Top 8 Challenges of Customer Journey Mapping in E-Commerce
In the hyper-competitive world of e-commerce and with our customer expectations constantly exceeding, understanding via optimizing your customer journey is no longer a nicety; it is the best practice. Customer journey mapping, the graphic representation of how a customer engages with a brand, provides phenomenally valuable information about pain points, areas for improvement, and ultimately steps to more loyal customers. That said, bringing such bear within the digital landscape and any e-commerce challenges specific to it is no simple task. In this blog, we will discuss the eight most common road-blocks e-commerce businesses run into when trying to map out their customer journeys and how to take the most effective steps along that journey with some examples from Salesforce Customer 360 and how tools such as Salesforce Service Cloud add an enriched and actionable post-purchase view of the customer.
The Necessity of E-Commerce Journey Mapping
- Customer journeys in e-commerce by nature are complex, and they have many touchpoints on different digital touchpoints. From the first time a customer sees your product on social media through buying and after-purchase assistance, every interaction contributes to the total customer experience. Mapping out these journeys helps companies identify the friction points further, streamline workflows, and improve customer service.
- But the gargantuan volume of data, the constantly changing digital world, and the customer behavior you’re at odds with considerably hinder the path.
Challenge 1: Fragmented Data and Siloed Systems
- E-commerce companies usually work with multiple systems: e-commerce platforms, marketing automation software, CRM systems (like Salesforce), and Analytics platforms.
- Fragmented existence means data silos and challenging to get a clear picture of the overall customer journey.
- For example, Marketing data in one system and customer service in another would keep us from getting a full view of the same customer interaction.
- Approach: Enforce data integration strategies across the board, using APIs and data warehousing to unify where necessary. Clever use of a cloud-based CRM, like Salesforce, consolidates customer information, making it easier for the company to see the complete customer.
Challenge 2: Capturing the Omnichannel Experience
- E-commerce businesses engage with customers over many touchpoints, including the web (websites), mobile apps (native app or mobile website), social media, and marketplaces. Capturing and mapping these omnichannel interactions correctly is not easy.
- Example: Imagine social media product research, a mobile application cart, and a desktop website purchase.
- Solution: Leverage big data/analytics to monitor customer interactions through all channels. Salesforce Marketing Cloud, for example, can manage multi-channel campaigns and analyze campaign performance of customer journeys.
Challenge 3: Creating Real Customer Personas
- Customer Journey Maps are only as good as the personas they are based on wrong or subset personas, resulting in misdirected journey maps and strategies.
- Example: All customers will behave similarly when making a purchase, without considering differences by demographics, psychographics, purchase history, etc.
- Solution: Care to do deep customer research using surveys/interviews and data analysis to craft a rich persona taking full scope. Use the contact management and segmentation of Salesforce to optimize customer profiles.
Challenge 4: Staying Current with Dispersing Customers
- Technology, trends, and consumer behavior are constantly changing in e-commerce, and that totally affects the customer journey. We also need dynamic journey maps for them to be effective, dynamic, and flexible.
- Example: With mobile and social commerce, journey maps must be constantly updated to keep pace with these new behaviors.
- Solution: Engage in continuous observation and improvement. The journey maps should be reviewed regularly to reflect changing customer behavior. Use analytics dashboards and live data to notice upcoming trends.
Challenge 5: Identifying and Addressing Emotional Touchpoints
- Customer journeys are not just transactional but also emotional. To improve customer satisfaction, you must be able to identify and work on these emotional touchpoints.
- Example: An irate customer frustrated over the lengthy checkout experience or shipping delays.
- Solution: Embed quantitative insights based on journey mapping and qualitative (via the listening service) in the journey mapping process training in customer feedback tools and sentiment analysis within Salesforce to figure out emotional touchpoints from data.
Challenge 6: Mapping Post-Purchase Experiences
- Most e-commerce companies will stick to the pre-purchase journey and optimize the post-purchase experience. However, post-purchase interactions, such as order fulfillment, customer support, and loyalty programs, play a huge role in Retention.
- Example: A case of shopper misfortune returns/post-purchase support challenges
- Solution: Migrate existing journey maps to post-purchase touchpoints. Automate order tracking, customer service, and feedback collection. Use Salesforce Service Cloud to handle the right post-purchase interactions.
Challenge 7: Aligning Internal Teams and Stakeholders
- A customer journey map requires the efforts of many internal teams, such as marketing, sales, customer service, and product development, to be created and actionable. Making these teams and stakeholders sync can be complicated.
- Example: marketing just acquired and sells, while customer service deals with the actual issue resolution and does nothing about a unified customer-centric approach.
- Solution: Encourage a customer-based culture in all departments. Identify common communication channels and collaborative forums. Implement workshops, conferences, and weekly sessions to familiarize teams with the importance of customer journey mapping.
Challenge 8: Measuring ROI and Validating Outcomes
- The ROI of initiatives for customer journey mapping can be difficult to prove. Companies need to be able to measure their campaigns’ return on impact in critical KPIs, like customer satisfaction, conversions, and customer lifetime value.
- Example: hard to attribute increases in sales or customer retention to journey mapping enhancements in specific
- Solution: Create KPIs and set up metrics tracking for how journey mapping impacts play out. Use Salesforce reporting and analytics to monitor the KPIs with proof of ROI.
- With the knowledge and the ability to overcome these hurdles, e-commerce companies can practice customer journey mapping to offer consistent, best-in-class experiences that result in customer happiness and Retention.
Conclusion
In summary, customer journey mapping in e-commerce calls for strategic and dynamic mastery. However, by proactively tackling fragmentation of data, omnichannel horribleness, persona reliability, changing behavior trends, emotional touchpoints, up-sales post-purchase experience, human reinforcement necessary, and ROI tracking, businesses will benefit from the full scope of this great tool. Beyond just a pictorial representation, the real success of journey mapping clicks and quantitatively leads to compendium changes in customer delight, Retention, and revenue. This never-ending mapping, measuring, and optimizing process allows e-commerce leaders to strengthen their customer relationships and succeed in a competitive digital world.