The retail sector, spurred by the advent of online shopping, has transformed itself across a variety of industries. While marketers have more opportunities to expand and sell globally, shoppers have nearly unlimited options to choose from. This has created an intensified competitive landscape for sellers and makes it even more challenging to stand out in the market and attract and hold the customer’s attention.

The worldwide disruptions caused by the pandemic have further pushed retailers to innovate and acclimatize to changing consumer behavior. As a result, there is increased emphasis on value, convenience, hygiene, and availability. The retail environment is challenging for everyone, with customers requiring (and even demanding) immense personalized attention.

A consistent and familiar buying process and enhanced personalization across all touchpoints is the foundation for a positive retail experience. Brands have to consider all aspects of the retail journey, both in physical stores and in online shopping. Customer Journey Mapping can help in identifying friction points and the insights needed to overcome them to optimize the customer experience.

Here are a few ways how Customer Journey Mapping can help brands provide a stellar retail shopping experience to their buyers:

Evaluating Omni-Channel Experiences from the Customer’s Perspective
To keep up with changing customer expectations, brands need to evaluate their deliverables on a regular basis. Customer Journey Mapping has proven to be an effective tool in helping brands optimize their omni-channel customer experiences. For example, in-depth heat maps of the customer journey in physical and/or online stores can help identify, and quantify, friction points that may be present. Customer journey maps can also highlight the negative impact that such friction points are having on the customer experience. By better understanding things from the customer’s perspective, brands can then prioritize their internal improvement efforts more effectively.

Better Understanding “Moments-that-Matter”
Though technology has made it feasible for brands to look at historical data, predict trends, and prescribe progressive solutions, identifying “moments-that-matter” can make a huge difference in engaging customers. Customer Journey Mapping and Research can quantify the “Moments-that-matter” to deliver more innovative and personalized offerings in order to retain the customer’s interest.

Through Customer Journey Mapping and Research, brands can further use data sources to expedite the shopping process for their buyers and customize promotions and deliveries to enhance customer engagement. Identifying and defining “Crucial” touchpoints makes it easier to humanize and personalize the experience.

Customer Journey Management for Continuous Improvement
Feedback Management is vital to finding out if deliverables match customers’ expectations by capturing their experience at different checkpoints. Retailers utilize many feedback tools that include quantitative and qualitative approaches. The ultimate objective of a feedback management tool used by retailers is to measure and track the deliverables to generate insights that “actually matter” for an engaging customer experience.

Short-sightedness and lack of an appropriate tool for feedback can seriously hamper the feedback process and limit its ability to achieve its objective. For instance, quantifying negative experiences due to attitudinal indifference from staff needs in-depth research at crucial touchpoints in physical stores or online stores for course correction through personalized interventions such as training. Customer Journey Mapping as a part of the feedback management process, enables retailers to identify, segregate and focus on insights that actually will make a difference.


Interested in learning more about how Customer Journey Mapping can help your business? Call us at 1-800-549-7170 or send an email to nitin@goldresearchinc.com

Gold Research is an award-winning Customer Journey Mapping and Research firm with extensive experiences in journey mapping, path-to-purchase research with a special focus in deploying “real-time” and behavioral/neuroscience research formats to gather in-the-moment customer insights.