What is a Channel in a Journey Map?
Ever wondered how businesses talk and sell products to customers? This post is about "channels" in a customer journey map.
What are Channels?
Channels support customer moments, which leads to key moments. A channel helps a customer through their moments as they seek to reach their goals.
For example, if you’re a Verizon customer and aim to upgrade your phone, you have the option to do the following:
- In-store: Purchase a new phone through the in-store channel.
- App: Pre-order your new phone via the My Verizon app channel, and then go to pick up the phone via the in-store channel.
- Website: Order a new phone from the Verizon website and have it shipped to your home or pick it up in store.
- Call Center: Possibly order a new phone via the Verizon call center.
A Verizon customer is not dependent on a particular channel, but will move through channels from moment to moment to fulfill their needs and goals.
Different Types of Channels
Here are the channels or pathways through which companies sell their products and services to customers in 2023. Remember, these avenues aren’t only for selling; part of the sales experience is communicating with the customer.
- In-Store
- Website
- Third-Party Marketplace (Amazon, etc.)
- App
- Call Center (Includes chatbots)
- Direct Mail
Channels coming in the near future:
- Augmented Reality (AR) - Combines the physical and digital shopping experience
- Virtual Reality (VR) - VR headset shopping experience
Why are Channels important?
Channels are essential because they allow you to sell your products to customers you may not have been able to reach before. The cost of selling products varies between channels. If you can find a way to sell a product with less cost to you, it obviously leads to greater profitability. Customers change their buying habits, and companies need to go where the customer is, which means creating new channels to meet customers where they spend their time.
The other reason channels are essential is that they give you more flexibility in how you communicate with your customers. This flexibility is also good for the customer, as they can hear from you via email, SMS, phone, video chat, or mail—whichever works best for them. When you meet the customer where they are, they’ll feel like you’re giving them excellent customer service.
How Different Channels are Used by Businesses to Sell Their Products and Services
Let’s take a moment to discuss channels' importance to your business. If you’re working for a retailer like Lowe’s, Home Depot, Walmart, or Kroger, then you probably know that once they only sold their products and services from brick-and-mortar stores in cities and towns across America. Then, due to the cost of managing those stores and the competition in their market, those retailers realized they could sell to customers in other ways.
So, they started investing capital into building their websites to sell products on the internet. Fast forward twenty years, and everyone is selling products via their websites. In addition to websites, they set up call centers to address customer concerns and complaints, and in the process they realized they could sell products via phone.
When the first iPhone was released in 2007, it spawned an entirely new channel—mobile applications. Suddenly, if you didn't have an app for your customers, you were losing sales to competitors. This situation unleashed a wave of apps in 2010 and beyond that now support customers shopping on their cell phones 24/7.
As the retailers added websites, apps, and call centers, one of their most potent product sales channels remained unchanged: email. Retailers have been selling through email for a long time, and it has proved an effective sales channel.
Journey Mapping
As mentioned in my previous Triangle Offense posts, journey mapping is a sophisticated customer experience (CX) method of understanding how a customer interacts with a business. You can dissect customer data and present it to business teams in many different ways that make it easy to build an actionable journey map. After you read this article, I encourage you to read the ultimate guide to journey mapping, which should help you become successful in building actionable journey maps for your organization.
When do We Map Channels in a Journey Map?
During customer and user research, teams learn about customer behaviors, habits, and sales and communication preferences. I've noticed that customers are often quite explicit about which channels they want a business to use to communicate with them. Direct communication with a customer is very personal, and customers know what they like.
The same holds true for the selling process. When you want to better serve a customer during a sales experience, that customer will be happy to tell you exactly how they buy a product or service. Of course, the nuance is, can you identify what’s best for both the customer and your business, so the company can extract profits from its operating channel?
Once you have solid intel on how your customers purchase products and know their expectations around communication, you can add the customer data to the journey map’s channels.
Customer Versus Omnichannel Journey Mapping
- A customer journey map captures all the customer interactions in a customer experience.
- An omnichannel journey map focuses solely on the channels and captures how customers move between those channels.
You may want to periodically conduct omnichannel journey mapping to make sure the channels facilitate all the customer moments and move the customers closer to their goals.
Channel Management
I remember working on a project at Lowe's, deconstructing the customer experience of a group that had purchased a service there. As I dug deeper into the background, I realized the customers didn’t feel like Lowe's was communicating often enough. From their perspective, pockets of dead air (zero communication) surrounded their service updates, which left them wondering what the heck was going on and if they would ever see a Lowe's rep show up at their home.
After processing this customer feedback, I asked the team how and when Lowe's had communicated service updates to that group of customers. We found that the company was communicating through different channels, and on top of that, delaying communication without providing status updates to the customers in the intervening time.
I learned an important lesson: Channels play an essential role, not only in how a company sells products, but also in how it communicates with its customers. Now, when journey mapping I ask myself, “What business problem are we solving?” I follow my five-step journey map process to understand why and how I will present customer data and what role channels play in the customer experience.
History of Channel Growth
Summary
Mapping channels in your journey map is essential and requires you to understand how customers move seamlessly across the entire customer experience. Understanding how customers move from one pathway (channel) to another as they interact with your business's customer experience is helpful.
Written by Leo Vroegindewey, B2B CX Consultant
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