Introduction
A customer journey map for lawyers is a visual representation of how your customer experiences your service. It highlights key aspects of the legal journey as a lawyer interacts with potential clients. Ultimately, it demonstrates how a particular goal can best be accomplished. Mapping out customer journeys helps explain why customers make the choices they do.
Moreover, it is proof of which aspect of your service is most valuable to them. A customer journey map allows you to capture the unique experience for each persona. In addition, it shows you how to solve potential problems and design a personalized customer experience. Consequently, you can understand which updates will benefit your customers the most and when to update your services.
How to Create a Customer Journey Map
Set clear objectives for the map
Before you start creating your map, set clear objectives. Think about what you want to accomplish. What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it specifically about? What experience is it based upon? It might be a problem you’re trying to solve or a service you’re trying to launch. It can also be an update or an experience you want to learn more about.
Without a goal, your customer journey map will have difficulties achieving the right impact for your business. Hence, start with articulating the challenges you’re facing so you can better use your journey map. Afterward, identify existing and future buyers. Accordingly, adjust goals specifically for those audiences at each stage of their experience.
Profile your customer personas
Build a complete picture of the customer whose journey you will capture on your map. Use all the demographic and psychographic data available to create your customer personas. Furthermore, research to understand who your customers are. Gather as much information as possible about the persona your customer journey map is based on by:
- Conducting interviews
- Talking to employees who regularly interact with customers
- Emailing a survey to existing users
- Examining customer support and complaint logs
- Monitoring social media discussions about your company
- Leveraging web analytics
- Gathering Net Promoter Score (NPS) data
Look for information that references:
- How did customers initially find your brand
- When/ if customers purchase or cancel
- How easy or difficult did they find your website to use
- What problems did your brand do or didn’t solve
- Did they get the needed support
- How can you improve your customer service
Click here to download our Buyer Persona template.
Define customer touchpoints
For a start, identify all the paths that your visitor may take on your website. If your visitor is a pre-existing customer, the first thing they might do is log in. Other activities include browsing, searching for products, comparing products, and more. These activities will help you identify all your touchpoints and the goals associated with each touchpoint.
Touchpoints are all the places in your brand journey where customers might interact with your company. It includes all the steps a customer comes into contact with your brand – before, during, or after the purchase. This also includes moments that happen offline/ online, through marketing, in person, or over the phone.
The number and type of touchpoints on your customer journey map will depend on the type of business. Some touchpoints may have more impact than others. Hence, take all potential touchpoints that occur between your customers and your organization into account. That way, you won’t miss out on any opportunities to listen to your customers. Moreover, you will be able to make the necessary improvements to keep them happy.
Touchpoints You Should Cover
Based on your research, list out all the touchpoints your customers and prospects are currently using. In addition, list the ones you would like them to use in an ideal world. This step will give you insight into what actions your customers are performing. If they are using fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they are quickly getting turned away? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your purchase process is complicated?
A typical customer journey should cover the following five client touchpoints. Awareness, Acquisition, Consideration, Service, and Loyalty.
Answer the following questions to cover the touchpoints above:
- Who is aware of your firm?
- What makes your clients choose your firm over others?
- What happens during the consultation that makes clients sign?
- Are client matters & cases being handled on time?
- Is there anything your staff can do better?
- How can you keep in touch after disbursement?
Identify customer actions, motivations and pain points
List out all of the actions your customers perform throughout their interaction with your brand. This might be a Google search for your keywords or clicking on an email from you. Recognize when they are being expected to take too many actions to achieve their goals. Moreover, take the necessary steps to reduce the number of those steps and improve the overall process.
Every action your customer takes is motivated by emotion. And your customer’s emotions will change depending on which part of their journey they’re at. The emotional driver of your customer’s actions is usually caused by a pain point or a problem. Knowing this will help you provide the right content and adjust the customer’s emotional journey through your brand.
Get to know which barriers are stopping your customer from making their desired action. For example, your customers could love your service but decide not to purchase it upon discovering high rates. Highlighting these potential obstacles in your customer journey can help you improve them. For example, you could provide an FAQ page that answers common questions about overall costs.
Potential Questions To Ask
Bring together all your data to identify potential obstacles or pain points in the customer journey. Include information that addresses elements of action, emotion, and potential challenges. Note down areas where you’re currently doing things right. Moreover, figure out ways to improve. To do this, ask yourself the following questions, and interview customers and customer-facing staff.
Some potential questions might include:
- Are my customers achieving their goals on my website?
- Where are the main areas of friction and frustration?
- Where are people abandoning purchases (and why)?
Understand your buyer’s goals
Once you’ve learned how different customer personas interact with your business, focus on one of them. Remember, a customer journey map tracks one customer’s experience who’s taking a specific path with your company. If you group too many personas, your map won’t accurately reflect your customers’ experience.
For your first map, choose your most common customer persona. Consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time. Afterward, create a new map for the ones you left out that’s specific to their customer types.
Next, determine the goals for each customer phase clearly on your map. That way you’ll be able to examine how well you are meeting those goals and answering customers’ questions. Understand what each of your customers hopes to achieve as they go through the customer journey. Think about what their ultimate goals are in each phase. However, have in mind that these may change during the process.
Some examples might be:
- Researching the different available options
- Ensuring that s/he is paying a fair price
- Seeking reassurance that s/he has all the necessary information about the product
Determine the resources you have and the ones you'll need
Your customer journey map is going to touch on nearly every part of your business. This will highlight all of the resources that participate in creating the customer experience. Hence, take inventory of the resources you have and the ones you’ll need to improve the customer’s journey. For example, maybe your map highlights some flaws in your customer service offer.
Maybe you notice that you don’t have the tools to properly follow up with customers after a service interaction. Using your map, you can invest in customer service tools that will help your team manage customer demand. By including new tools in your map, you can accurately predict how they’ll impact your business. Ultimately, you can drive more revenue.
Take the customer journey yourself
The most important part of the process is analyzing the results. The exercise of mapping the customer journey remains hypothetical until you try it out yourself. Analyzing the results can show you where customer needs aren’t being met. By approaching this, you can ensure that you are providing a valuable experience.
Furthermore, you can make it clear that people can find solutions to their problems with your company’s help. Follow your persona’s journey they take through their social media activity, reading emails to searching online. See if you can answer the questions you posed at the beginning of the process. Then, you can better visualize how to improve.
Make the necessary changes
Your data analysis should give you a sense of what the overall customer process should look like. And once you’ve test-driven the map, make any necessary changes. Moreover, repeat the process over time as you add new features and updates.
Even if small, the changes will be effective as they are directly correlated with customers’ pain points. And your visualized customer journey map will ensure those needs and pain points are always addressed.
Review your map on a monthly or quarterly basis to identify gaps and opportunities. Above all, to adjust your customer journey further. In addition, analyze how new products or offerings might have changed the customer journey. Optimize it accordingly whenever you introduce significant changes to your service.
Click here to download our Customer Journey Map template.
Conclusion
Completing a journey map for your clients is a vital first step in your firm’s marketing plan. The process requires analyzing all the steps a client takes before and during their relationship with your company. As a result, you will recognize the client’s needs at each stage of their journey. Consequently, you’ll be able to provide them with the information they need to become a loyal client.
Use a customer journey map to get a better idea of how various personas interact with your services. Furthermore, use it to explore the customer experience fully. Finally, understand how the customer experiences different parts of your service. When you understand your customer’s journey completely, you can establish the best way to serve them. Accordingly, create different pathways for different personas to provide a more personalized experience.
In addition, use it to track staff performance, client satisfaction, find opportunities to reduce costs and more. Consequently, it will help you focus on sending the right information to the right people at the right time. And that will result in happier, loyal clients and a growing business for you.