Before we dive into the mapping side of things, let’s quickly take a moment to explain what the customer journey actually is.

A customer journey consists of the various touchpoints and interactions a healthcare professional, or HCP, has with your business. It’s worth mentioning that in this lesson, when we talk about customers, we’re referring to HCPs who hold prescribing power.

So, what might a customer journey look like?

Dr. Alvarez is reading a medical journal, when they stumble across an ad for your brand. They’re curious to find out more, and visit your website, where they sign up to your newsletter and share their contact details. At a later date, Dr. Alvarez then receives a promotional email, notifying them that your brand will be hosting a stand at an upcoming congress.

This piques their curiosity, so they decide to sign-up for and attend the congress. Since Dr. Alvarez is showing a clear interest in your brand, you invite them to a virtual meeting the following week. During this meeting, you give them some more information about your new product and try to secure a commitment to prescribe your brand.

As we can see from Dr. Alvarez’ story, each interaction that you have with someone along the customer journey is an opportunity to better understand your customers and the different experiences they're having with your brand. This will help you identify how customers behave at each touchpoint, the needs they have, or the pain points they encounter during these interactions.

This is where customer journey mapping comes in. Put simply, this involves creating a visual story of the touchpoints and interactions in a customer journey, to help you see things from the customer’s perspective. It can tell you how they feel about your brand, reveal what their prescribing preferences might be, and help you identify which touchpoints are moving them towards a decision.

As someone in the sales team, you’ll play a key role in the customer journey mapping process. After all, you work with your customers directly, so you know them best! This makes you a great candidate to lead the process of customer journey mapping.

But, it’s still important to take a collaborative approach and work with other teams, like your marketing colleagues, who can shed some light on other touchpoints they have with customers. The more touchpoints you uncover, the easier it will be to create suitable customer journey maps that not only increase prescribing levels, but also help you meet customer needs and improve their experience with your brand. So, let’s take a look at the customer journey mapping process itself.

First things first - it’s important to establish a clear set of goals for your customer journey map before you start to build one. This might be something like, “identify which interactions are the most likely to drive prescriptions for the brand.”

Next, you’ll want to create customer personas. These are fictional representations of your ideal target customer. Each customer persona will represent a group of people that share similar goals, journeys, needs and preferences. Personas can help you understand who you’re trying to sell to, and identify the most suitable touchpoints to meet their needs.

This brings us onto the next stage of the mapping process. You’ll need to list all of the possible touchpoints specific to the customer journey you’re trying to map, highlighting the ones that you can control and adapt yourself. Then, you can start to identify which touchpoints you want to include in your map - the ones that will help you achieve the goals you established earlier. Collecting and analyzing relevant data will help you with this step, by revealing which touchpoints are working well, and which ones don’t provide as much value.

Once you’ve built your journey map, you can begin to evaluate its effectiveness - so, it’s time to step into your customers’ shoes and walk through it yourself, looking for any areas that might need improvement. You might find that some touchpoints aren’t quite right for this particular journey.

Tailoring your touchpoints to meet the needs and expectations of your customers will go a long way in helping you maximize the effectiveness of each interaction. If you fail to see things from your customers’ perspective, they’re unlikely to continue moving through their journey - stalling along the way, or dropping off altogether.

Customer Journey Mapping