Mapping the Customer Journey in Community Powered Journalism
A customer journey map allows the organization to understand and explore all the possible channels and pathways that your potential customer follows to engage with your products and services. Such a map illustrates every potential touchpoint, and also reveals the customer’s feelings along the journey. Defining the emotional state of a target member helps us understand how to effectively inform, communicate with and market to potential customers, depending on where they are in the journey.
The following graphic contains a detailed hypothetical example of how a customer journey might look for users who move from anonymity to a membership decision based on their interaction with particular content (we use the example of a local story). In fact, customer journey map styles are as varied as the types of businesses and industries that regularly utilize them:
Traveling with your Customer
A customer journey map allows the organization to understand and explore all the possible channels and pathways that your potential customer follows to engage with your products and services. Such a map illustrates every potential touchpoint, and also reveals the customer’s feelings along the journey. Defining the emotional state of a target member helps us understand how to effectively inform, communicate with and market to potential customers, depending on where they are in the journey.
The graphic contains a detailed hypothetical example of how a customer journey might look for users who move from anonymity to a membership decision based on their interaction with particular content (we use the example of a local story). In fact, customer journey map styles are as varied as the types of businesses and industries that regularly utilize them:
The goal is to create a continuous path for your customer.
As Blake Pappas writes in Vertical Measures: “Your business cannot afford to have content gaps in the customer journey. Otherwise, potential customers will have no choice but to leave your company behind and find solutions to their challenges elsewhere.” In other words, once they’re interested, you must keep them interested.
Two points are key here, because they define a powerful feedback loop: (1) The customer journey informs every touchpoint with the target individual, meaning that we position those touchpoints along the journey. (2) In parallel, every interaction between the individual and our organization informs our understanding of the customer journey.