It is the nature of advancement to continuously penetrate sectors, enhancing their techniques and plans for the future. Multiple businesses are adapting quick and easy ways to generate ideas that can elevate their brand to new heights, and one of the best ways to plan this is by using an experience map.
Experience mapping is one tool that is advanced in nature but has a powerful impact on multiple industries. In experience mapping, we witness the overall journey of a brand and its consumer and how that brand came into the consumer’s reach. This simple yet effective tool has caused multiple improvements in brands, products, and overall consumer experiences.
This is an article dedicated to the art of experience mapping and how it is effective for companies and brands, what features it offers, how it works, and all of its advantages that are evident in the market,
How Does an Experience Map Help?
An experience map creates a clear path for companies to set up their new launches by analyzing the market trends. It is also effective for people who deal with customers every day to run their businesses successfully.
On top of this, an experience map can detect loopholes in the customer journey from previous strategies, which can dictate companies to take safe steps. People or companies who want to know all about their customer’s journey and what emotions they’re feeling can utilize an experience map for their next product and reap the benefits later.
Experience Map Features
An experience map has some unique features that allow users to gain a lot of value from using them. Some of these benefits are:
- It collects different experiences from different users and then aggregates them all within one frame. This approach provides maximum understanding with a vast number of different samples.
- An experience map is not tied to one certain customer but collects versatile experiences for a result. Furthermore, experience maps are not linked to one specific brand or product. This allows the user to compare multiple different experiences and products to find the perfect journey.
- It depicts every stage of a customer’s journey, their actions, and emotions in chronological order for its users.
What Does an Experience Map Offer?
By using an experience map, you will be able to identify new trends and adopt them to the advantage of your brand. This will not only make your brand prominent in the eyes of your consumers but will also act as a bridge in creating a healthy communication and brand base.
Other than this, experience mapping helps identify the flaws in the other customer journey maps. This could either be within your product or externally in the market. Either way, using an experience map helps locate elements that can make the customer journey effective and smooth.
By experience mapping, companies can locate potential areas to invest in or advance according to their financial statuses. These advancements often give the brand a new image among the general public and provide a route to increased consumer engagement.
Experience mapping helps identify consumer insights and what they like about the brand. You can either enhance those features or upgrade them to offer something new to your clients.
Why Use an Experience Map?
There is always a need to represent the customer experience for your brand. It acts as a guide for companies to tell them where to improve and what needs to be fixed. It also serves as a guide to enhance your product quality and overall client engagement. These are all critical applications of experience mapping and significant reasons you should use one.
Using an experience map helps catalog every touchpoint or relevant stage where your consumer could have interacted with your brand. This improves decision-making skills and brand image among your consumers. You can alter your movements due to the flexibility of the experience map that lets you decide your next move. This usually happens when customers are showing unique behaviors unknown to the previous record.
Learn more: How to Build An Experience Map?
Experience Map Templates
Most experience maps focus on one specific task or agenda because it makes it easier for companies to make decisions within a particular area. This means they usually have a trendline of emotions that correspond with multiple distinct phases that walk through a singular experience.
However, people who want to make their own experience map can opt to make for whatever shape or pattern they like to have. Patterns include a customer experience journey with a specific brand or product. The other alternative includes experience mapping for a specified project like mobile applications. This one will be more complex and have increased touchpoints and channels, while others will be heavily focused on emotions rather than journey phases.
How To Create an Experience Map
If you want to dedicate your time to creating an experience map, you can follow the steps listed below for an easier and swift experience mapping.
This is a five-step process:
Plan Your Experience Map
This step includes listening to different experts, attending experience map workshops, or listening to podcasts explaining to you how experience mapping can help. These tasks build the foundation of learning what an experience map is and looking into how you can structure one to fit your specific needs.
After identifying all of this, you will see that you have a lot of loopholes to fill in your planning. Many of these loopholes will fill when you proceed to other steps, so simply worry about your goals here.
Conduct Customer Research
Research is the most essential part of an experience map. It would help to research the ongoing trends customers like and the market situation related to a particular brand. Additionally, you need to gain direct feedback from your customers.
One great way to gain direct feedback is by conducting a survey to get an authentic insight into customer interactions. Researching should not be limited to oneself but also move from brand to consumer. You can research your clients, and you will be able to learn a lot in a short duration.
Begin Collaboration
After conducting ample research, it’s important you bring other parties in to help disperse the data and sort it into the various feelings and stages that correspond to your experience map.
Mapping out these data points will help paint the picture of how the customer feels about a certain experience. This will serve as the base of your experience map, and for that base, it’s important you include multiple collaborators to provide their unique perspectives on the customer feedback.
Build Your Experience Map
This is your step to implement your research and finally start your consumer interaction representation. Building your experience map will allow you to map data trends based on specific stages, emotions, and feedback that you’ve received directly from your customers.
Analyze the Results
The last is to utilize what you formulated and implement it in your future workflows. Analyzing the results is critical if you’re to effectively solve the problems listed by your customers, and this stage is all about implementing them as real solutions. Listen to the feedback from the users, take the aggregate data from the experience map, and create 2/3 possible solutions for each problem.
How to Collect Experience Map Data
Experience maps are made up of many things, but they mostly rely on consumer data. Being able to gather customer opinions is important because it forms the basis of the experience map, but how can you gather their feedback? Here are some popular (and secret) ways to gather customer feedback.
Social Media
Interacting on social media is an advanced yet effective technique to see the result of your engagement with your consumers. User stories can be submitted to the brand with the consent of consumers and can even be posted on social media profiles by tagging the brand. This is a way to engage a different and vital audience, and for some brands, this will be a critical method of feedback generation.
Cold Calling
Cold calling is not the most effective way to get user feedback due to connection issues at some places and people being generally unwilling to respond to a random number. However, it is a basic element to know what your consumers are experiencing after interacting with your brand. Consumers can also feel engaged due to the brand’s consideration for them.
In-product Tracking
Product tracking and usage often come in applications and software products because they allow you to map the actions and goals of the user automatically.
Usage of such products also tells what customers think about a certain brand. This could reveal important information that’s tangentially associated with the product. Maybe people find the product brilliant, but they dislike the brand association.
Analytics
Analytics is an old-school way to see your brand’s effectiveness among the masses. Utilizing analytics carefully explains the crucial details of customer experience with the product. Analytics helps us to see whether a technique or tool works or not. This is the case with experience maps; their analytics give a transparent picture of their effectiveness.
Brief Experience Map Advantages
Experience maps come with multiple advantages. Some of them are centered on human behavior, and others are product-centric.
Experience maps provide a complete overview of any situation and customer experiences throughout the journey. It allows companies to change their strategies for better user interactions without wasting time.
Because of its user-centric approach, there are multiple chances of favorable outcomes from experience maps. In this way, brands can secure their positions in the market, create better user engagements, and reintroduce the same product if necessary.
An experience map lets its users analyze from a whole different perspective. They can locate several flaws and loopholes before time and secure their positions and reputations from falling.
Learn more: What is Experience Map?
Conclusion
One thing about the experience map that is unique and impactful is its analytics and predictions related to the market. However, other alternatives to experience maps, like customer journey maps, work slightly differently but yield evident results.
In the end, choose maps suitable for your business and market position and try to implement experience maps for a given issue where you need to find a specific answer to improve your brand or your company’s situation.
