7 customer journey mapping mistakes (and how to avoid them)

Customer journey mapping is one of the most important processes in building effective marketing strategies that drive conversions. However, it’s also a complex process that many marketers struggle to nail down, and without the right approach, you’re missing out on leads and sales.

This article will outline some of the common customer journey mapping mistakes that lead to missed opportunities and wasted marketing spend. We’ll also reveal how you can avoid them with strategic data analysis and actionable insights from software like call tracking.

The importance of accurate customer journey mapping

There are many reasons why customer journey mapping is important and why you need to avoid the common pitfalls that impact your conversions.

To drive more leads and sales, you need to know where, how, and when customers are interacting with your business. This enables you to learn how different campaigns influence customer behaviours along each stage of the journey, and in turn, you’ll know which data-driven decisions will have the most positive impact on your conversions.

How to create a customer journey map

Creating a customer journey map requires gathering in-depth data surrounding every customer interaction with your business – or ‘touchpoint’. Once you have the full picture of a customer’s path, you can create a visual representation of their journey, known as a customer journey map.

Call tracking software, such as Mediahawk, is essential for collecting the data needed to create the most accurate maps that reveal actionable insights to improve your cross-channel campaigns.

Also, before creating a customer journey map, it’s important to know the five stages of the customer journey and how to optimise your marketing strategies at each stage for increased conversions.

7 common customer journey mapping mistakes

Creating an effective customer journey map requires close attention to detail and a commitment to data-driven decision-making. To help you conduct your process effectively, here are the most common customer journey mapping mistakes and practical solutions to overcome them:

1. Overlooking offline touchpoints (like phone calls)

Focusing only on digital interactions in your customer journeys, like web visits or form fills, means you’re missing out on significant insights from your offline touchpoints.

Phone calls are often among the highest-intent interactions, and ignoring them in your customer journey maps will skew your analysis of customer behaviours and campaign performance. Many customers still need to speak to a human during the awareness, consideration, and decision-making stage of their journey, especially for complex products or services.

You need software like call tracking that captures call data alongside digital metrics to get the full picture of how online and offline activities influence interactions. Dynamic number insertion (DNI) will attribute every phone call to the original marketing source and channel.

2. Relying on assumptions instead of data

Without building your maps around accurate data, your marketing decisions are led solely by assumptions and internal perceptions of the customer journey.

This leads to misaligned strategies and inaccurate targeting, where you’ll see valuable leads and re-targeting opportunities slip through the cracks.

What you think customers do and what they actually do is often drastically different.

Marketing attribution delivers the key data you need to take the guesswork out of your customer journey maps, showing you the exact pathways and interactions of every customer who interacts with your business.

For even deeper insights, you can analyse speech data to identify customer needs, spot common pain points, and categorise phone call conversations based on the customer’s intent to purchase.

3. Ignoring post-purchase engagement

Another customer journey mapping mistake is thinking it ends at the point of sale. Post-purchase engagement is vital for not just improving customer satisfaction, but optimising retention and advocacy stages that will increase your leads.

It’s important to nurture loyalty and drive repeat business from your satisfied customers, as this will provide lifetime value for your brand in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) sectors.

Analyse speech data for post-purchase support phone call conversations and you’ll identify recurring queries, feedback for smoothing out the sales cycle, and the top satisfaction drivers. You’ll also be able to categorise the phone calls based on the outcomes, tracking which customers show intent to write a review or make a referral.

4. Failing to track calls to action (CTAs)

If you’re not tracking how call to actions (CTAs) are driving customer interactions at various journey stages, you’ll fail to see where you should refine your campaign content to increase conversions.

To avoid wasted marketing spend on underperforming touchpoints, you need to know how each campaign’s CTA is performing.

Use call tracking software to measure the value of interactions at different stages in the journey and how CTAs are impacting conversions – i.e. is CTA messaging more important for driving phone calls in the early awareness stages of the journey? Are customers being driven to use live chat features? Which online touchpoints and CTAs generate the most phone calls?

5. Not segmenting customer personas

Customer journey maps should be as unique and flexible as the customers you track. Using a one-size-fits-all journey map will fail to capture the data and insights needed to target different audiences and behaviours.

Analysing the interactions before, during, and after a customer call will allow you to categorise them based on data like the campaign type, enquiries made, and average time to conversion.

You’ll also be able to analyse speech data to gain clearer context surrounding the outcomes of phone call conversations, so you can segment audiences based on intent to purchase. This way, you’ll know how to tailor campaigns and re-targeting messaging based on different personas and customer needs.

6. Skipping real-time data

If you’re not using real-time data to create your customer journey maps, you’re relying on outdated or generalised data to give you the relevant and timely insights you need now. This means you’ll miss shifts in customer behaviour and emerging trends, which can cost you conversions.

Software with real-time reporting capabilities will ensure every customer interaction is tracked and analysed in real-time. You’ll have up-to-date insights that show the most accurate picture of customer behaviours, so you closely align your campaign adjustments with what your customers are really doing.

7. Not aligning sales and marketing teams

Siloed data will lead to incomplete customer insights and a less efficient allocation of your marketing budget. Without having a clear connection to both marketing and sales data, your campaigns will have disjointed messaging and you’ll miss opportunities to increase conversions.

By integrating call tracking with your customer relationship management (CRM) software, you’ll seamlessly share call data with platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, and more. You’ll have clear performance data that reveals the true ROI of every campaign and channel, and you’ll save significant amounts of time with automated data sharing.

How Mediahawk perfects your customer journey mapping

Mediahawk’s comprehensive call tracking and analytics platform is the best solution for all these common journey mapping mistakes, giving you:

• Complete touchpoint visibility: Track both online and offline interactions for a holistic view of the entire customer journey. Connect phone calls to things like paid ad interactions to understand exactly how customers move between digital and traditional channels.
• Deep data insights: Uses call tracking, speech analytics, and attribution models to provide actionable customer behaviour data. The platform reveals not just what customers do, but why they do it, so you adjust your campaigns to align with what really drives customers to convert.
• Improved marketing ROI: Optimise your marketing spend by identifying the most effective channels and messages. Stop guessing which marketing efforts drive results and start making data-backed decisions.