The Complete Guide To Customer Journey Mapping (With Examples)

The customer experience defines every interaction between your brand and customers. It could comprise of a direct interaction, such as someone asking for a quote from your lawn care business, or indirect action, like a potential client reading your blog on pest control. 

Regardless of how it happens, every interaction is part of the customer journey. When you understand the customer journey, you understand how to craft a customized client experience that yields not just new business but a long-term relationship.

Today, we’re going to look into what is the customer journey and how to map it out within your field service business.

What Is A Customer Journey?

Before we provide insights on how to map a customer journey, let’s define customer journey. The customer journey encompasses the full scope of a customer interaction from discovery phases to purchase points. However, the process is more in-depth than that. The true customer journey definition highlights the need for a visual representation of every possible engagement someone could have with your brand and its services.

Creating your journey puts you inside the head of your target market. Approximately 67% of professionals have used this tactic to find out where they’re missing the mark and where they’re excelling.

Your map empowers you to improve your company and think up new ways of streamlining the journey.

Grasping the customer journey meaning is essential for understanding where customers are joining your map and the potential points where they could drop away. It’s designed to be an in-depth document because it includes every objective over the entire period of a person’s time with your brand.

While you might look at customer journey examples across various industries and see many similarities, it should be tailored to your field services business to get the most out of your map.

The Benefits of Using a Customer Journey Map

Your journey map has a single purpose: to analyze user behavior and improve the way your customers transition from learning about your brand to booking one of your services. It also examines how they feel during their time.

While customer journey marketing may seem unnecessary and frivolous, developing a customer experience mindset can increase revenue by up to 8%. Happy customers will drive long-term relationships in service-based industries like pest control, lawn care, and pool cleaning.

Let’s look at the two overarching benefits of thinking about the client journey.

Make Customers The Heart Of The Business

Business owners often fall into the trap of being unable to see the woods for the trees. Making assumptions about yourself based on an ideal customer persona can leave you lagging behind reality.

Creating an image of the ideal customer is an essential step, but the flaw in this strategy is not advancing on it. So what if you know who your ideal client is if you don’t know where they’re going?

Customer mapping enables every decision-maker within your business to stay focused on the client. By making the journey the core of your organization, every decision is made with the end-user in mind.

Lessen Friction Within The Sales Funnel

All field service businesses want to convert leads into paying customers, deliver excellent service, and secure repeat business.

Yet every step within the sales funnel comes with potential pitfalls. Friction can stop a new sale in its tracks. Your job is to streamline the process and lead your target market through every step until they book one of your services.

Understanding the journey followed by your customers allows you to magnify every step within the buying experience and discover obstacles preventing customers from acting and moving onto the next stage of their journeys.

Remember, a great marketing team can only do so much. Without a set journey that prioritizes ease and convenience, you’re not going to see the results you want. 

Step-by-Step Guide: How To Map The Customer Journey

It might surprise you to know that customers do expect you to be psychic. One study revealed that 76% of customers expect the companies they work with to understand and anticipate their needs.

Journey mapping is one way to do it by drilling down into the thought processes and behaviors of the people you’re marketing to.

Let’s start creating your visual map to empower you and your team to secure more business and grow your revenues.

Step One – Create Your Customer Persona

A customer persona is an idealized image of the person you’re marketing to. Simply trying to pull in anyone who’ll open their wallets isn’t beneficial to your business in the long term. You need people who suit your products and services.

For example, there’s no point in having an incredible website journey for your pool care business if half of the people visiting your site don’t own a pool.

What information goes into crafting a customer persona? You’ll need to figure out things like:

• Age

• Job type

• Personal goals

• Income

• Family Setup

You don’t need to settle on a single customer persona. Most companies begin with two or three. If your field service business offers several distinct service categories, it’s a good idea to create one for each type, even if there’s some overlap.

Step Two – Gather Existing Data On Your Customers

An effective customer journey map is based on hard data, not assumptions. There are two kinds of data you’ll be using to create your journey:

• Analytical Research – These are the numbers already available to you. It could include website metrics, like average time spent on a page and bounce rate, or your sales figures.

• Anecdotal Research – Speaking to your current customers and examining previous successes can give you insights into what’s worked in the past to inform the future.

Remember, your map will evolve to suit your current business needs. For example, market needs for pest control will change as the climate emergency alters the weather and brings in new pests.

It’s a living document and should be revisited at least biannually and preferably every financial quarter. Regular reflection and making tweaks based on the latest data will allow your business to stay on top of things.

Step Three – Organize Touchpoints And Stages

Your journey's design will differ depending on what your field service business offers and the marketing channels utilized. Organize your map into broad stages and touchpoints as you start your design. You can always drill down deeper later.

Start by identifying your primary touchpoints. A touchpoint is any interaction with your brand. It could be a social media ad found on Facebook or a follow-up survey after a successful landscaping job.

Marking all your touchpoints enables you to spot trends and gather further customer feedback. You want to know how each touchpoint makes the customer feel and whether they find it satisfying or valuable.

Write out all the stages. Every time a customer engages with your brand, there’s a purpose behind it. Break these purposes down throughout the journey.

For example, if someone discovers your brand via a blog you shared on social media, the purpose may be to learn. If someone lands on one of your service pages, the goal is to solve a problem. When customers hit the payment page, they’re taking prompt action to resolve an issue.

Step Four – Boost Your Map With Customer Feedback

Collecting customer feedback uncovers the motivations and feelings behind every action your target market takes. If you don’t have a comprehensive feedback strategy in place, you’re in danger of making assumptions about your customers.

There are several ways to collect feedback and deliver surveys. Some of the most common scoring methods used by field service companies include:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

• Customer Effort Score (CES)

Surveys based on these concepts collect actionable firsthand knowledge from the people you target.

Take advantage of several channels to increase your response rates. Email requests, web forms, SMS surveys, and even in-person interviews are all viable options for finding out more about a customer’s personal journey.

Customer Journey Examples

Ensuring a great customer experience means everyone has to be on the same page. Everyone needs to know that the customer always comes first, from your administration team to the people removing infestations, weeding, and cleaning pools.

To make it easier for you to interpret the customer’s journey, here are three customer journey examples that could apply to your business.

Example #1 – Crafting An Incredible Web Experience

Your lawn care business has made its website the center of the customer experience. A middle-aged woman is surfing the web for someone to fix her lawn. Your website catches her eye, but the well-designed layout convinces her to stay on your site. 

She’s convinced your company is well-organized and reputable, so she clicks on your services page. The prices are displayed clearly, and she has lots of custom packages to choose from. She’s also attracted by the fact you offer a lower price for committing to a regular monthly contract.

Each service is fully described with what’s included and what isn’t. She decides to schedule an initial lawn care appointment and bookmarks your website for future reference.

At this stage, she receives an email confirming her appointment. She may also receive a small survey to provide feedback on her website journey.

Assuming you also delivered an incredible lawn care service, she might, then, decide to share your web link on her Facebook page or send it via a messaging app to a friend or family member.

In this case, the successful journey demonstrated an excellent web user experience, with detailed information and an easy checkout feature.

Example #2 – Slow Loading Times

A small business owner in your local area has four kids and a busy schedule. He hasn’t had his pool cleaned in months, and he’s stressed. He’s searching for someone who can carry out the service without any fuss or hassle on Google.

He finds your pool care business and clicks on the services page. The page is loading slowly, and he’s becoming frustrated. He tries to type a keyword into the search bar yet gets no results. This dad has no time to mess around with you and chooses a local competitor instead. He schedules in two clicks, and that’s the end of the matter.

As you can see, the customer's motivations in this second example are different from the first. He’s not interested in interacting with your brand. He just wants to get what he needs and continue with his busy schedule.

What’s even more critical is that his negative experience had nothing to do with your ability to clean his pool and do a great job. It has everything to do with giving him the information he wanted immediately.

Experiences like this indicate flaws in your journey and potential for improvement.

In short, the only other interaction with this customer you might have is an unfortuante social media comment about your terrible user experience (UX). If you aren’t aware of experiences like this, it could hurt your online reputation in the long run.

Example #3 – Difficulty Scheduling An Appointment

A family has been struggling with fire ants for some time. None of their DIY solutions have alleviated the problem, and they’re searching for a professional. There’s a significant lack of availability among professional pest control agents in your local area as the region is struggling with a wave of infestations.

Your family asks for recommendations on social media for a local pest control company that can fit them in. A friend links them to your page. The family browses through your posts, examines feedback from other customers, and may even read a blog or two.

The family believes they’ve found a winner in you. They go to schedule their appointment only to find that you don’t accept their credit card. They go to try PayPal and find it also doesn’t work. Most people would have already dropped out at this point, yet this family is desperate.

You receive a message regarding the problems on your site, and the family asks to schedule an appointment manually. Unfortunately, you don’t see the email in time, and they’ve already gone elsewhere.

Despite the complexities and technical errors found within your online scheduling and payment process, you still had a chance of encouraging that customer to work with you. Instead, your slow response times meant you lost them forever.

Your next touchpoint with this family is a social media comment on their friend’s initial recommendation saying how they were disappointed in your customer service. 

Client Journey Takeaways

What’s the purpose of mapping out these examples in relation to field services businesses?

These examples demonstrate the spectrum of positive and negative customer experiences. No matter how these examples ended, you can see how many potential pitfalls there are at each stage of the journey. Even the most minor problem could derail your ability to secure another customer.

What’s more, most customers won’t report a positive or a negative experience. They’ll silently go about their days. So many business owners are unaware that their customer experience is suboptimal for months until one angry customer finally tells them.

The value of journey mapping is in anticipating and uncovering problems before someone tells you about them. Staying on top of the journey and optimizing it for sales will ultimately give you an edge over the competition.

Customer Journey Marketing FAQs

Understanding the client journey can be a challenge when mapping out your business’s journey for the first time. Here are the answers to some of the most common questions people have about client journey marketing.

Who Should Be Involved In Creating Your Journey Map?

Everyone! Don’t silo yourself by only considering the views and interpretations of a small team. Anyone who interacts with customers has something of value to share. Speak to your team on the ground and in the office. It should be a collaborative effort.

How Long Does It Take To Develop My Map?

The ideal map can take anywhere from six to nine weeks to craft. Why so long? It’s based on accurate, reliable data. It takes time to gather this information and refine your existing personas. It’s not a process you should rush.

What Tools Are Available To Speed Up The Process?

Journey marketing has become a big trend across several industries. Make your life easier by utilizing a mapping template to organize and visualize the information you have at your disposal.

You should also consider consolidating your entire business in one place using a dedicated platform like FieldRoutes.

Do More With FieldRoutes 

Understanding the motivations and behaviors of your customers provides new insights into where you’re beating out the competition and where you could improve. Never run your field service business based on assumptions. Use real analytical and anecdotal data for better results.

Make running your business simpler with the field service industry’s only dedicated field service software for managing and branding your organization. Harvest data at the click of a button and get an overview of your operations.

Why do so many companies rely on us to reach their potential? Contact us and get your free demo now to discover what all we can do for your business.