How well do you understand your customers’ experience with your brand?

Research shows that most businesses don’t know how customers perceive their CX. In fact, 87% believe their CX is great, while only 11% of customers agree.

The difference is staggering, especially because it suggests most businesses aren’t trying to refine their CX. 

However, there’s a way to closely examine your CX and gain a deeper understanding of your customers. It’s called a customer experience map.

In this article, I’ll discuss what it is, how you can create one, and how it can impact your business.

Tip: Your CX works hand-in-hand with your messaging strategy.

I’m Nora Sudduth, a messaging expert, and we can work together to create powerful brand messaging that bolsters a positive CX and drives results. Schedule a discovery call with me today.

What is a Customer Experience Map?

A customer experience map is a visual representation of the entire relationship a customer has with your brand, regardless of whether it ends in a specific action or reaches a goal.

It maps out the entire customer journey, highlights all customer touchpoints, and examines how key messaging strategy moves clients further along. It also notes customer sentiment, motivations, and challenges at every level.

The CX map is essential for understanding how customers interact with your brand. It provides insights into behavior patterns that you can use to optimize specific customer journeys.

Customer Experience Map Example

CX mapping can be daunting because it is a comprehensive process.

You can take inspiration from this example when starting one for your company:

Let’s say you run a startup online tutorial company. 

This sample map traces how customers interact with you at every level of the customer journey, from awareness to post-sales engagement.

Your map should reflect the unique nature of your business and its actual day-to-day operations. It should also include information that significantly impacts client behavior. In this case, these are things that are “nice to have” and “needs and challenges.”

What is Customer Experience Journey Mapping?

Customer journey mapping is the process of tracing the entire journey that customers take when interacting with a brand while taking note of other important elements like the way customers feel, think, and engage at various touchpoints.

It’s important for businesses to map their CX to:

• Find and address gaps in their content messaging or overall brand messaging
• Spot friction areas, problematic drop-off points, and other issues in their CX that turn customers off
• Examine the overall CX and learn how it matches customer expectations

Customer Experience Map vs. Customer Journey Map

Although they seem similar, the terms “customer experience map” and “customer journey map” are different.

Here are some of the most important ways they differ:

While the above differences separate the two from each other, both are necessary tools for a thorough assessment of your CX.

You can’t perform an in-depth customer experience map without creating multiple customer journey maps that define the paths each customer takes to reach your intended goal.

What is a Customer Journey Model?

A customer journey model is a framework or template that outlines the stages of a customer’s lifecycle.

It’s an important tool for defining how you want the journey to look or as a benchmark for assessing existing customer journeys.

Key Components of a Customer Experience Map

CX maps will look different depending on who’s creating them because, though similar businesses may follow a template, some nuances are unique to every brand.

Those nuances, or specific factors that affect your overall CX, need to be reflected in your map to realistically depict existing processes and systems.

Still, certain key components need to be present when mapping your CX.

These are:

• Objectives: Since CX mapping is quite comprehensive, setting specific objectives helps provide a focus for the exercise. For instance, you might want to find out why more customers sign up for one particular service.
• Customer personas: Represent specific customer segments and allow you to create an accurate profile of your customer base.
• Customer touchpoints: Moments in the customer journey where you get to engage with your customers, which covers everywhere you exist (email, website, social media, etc.).
• Customer journey: Mark out the stages customers go through, from initial brand awareness to post-purchase/sign-up and advocacy.
• Customer needs: What questions are your customers asking? What problems do they want solved? These are pain points that you should address with every customer touchpoint or at each stage in the customer journey.
• Motivators: Positive interactions that nudge customers further in their journey, boost their trust, and enhance your relationship. These can include a smooth transaction with a live agent, a comprehensive product demo, or educational content that answers their doubts about a product.
• Messaging: Reflects how effectively you can implement your messaging matrix across various channels where customer engagements happen. It also shows how you flex core messages to ensure that they resonate at every level of the customer journey.
• Takeaways or insights: Highlight areas for improvement and other qualitative insights drawn from the CX map.

How to Create a Customer Experience Map

It’s time to design a customer experience map for your business.

Follow this step-by-step guide:

1. Establish Your CX Lens

Also called your CX’s guiding principles, the CX lens is the perspective through which you interpret the customer experience and discover new insights.

There are four main types of CX lenses, namely:

• Behavioral: Customer actions and patterns of behavior
• Emotional: Emotional motivations and feelings
• Quantitative: Measurable findings into customer behavior
• Qualitative: Explore why customers behave the way they do

To understand this concept further, let’s refer to the example of Rail Europe again.

You’ll notice that the sample CX map indicates guiding principles like “People choose rail travel because it is convenient, easy, and flexible.” This is an example of a behavioral lens that answers what travelers do with regard to Rail Europe’s service.

These lenses provide a framework for understanding the customer experience and help give a bird’ s-eye view of your processes from a customer’s perspective.

2. Collect CX Data

Now that your lenses are established, you can proceed to data collection, covering all touchpoints and channels where you exist.

This includes real-time, historical, and even predictive analysis of customer data and insights to understand your customers better.

Tip: Use tools to expedite data collection, such as social listening tools and customer relationship management (CRM) software.

3. Identify Customer Touchpoints

Customer touchpoints are moments in your overall CX where you interact with your customers. These are also opportunities for your brand to make a positive impression.

Examples of customer touchpoints are:

• Conversations with a live agent or bot
• Social media interactions
• Product demos or walk-throughs

Your goal at this stage is to identify these key moments as well as examine whether individual touchpoints connect seamlessly to create one cohesive and efficient journey.

4. Define Stages of the Customer Journey

These are the steps that customers take as they form a deeper relationship with your brand. 

A typical journey includes the following stages:

• Awareness: Potential customers become aware of a problem that you can solve
• Consideration: They begin to weigh their options and look to know more about what you offer
• Decision: Customers either make a purchase or turn to a competitor
• Retention: The stage where you maintain a mutually enriching relationship with your customers
• Advocacy: Satisfied customers become advocates of your brand by positive word of mouth or referral

These stages can look much different for your brand, just as in the earlier example for Rail Europe. Be as precise as possible when identifying the exact stages of the customer lifecycle.

5. Assess Your Messaging

You’ve now established the CX journey stages. Now, it’s time to assess the messaging strategy you’re using to carry customers from one stage to another.

Examine the messages you deliver at various touchpoints and how effectively they motivate customers to engage meaningfully with your brand. You can also conduct message testing to learn what messages resonate with your customers best.

Remember: Your messaging is crucial to your CX. It delivers your brand value in a way that your customers remember and appreciate.

If you need help with your messaging, let’s discuss how we can design a messaging strategy that convinces your audience of your unique selling points. Book a discovery call with me today!

6. Highlight Key Insights and Factors

Highlight important insights and factors that affect customer behavior. These can be:

• Buyer pain points: What problems are they facing? What challenges do they need to overcome to come to a decision?
• Emotions: How do customers feel at various touchpoints? Qualitative customer feedback comes in handy for determining this.
• Motivations or influencers: What incentives do your customers want to gain, and how do your products and services provide those?
• Opportunities: Are there opportunities to further improve the customer journey?
• Positive experiences: What experiences do your customers especially appreciate or enjoy?

7. Create a Visual Map

Once your data and findings are complete, turn them into a visual map that will help internal stakeholders grasp your findings easily.

This involves using charts, tables, and graphs that clearly illustrate all the critical components of the map while still ensuring readability and quick interpretation.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Learn more about mapping the customer journey with these FAQs:

Where Does the Customer Experience Map Begin?

The customer experience map typically starts with customer personas, which give you deeper insight into customer behavior, preferences, motivations, and challenges.

What is an E-commerce Customer Experience Map? 

An e-commerce customer experience map is a visual illustration of how customers interact with an e-commerce business, taking note of factors that affect customer interactions and opportunities for creating a more seamless customer journey.

What Tools Are Available for Creating a Customer Experience Map?

Various tools can make building a CX map faster and easier, such as:

• Analytics software for gathering customer data (like CRMs)
• Mapping tools like Adobe Experience Cloud and ClickUp
• Visual tools like Gantt charts for presenting insights and quantitative data

Conclusion

Learn more about your customers and your business by visualizing the customer journey through CX maps.

To build one:

• Establish your CX lenses
• Determine customer touchpoints and journey stages
• Examine your messaging
• Analyze findings to draw CX insights

Don’t forget that your messaging strategy works hand-in-hand with your CX.

You need impactful messaging that speaks directly to your customers’ pain points and motivations at every stage of the journey. Let’s talk about how we can achieve that together. Join me for a discovery call today to get started.