Creating a Customer Journey Map for Commercial Businesses

Creating a Customer Journey Map for Commercial Businesses

Understanding how customers find and interact with a business can be a mystery. Many entrepreneurs find themselves becoming frustrated by the seeming disinterest in their hard work. It can seem like a fixed game when everyone else has stellar reviews and your business isn’t even on the radar. This defeatist attitude helps no one. By creating a customer journey map for commercial business, owners can build a sales funnel that in turn builds up their business.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

Only a hobbyist or amateur relies only on the existence of their store or product to ensure success. Creating a trustworthy persona and reliable experience is key to turning a stranger into a vocal repeat customer. That’s what a journey map is all about. The goal is to plan out exactly how customers will find a business, make a commitment of time or money, and then continue to do so. What about a business that makes a customer write a good review or recommend it to their peers? Usually, it’s a solid plan on what a business means, what it represents, the services it offers, and how it treats people.

Decide on a Framework that Works for Your Business

The next step to creating a customer journey map for commercial business is to figure one out what will work. Every business’s exact needs depend on the nature of what it sells. An art supply company’s details on their map will not be anything like the map for a law firm or restaurant. However, most businesses have the same basic goal—convert chance buyers into repeat customers.

In business terms, this comes down to driving awareness, converting visitors, and maintaining awareness and brand interest. Using these four points is a great basic map template that will work for most. Realizing where customers come from, tapping into those markets, creating sales, and building trust are all independent factors that can be analyzed at length. Once a business knows how they fall in each category, they can make active efforts to become more efficient on each level.

Deal with Problems Before They Arise

One of the biggest hurdles to implementing a customer journey map is to identify problems before the customer does. For brick-and-mortar stores, the physical location is a crucial detail. Take the time to plan out the traffic flow inside out of your business. Having a clean and well-arranged store is as important as an organized and properly maintained parking lot.

When it comes to the eCommerce side of things, this includes making sure a website has an orderly structure and is completely bug-free. Stores and websites can also be arranged with the map framework in mind. The more consciously it is implemented, the more customers will follow the route without stumbling.