The best practice for mapping a B2B (business-to-business) digital and physical customer journey (or client journey) is to break the journey mapping process into three stages:
- Stage 1: Voice of the Customer (VoC) Research
- Stage 2: Build the B2B Customer Journey Map
- Stage 3: B2B Customer Journey Insights
A customer journey map is a visual representation of your clients’ business relationship and their activities. These activities are expressed as journey phases, stages, steps and digital and physical touchpoints and interactions.
Depending on the complexity of service offerings, the customer journey map might represent the client lifecycle, from the initial awareness stage to post-purchase activities. Alternatively, the customer journey map might deep-dive into a specific part of the customer’s journey, such as the end-to-end onboarding journey.
Mapping the customer journey helps the employee teams in the business understand the customer’s experience from your customer’s perspective. The journey map is used to identify and understand the root causes of customers’ unmet needs, painpoints, emotions, truths and opportunities, to develop the customer journey insights and make improvements to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Here’s how you can go about building a digital and physical B2B Customer Journey Map:
- Stage 1: Voice of the Customer (VoC) Research
Define Your Customer Segments:
Understand your B2B customers by creating detailed behavioural segments. Use business data to examine customers by revenue or profitability, the number of services, usage, loyalty, recommendation etc.
Identify Customer Journey Stages:
Break down the customer journey into (what you believe) the key B2B customer journey stages. Don’t forget, if you want to understand your customer experience the journey needs to be mapped from your customer’s perspective.
Here’s a generic example of journey stages:
- Awareness: The customer becomes aware of a problem they need to solve.
- Research: The customer researches and evaluates various solutions.
- Decision: The customer selects a solution and makes a purchase.
- Implementation: The customer integrates the purchased solution into their business.
- Post-Purchase: The customer receives support, uses the solution, and may consider renewals or upgrades.
Gather Customer Data:
Collect data from various sources, including customer feedback, analytics, customer in-depth interviews and customer observation to understand how customers engage with each digital and physical touchpoint and their emotions and actions at each stage.
- Stage 2: Build the B2B Customer Journey Map
Build the Journey Map:
Use a visual format to map out each stage and the associated touchpoints. You can use readily accessible tools like Excel or specialised customer journey mapping software.
Include Customer Actions and Emotions:
For each digital and physical touchpoint and interaction, note the actions customers take and the emotions they might be experiencing. This helps you understand unmet needs, pains and gains, moments of truth and areas for customer experience improvement.
- Stage 3: B2B Customer Journey Insights
Identify Painpoints and Opportunities:
Identify and analyse the journey data for your customers’ unmet needs, painpoints and service gaps, where customers might face challenges or frustrations. Also, pinpoint opportunities where you can exceed expectations and create positive experiences that deliver competitive advantage.
Develop Actionable Insights:
Based on the customer journey map analysis, generate actionable insights for each stage. Determine how to improve touchpoints, and address painpoints and service gaps to create a frictionless experience.
Share Your Customers’ Story:
Help cross-functional teams such as sales, marketing, customer service support, operations and product development to understand their customer’s experience by sharing the customers’ using the journey map.
Improving the Experience:
Implement the recommended customer experience improvements and changes. Continuously monitor the impact on the customer experience and gather feedback to refine the journey map over time.
Remember that B2B customer journeys can be complex, involving multiple decision-makers and influencers. Therefore, it’s important to capture the detail of these digital and physical interactions from your customer’s perspective.
Taking an outside-in approach to building a comprehensive and accurate customer journey map provides the evidence to stakeholders to guide the business’s efforts in enhancing the B2B customer experience.
Click here to view my Customer Journey Mapping example
Alex Allwood is a Customer Experience Consultant with specialist Customer Journey Mapping consultant services. Alex has deep domain expertise in ‘digital and physical’ customer journey mapping and service blueprinting. The work helps B2B & B2C organisations solve challenging and complex customer experience problems.