So what the heck is a customer journey map? It is a way of documenting the total customer experience across all contact points of your business on their path to a sale. How are customers interacting with you and where are the gaps?

Analysing your business in this way is important because it helps you improve your customer's experience by looking at it from their perspective - not yours. The better that experience, the more chance you have of holding on to them and the more profitable that relationship will be.

What we have learned is that your customer's journey through your business doesn't follow a constant path. They may interact with some touch points and completely miss others.

A touch point is any part of your business where your customer interacts with you. It might be by receiving an invoice or submitting a form on your website or phoning your business for help.

Seeing your business through the eyes of your customer can help you decide if it is more important to update your website or instead send some of your team on a telephone answering course.

Here are some tips to help you create a customer journey map:

1. Identify your target market. Understand who they are. Considering the 80/20 rule where 80% of your sales probably comes from around 20% of your customers. Identify a specific gender, age bracket, income level, marital status or other demographics that really help you to hone in on that ideal customer.
   
   
2. Your customer journey. Prepare a flowchart which shows the various paths that your customers experience as they learn more about your products. If they are navigating your website, what is their experience like? What pages would they typically refer to before making the call? What is their experience during the call? What is their experience as they move towards the sale?
   
   
3. What are your customer's goals? Your customers are only interested in their goals, not yours. How do they interact with your business in order to achieve those goals? If they are looking for instructions on how easy it is to use your product, are they able to easily find an explanatory video?
   
   
4. Identify all of the touch points. Look at all the areas in your business where your customers have an interaction. How does their experience at each of these touch points help them realise their goals? Does your blog answer the questions? Do your testimonials help? Is your team trained to identify issues and deal with them on the phone?
   
   
5. Identify the gaps. Find the touch points which aren't delivering as they should be and put a process in place to ensure that your customer's issues are being addressed in a way that makes sense to them.

Mapping the process helps ensure that your marketing collateral and sales procedures focus clearly on your customer, improving your chances of success.