Customer journey mapping is becoming (thankfully!) increasingly common in B2C environments, as companies seek to understand the blockages, gaps, and processes that customers experience when seeking customer support, navigating a website, or purchasing in a store. However, in B2B environments, customer journey mapping is not nearly as common.
Which is interesting.
Because in business environments, there are numerous decision makers concerned with the buying experience, multiple layers to navigate, and complex steps that are required before making the sale.
Sounds ripe for a customer journey map, doesn’t it?
What does customer journey mapping in B2B uncover?
In B2B environments, customer journey mapping accomplishes multiple tasks that help prepare your company for a sale. You’ll learn much more about your B2B customers, which eventually helps you ensure that your product or service will meet their needs. The customer journey mapping process in B2B is a multi-step process: We’ll administer journey mapping with your internal teams, and then speak to your prospects and customers and go through the journey mapping process with them. By taking a two-pronged approach, we’re able to have greater visibility into your organization, allowing us to identify new areas for growth and help you grow your customer base. Once we tie in the customers’ journey, you’ll have a 360-degree view of your B2B selling process.
For further explanation, customer journey mapping in B2B:
Gives you insight on the customer experience: Customer journey mapping in B2B provides a technique to understand the “ideal” and “current” experiences your customers encounter when working with your company. Furthermore, it gives your customer-listening programs invaluable intel to ensure that you are capturing and measuring key touch-points in their experience.
Reveals the most critical interactions: Customer journey mapping in B2B involves a process that tracks the path you go through when working with customers, and it identifies best practices and critical moments, which you can then use widely across all customer interactions.
Personalizes your brand: During the customer journey mapping process, you’ll get firsthand knowledge about what your employees and customers think about your brand. Their perspective will invigorate your branding, and help you identify what you excel at, which shapes how you communicate value.
Is a great tool for training and educating employees: In customer journey mapping for B2B environments, the first (and a crucial) component is reviewing the mapping process with your employees. Through this process, you’ll gain a better understanding about how your training and on-boarding process works in practice, thus helping you define how and where you can implement improvements.
Provides internal clarity: As your staff goes through the customer journey process, you’ll see silos break down. As we work with employees, going through themes and questions, we discover how departments work, and employees gain insight about their roles in the company, and how their job affects not only the customer, but others in the organization. Going through the mapping process enhances everyone’s visibility of customer pain points, and offers a more complete view of other departments and their function in working with customers.
What have you got to lose?
Customers today in B2B buying environments expect a lot from the companies they buy from. They don’t want a one-size-fits-all approach and their needs are complex. Taking the time to go through a customer journey mapping process with your B2B customers will give you more clarity and visibility, which ultimately helps you serve them better, giving you a competitive edge. In fact, what you’ll learn from the customer journey mapping process is much more insightful than anything you’ll gain from your CRM.
