Businesses today are constantly striving to provide customer experiences that resonate with their target audience.
But to achieve this goal, they need to know what their customers want. They also need to understand the journey their customers take to buy their product so they can design and deliver positive experiences that drive loyalty and lead to conversions.
That’s where customer journey mapping tools can help.
What are customer journey mapping tools?
Customer journey mapping tools are software that helps businesses visualize, analyze, and optimize the path customers take from initial awareness to purchase. They do this by providing a visual representation of every stage of the customer journey, whether it be the first time a customer becomes aware of the brand or the time they make a purchase.
This visual representation helps businesses to identify areas where the customer experience is not as good as it could be, and to make changes to improve it. Customer journey mapping tools typically allow businesses to collect and analyze data about customer interactions with the company.
This data can be used to identify common pain points and areas for improvement. The tools also typically allow businesses to collaborate on customer journey maps, which helps to ensure that everyone in the company is working towards the same goals.
Why are customer mapping tools important?
Customer journey mapping tools are crucial for organizations looking to enhance their customer experience and achieve sustainable success.
They enable businesses to gain a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey, enabling them to identify areas for improvement, optimize touchpoints, and foster customer loyalty though customer experience data.
Here are some ways your business can use a customer journey mapping tool:
- Visualizing the Customer Journey. Customer journey mapping tools provide a visual representation of the customer journey, allowing businesses to see the entire path customers take from their first interaction with the company to their post-purchase experience. This visual representation makes it easier to identify gaps, inconsistencies, and pain points in the customer experience.
- Identifying and Prioritising Pain Points. By mapping out the customer journey, businesses can pinpoint areas where customers experience frustration, confusion, or dissatisfaction. This information is crucial for prioritizing improvement initiatives and focusing on the most critical touchpoints that impact the overall customer experience.
- Optimizing Touchpoints Across Channels. Customer journey mapping tools help businesses ensure a seamless and consistent experience across all touchpoints, including websites, mobile apps, social media, and customer service interactions. This holistic approach ensures that the customer journey is cohesive and consistent.
- Facilitating Collaboration and Alignment. These tools promote collaboration among cross-functional teams, such as marketing, sales, customer service, and product development. By sharing a common understanding of the customer journey, teams can work together to align their efforts and deliver a consistent experience.
- Improve Customer Experience. Many customer journey mapping tools integrate with analytics platforms, enabling businesses to track key performance indicators (KPIs) and measure the impact of their initiatives. This data-driven approach drives continuous improvement and ensures that customer experience efforts are aligned with business goals.
- Driving Personalization and Engagement. Customer journey maps provide insights into customer preferences and behaviours, allowing businesses to personalize their interactions and deliver targeted messaging. This personalization fosters stronger customer relationships and drives higher engagement.
Choosing a customer journey mapping tool
Choosing the right customer journey mapping tool for your business is crucial for you to effectively visualize, analyze, and optimize their customer experiences. But with so many tools out there, it can be difficult to know which customer journey mapping tool is best for you.
Here's a step-by-step guide to choosing the most suitable tool for your needs"
- Define your needs and goals. Clearly articulate your objectives for using a customer journey mapping tool. Are you aiming to identify pain points, improve customer satisfaction, or optimize cross-channel experiences? Understanding your specific goals will help narrow down your options.
- Evaluate ease of use and functionality. Prioritize tools that are user-friendly and intuitive, allowing even non-technical users to create and edit customer journey maps. Consider the tool's drag-and-drop interface, visual elements, and overall ease of navigation.
- Check for data integration capabilities. Ensure the tool integrates with your existing data sources, such as CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, and customer feedback surveys. This integration will provide a comprehensive view of customer interactions across various touchpoints.
- Assess collaboration features. Look for tools that facilitate collaboration among cross-functional teams, such as marketing, sales, customer service, and product development. Shared workspaces, commenting capabilities, and real-time updates should be available to foster collaboration and shared ownership of customer experience initiatives.
- Evaluate pricing and value proposition. Consider the tool's pricing structure and whether it aligns with your budget. Compare pricing plans and ensure the tool offers features that justify the cost. Evaluate free trials or demos to experience the tool firsthand and assess its value proposition.
- Read reviews and user testimonials. Gather information from existing users through reviews and testimonials to understand their experiences with the tool. This feedback can reveal potential shortcomings or areas of improvement.
- Consider integrations with other business tools. Ensure the customer journey mapping tool integrates with your other business tools, such as project management platforms, communication tools, and productivity suites. This integration will streamline workflows and enhance collaboration.
- Demo the tool with your team. Invite members of your team to participate in a demo of the shortlisted tools. This will allow them to experience the tool firsthand and provide their feedback on its usability and effectiveness.
Best customer journey mapping tools
There are a variety of different customer journey mapping tools on the market today, each with its own set of features, benefits and price points.
In this list, we’re counting down ten of the best customer journey mapping tools available today based on their ease of use, features and customer reviews.
Totango
Used by over 5,000 companies, including SAP and Zoom, Totango is one of the better-known customer journey mapping solutions in the world today. The platform comes packed full of all-in-one toolkits to help you better understand the customer journey and plan for customer success. Totango has templates for everything from onboarding and adoption support to customer engagement and digital experience.
Not only can you get a better view of the customer journey with Totango’s help, but you can also build a strategy for how you’re going to improve the experience with revenue growth strategies, customer-personalised marketing, and more. This makes it easy to understand what makes your users tick, leading to a better customer experience and ultimately more conversions.
Gliffy
Gliffy is a web-based visualisation tool and editor, created to help companies build and edit diagrams about the customer journey. Though a little basic for highly technical visualisation, Gliffy can be ideal if you want to give your employees a better view of how your customers interact with your business. Building Mapping exercises and templates is easy, helping your team build empathy for customers or users and effectively solve problems or improve their experience.
You can share the content with anyone in your team, collaborate and comment on diagrams, and even integrate your tool with various other tools to help you build more accurate customer journey diagrams. To help visualize customer journeys and share them with your team, Gliffy is worth looking at.
InMoment
A platform designed to gather data from different environments in various feedback channels, InMoment helps you to get a more complete view of your customers wherever they are. Named a leader in the Customer Feedback Management section for the Forrester Wave, InMoment is an innovative tool for experience improvement.
The platform doesn’t just look at one channel; it brings multiple avenues together to give you a more comprehensive view of the customer journey. Journey mapping solutions come with access to engagement level tracking too, so you can see how customers feel about certain parts of interacting with your platform.
Google Analytics
The only free-to-use tool on this list, Google Analytics focuses on delivering insights into your customer’s experiences when they’re on your website. The GA environment gives you access to a range of website traffic metrics, like exit and bounce rates, goal conversion, sources of traffic, and user demographics. It tells you how much traffic your website gets, and where it comes from, and helps you understand which channels convert best. You can also see what your most popular landing pages are, and where people are exiting from your website.
If you want to specifically improve your insights into your business operations from a digital perspective, Google Analytics can tell you how much traffic your website gets and where it’s coming from. You can even get a better idea of which landing pages are the most popular, and what kind of people are more likely to abandon your website.
Smaply
Another fantastic tool for companies in search of visual customer journey insights, Smaply is an intuitive tool for creating stakeholder, customer, and personal maps. You can enhance your maps with various details, like live data, channels, storyboards, and backstage process information. There’s also support for collaboration, so you can work together as a team on different ideas.
Journey maps can be linked together to create a bigger picture of your entire business and develop hierarchies that support your overall view of customer experience. There’s also a persona editor to allow you to define and describe the context of customer types visually, with things like real social user profiles and more.
Heap
A leader in behavioural insights, Heap makes it easier to become data-driven and design better customer experiences through valuable information. You can use Heap as a complete overview of everything users do on your site. Heap makes it easy for digital innovators to collect the most valuable insights from your digital experience. You can collect data on where customers click, what they look at and more, all without engineering experience.
Heap’s data science layer also scours your digital data environment to learn more about what’s important to your business and surface highly targeted, unexpected insights. The low-code platform means you can answer questions about your business faster.
Clarabridge
A leader in the Forrester CFM platforms Wave, Clarabridge is a well-known tool for customer insights and journey mapping. You can use this digital service to grow sales, build compliance, and increase efficiency on a massive scale within your organisation. There’s access to a comprehensive central environment where you can aggregate all of your Voice of the Customer data for better audience overviews.
Clarabridge comes with access to innovative technology like natural language understanding, so it can even collect information from phone calls. You can track things like customer loyalty and sentiment and discover the cause of common NPS changes.
ClickUp
ClickUp is a powerful customer journey mapping tool that lets you seamlessly create visual workflow representations with its whiteboard feature and mind map maker. The platform makes it easy to outline and view the various touchpoints of your customer lifecycle, from awareness to conversion, repeat purchases, churn, and more. It also provides a host of different customer journey map templates so you don’t have to start from scratch, allowing you to create detailed workflows and approval processes quickly and efficiently.
ClickUp stands out for its ease of use. The platform’s mind map maker helps create dynamic visual outlines and flowcharts for ideas, projects, or existing tasks in seconds. Meanwhile, its whiteboard feature that allows individuals and teams to visualize ideas, improve communication and create unique CRM workflows to improve customer journeys. Despite its simplicity, ClickUp is still incredibly customizable. You can choose between 15+ different views for task management, journey mapping, diagramming, or through custom Gantt charts.
UXPressia
An easy-to-use environment for building and tracking customer experience maps, UXPressia gives company a single place to track all the information they might need about their audience. There’s a built-in academy where employees can take lessons and courses on how to develop their customer service strategies and a range of templates for personas.
UXPressia turns customer journey maps and visualizations into easy-to-understand storylines so you can better understand your target market. You can even create impact maps to help you predict how your customers might respond to changes in your organisation or portfolio.
Hotjar
One of the industry's most powerful tools for customer behaviour insights, Hotjar helps you collect valuable information about your audience through tools like session recordings, heatmaps, feedback, and surveys. These insights show you how your users behave, where they click and scroll, where they get stuck, and the actions they take to move from page to page. HotJar’s heatmaps and session recordings will also give you a better view of how customers behave and what they do when they’re active on your site.
The insights available from HotJar make the tool an incredible choice for companies who need help figuring out how to build and fix their website to offer the best possible customer journey. You can also use traditional tools like Google Analytics alongside Hotjar for better insights, providing you with a complete view into how your users behave, what they want, and how you can convert them into customers.
