Customer journey mapping tools help companies understand a customer’s full experience using dynamic visualizations. Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a visual map of all the touchpoints throughout a customer’s journey, including customer’s expectations, objectives, and interactions. This representation is mapped out from the beginning of a customer’s experience with your brand (i.e., initial discovery) to purchase and retention. While often confused with customer journey analytics software, both types of software are complementary but different. Customer journey analytics software monitors, tracks, and analyzes lead and/or customer behavior across a multitude of channels over time and helps eliminate data silos by combining previously segmented data.
Marketers use customer journey mapping software to improve and enhance the full customer experience by creating a visualization of every customer touchpoint, including email, ads, social media, online reviews, and many others. Marketers can also use customer journey maps to help break down organizational silos by fostering a customer-focused mentality throughout their business. These customer journey maps can be distributed with an entire company to showcase a customer’s journey with their brand, which can help product, sales, customer service, and more. Additionally, this type of software helps marketers visualize and target multiple personas and often integrates with existing cross-channel marketing data sources to create a comprehensive view of customer journeys, including but not limited to social media management software, email marketing software , and marketing automation software.
To qualify for inclusion in the Customer Journey Mapping category, a product must:
- Create dynamic visualizations of a customer’s journey at each touchpoint across multiple channels
- Provide customer journey mapping templates depending on a company’s objectives
- Allow collaboration features across teams, departments, and/or stakeholders to keep maps up to date
