dashboard. Integrate all customer data with other BI tools and automate workflows across teams.

One can analyze quantitative and qualitative data with AI analytics and map customer behavior with these critical metrics. Merren is built for any industry including small to enterprise level organisations that work on a global scale. Merren offers a 14 day free trial before purchase. You do not need to share credit card information.

Create Instant Survey Template Using An AI App

Consider exploring an instant survey feedback template from this AI Survey Builder. Marketing professionals need not worry about manual intervention or the semantics of a survey questionnaire. Simply add the industry, questions types and easily customize it according to your business goals. Create on-the-spot questionnaires with the help of an artificial intelligence at your disposal. After all, buyer journey mapping should be hassle free so you can focus on the important CX metrics.

Conclusion

A user journey map is a critical requirement to conduct user research and analyse emotional metrics over a long duration of time. Tracking a journey is often a long term procedure and needs constant attention at touchpoints. You can also create a buyer persona with customer data to identify your ideal customer. Decision makers need to focus on customer success. This can only be done when you track consumer data, product usage and behavior patterns in a dynamic market. Equip your CX teams with a well-built mapping tool and supercharge your business today.