We’re now in an era of business where the success of any brand highly depends on the experience of its customers — before, during, and after purchase. A clear vision and strategy for customer interactions with your brand is no longer a luxury but an absolute necessity.
Many brands have employed customer journey maps to understand how their customers interact with their brand — on and offline — and have used information acquired from the maps to improve their customers’ experience.
Journey maps are a proven framework for helping drive greater customer insights and improving internal efficiencies. They help you identify engagement and enhancement opportunities, increase conversions, and achieve the high return on investment (ROI) that is important for your business growth.
In this guide, we’ll be discussing, in detail, how you can build your own complete and comprehensive customer journey map, and how to use it effectively.
Before we dive into creating the journey map, let’s understand what it is and why it’s important.
WHAT IS CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING?
Customer journey mapping (also called user or buyer journey mapping) is simply an overview of how customers interact with and experience your brand across multiple touchpoints. Instead of looking at just a part of a transaction or experience, the customer journey documents the full experience of becoming a customer.
WHY IS CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING IMPORTANT?
Customer journey mapping enables you to discover how to be consistent with providing a positive customer experience and retaining customer loyalty.
By visualizing the thoughts, actions, and emotions your customers experience, you better understand them, identify their pain points, and then develop strategies to help them reach their goals.
Customer journey mapping is a concrete way to work towards creating a great experience, as it enables teams to:
- Shift from a company to a customer-focused perspective.
- Increase customer engagement through channel and touchpoint optimization. If you found during customer journey mapping that most of your customers contact you through your Google My Business page, you will be prompted to optimize that channel so you can acquire more customers.
- Eliminate ineffective touchpoints and channels. With customer journey mapping, you can discover and eliminate channels and touchpoints that are costing you time and resources but are not effective.
- Create cross-team alignment around the business and close interdepartmental gaps.
- Make necessary improvements to convert more leads into customers then work towards retaining customer loyalty.
WHAT TEAM DO YOU NEED TO MAP YOUR CUSTOMER JOURNEY?
If you work in a brokerage or firm, it is not advisable to create your customer journey map alone. You need a team consisting of key decision-makers at every level of your organization to craft, revise, and bring it to life. Without this designated team, the work you do here will likely get steamrolled.
The team required to build your customer journey map highly depends on the size of your organization though.
For real estate brokerages and big agencies, you need key decision-makers in your company such as the CEO, COO, CMO, etc. The more decision-makers that can be involved in the process the better. Their inputs will significantly increase the relevance of the journey map produced.
If you are an independent agent or broker, you can do it alone.
HOW TO CREATE AN EFFECTIVE CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP
There are several ways to create a customer journey map. However, the steps outlined below have been tested and optimized for the real estate industry.
Download our free real estate customer journey mapping kit to get you started.
Step 1: Identify your target audience and create buyer personas
The first step to creating an effective customer journey map is identifying your ideal customers. And there’s no better way to identify and understand your customers than creating buyer personas.
Buyer personas (also called customer personas, audience personas, or marketing personas) are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research.
Buyer personas provide guidance and input for your customer journey mapping. They help you understand the goals and motivations of your customers (why they do what they do). They also provide relevant information about their challenges and pain points, as well as their demographics and psychographics.
The easiest way for you to create effective buyer personas is to use our free, downloadable guide and template.
Step 2: Map your customer journey
The next step is to map your customers’ journey using the downloaded customer journey mapping template.
There are four (4) stages of the customer journey (in the real estate industry) you need to map.
Check out the example of mapping the journey of a first-time home buyer who’s getting married soon below. The example is also included in the free downloadable customer journey mapping kit as a picture.
The four (4) stages are:
- Awareness: This is the first stage in a customer’s journey and is a stage where your prospect acknowledges a problem and begins to research a solution. As an example, someone might be getting married and want a bigger house that’ll accommodate their prospective new family. Their journey to getting the apartment required starts once they start searching.
- Consideration: This is the stage where the prospect looks at the options of solutions available to them and weighs them accordingly.
- Decision: The prospect chooses a solution, looks at specific buying details, and considers if there’ll be any support or follow-up. For example, they’ll consider if you’ll be available to lead them to inspect the properties they’re interested in, and how difficult or easy it’ll be to purchase or lease the properties of their interest when they are ready to commit.
- Engage/Delight: In this stage, the once prospect who is now a customer looks forward to how you’ll support them after their transaction with you.
You aim to map the journey of your customers across the aforementioned stages documenting the following in each stage:
- Initiating events and actions: These are simply the things that drive customer behavior. It also includes the actions they take at each stage of their journey.
- Feeling/emotion: Every action of your customer is motivated by an emotion. And your customer’s emotions will change depending on which part of their journey they’re at. The emotional driver of each of your customer’s actions is usually caused by a pain point or a problem. Knowing this will help you to provide the right content at the right time so that you smooth the customer’s emotional journey through interaction with your brand.
- Touchpoints: A “touchpoint” refers to any time a customer comes into contact with your brand – before, during, or after they employ your service. This also includes moments that happen offline/online, through marketing, in person, or over the phone. You’ll want to take all existing and potential touchpoints that occur between your customers and your organization into account. That way, you won’t miss out on any opportunities to listen to your customers and make improvements that will them achieve their goals and make them happy.
- Communication/Improvement strategy: This simply is how you communicate with the customer in each stage. It also includes the strategies you plan to employ or improve to eliminate obstacles for your customer in each stage of the journey.
If you’re interested in collecting — from your customers — first-hand information you can use in creating or updating your customer journey map check out the free customer journey questionnaire included in the customer journey kit.
Step 3: Prioritize and fix roadblocks
Customer journey mapping isn’t done for fun. It is done to get useful insights into how your customers interact with your brand and how that translates to their experience, whether good or bad.
So, analyze their journey, find out what can constitute roadblocks, and develop strategies and action plans to eliminate them. The ultimate aim is to deliver a good experience to your customers.
Some questions you can ask yourself are:
- What needs to be corrected or built?
- Is there a need to break everything down and start from scratch? Or are a few simple changes all that’s necessary for a big impact?
- What tactics can we employ to eliminate obstacles and objections at each stage of the customer journey?
- How can we support people when they decide to employ our service?
You may wind up with a long list of actions and strategies. That’s fine. You just need to prioritize them accordingly.
You can prioritize according to four factors:
- Impact of the action plan or strategy.
- Ease of implementing it.
- Time required. Usually split between short, medium, and long terms.
- Budget and resources available for the action plan or strategy.
Step 4: Update and Improve
Your customers are constantly changing and evolving so your customer journey map should be doing the same. Consider it a living document that will continue to grow and develop.
If possible, test, update and improve your customer journey map every quarter or so. In addition, customer journey maps should also be tweaked accordingly whenever you introduce significant changes to your service.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Customer experience has a direct impact on the success of any business. By shifting the focus of your business to the customer’s perspective, you can better understand consumer wants and needs and then create more effective and satisfying experiences for them.
Let us know if there’s anything we’ve left out in this guide.
Also, check out our guide and free templates on creating buyer personas, conducting competitive analysis, and completing your overall brand strategy.
Reach out to us if you need any help with developing or implementing your real estate brand strategy. Our crack team of brand strategists and marketing specialists are always happy to connect you with the right customers who’ll bring growth to your business.