Achieving a great relationship with clients is the fundamental basis for any business. Understanding their wants and needs is essential to create the most impressive experiences and succeed.

Client is king, right? If we want to know how they interact with our e-commerce site, we must put ourselves in their shoes for a moment. We must understand how they think, the steps they take, their attitude, how they behave when they are making a decision, and even their buying motivation. These are key factors to detect possible errors and improve their relationship with our brand.

The navigation through our e-commerce should be an enjoyable experience for the clients’ satisfaction, so that they decide to repeat it again in the near future. Knowing the touchpoints potential clients go through, will give us the guideline to think strategically about the best course of action to attract their attention and improve their experience and the image they have of our business.

Have you already drafted your brand’s Customer Journey Map (CJM)? If you are just beginning to consider it, or if you simply need inspiration to continue improving it, in this article we will explain how it helped us. But first, what do we mean by Customer Journey?

What is the Customer Journey?

Making a purchase entails a process, which may be different for each e-commerce. As users in the digital era, we usually investigate, research, compare and keep on searching until we finally make a decision.

A Customer Journey (CJ) is, precisely, the path followed by a consumer in any purchasing process. This journey comprises all the stages the clients go through, from the detection of their needs to the final purchase.

Each and every phase of the process is fundamental, as the impression or the feeling the customers have made regarding your brand will ultimately determine if they will choose you or your competitors.

If you have mapped and pictured the profile of your buyer, you will be able to align all your actions and contents towards them, so that you can catch their attention, and make sure that the people who are interested in your brand follow the path of your customer journey and perform the desired action.

Remember! It is necessary to take into account that the steps that constitute the journey of the buyer are different due to a number of factors and, for this reason, THERE IS NO ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL MODEL.

One of the reasons to start creating the Customer Journey Map is considering the ideal flow you want for your clients as a reference, and compare it to what is really happening on your site.

For instance, if we are talking about an e-commerce site with a high volume of traffic but a low level of purchases, you can think about what is happening on your site that prevents the potential buyers from making the purchase. In this case, you should understand everything the user makes before comparing, in order to see if the problem lies on how you offer your products, or on your purchasing flow, the payment methods, your delivery offers, etc.

There are some excellent tools that can help you see what is the path followed by the user on your website. Some of these tools are HotJar, Google Analytics 4, and Mixpanel. These will help you make heat maps, understand the interactions of your users, and see the point where they stall. In other words, they will help you make an analysis of what happens with your users on your site.

You can use the pain points (in other words, those points which makes the user leave your site without making a conversion) to reconsider your clients’ touchpoints and thus build a Customer Journey Map where you can offer alternatives to generate new processes that may improve the investigation of your potential clients on your e-commerce.

Case Analysis: Use of the Customer Journey Map in Adtomic

There was a point where Adtomic grew remarkably fast, which made us understand that our platform’s onboarding process was becoming inefficient and complex, both for the company itself and for the client.

Although we were not precisely focused on e-commerce and sales, we actually needed to improve the experience of our clients. For this reason, we understood that we had to develop the Customer Journey Map in order to devise the best possible journey for our clients, and to reorganize the process to make it more efficient.

Touchpoints
The first step was talking to all the departments involved in the process. Each department commented which were, up to that moment, the touchpoints they maintained with the clients during the onboarding stage. In other words, everything that happened since the lead received the first Adtomic email until they became clients and started running campaigns with our tool.

Pain points
We wanted to understand which were the pain points, the tasks which were complicating the customer’s experience and the internal work. Considering the full customer journey helped us not only find the points which we already knew were conflicting, but also discover other aspects which we had not taken into account at the beginning, and which represented an obstacle to achieve the improvement of the process’s efficiency.

Points of contact
Once we defined the pain points, we organized workshops where we discussed the way in which we were doing things until then, as well as ways to improve them, with all of the areas involved. It was a highly enriching experience because all of us, from our position, were able to offer our point of view and share our thoughts regarding how to make the process more efficient.

This is how, working together, we were able to define our Customer Journey Map, which means, those steps which we wanted our client to go through in the onboarding process.

Once we had all of the desired points of contact, we worked on developing the tasks to be fulfilled by each area in order to carry out this plan.

Matrix
Once we had defined our client’s journey map, we decided to transfer all the stages of the Customer Journey Map onto a matrix, with their respective tasks and departments in charge. This helped us put in order and improve the onboarding process for our platform, so that no one would use extra time in their working day, and turning it into a customer-friendly path for our clients.

All in all, the Customer Journey Map was a key tool to organize an internal process which at the same time impacted strongly on the experience of our clients.

We are confident that drafting the journey map of your customers can be useful to better understand which are the obstacles which they find when they want to make a purchase on your site. This will also be a starting point in the process of improvement of your e-commerce site, of your internal processes or to think about what you are offering and how you are doing it.