Robots from Flickr by jeleneOne of our most important programs here at Delvinia is our Customer Journey Mapping. By combining the results of user testing, customer surveys and interviews with web analytics and sales data we can map how your customers (and potential customers) interact with your company from their initial want or need through to purchase and post-purchase behaviour.

While a detailed data visualization of the customer journey is the deliverable, we feel that adding a layer of storytelling helps to bring the journey to life for our client. It’s not uncommon for us to develop customer personas for the more popular user segments using information we’ve collected from customer data, surveys and interviews. That persona gets augmented with a face, name and personal information and then we craft a narrative (based on data) that sees that persona travel through the customer journey we have mapped.

Two years ago, we began to use social media listening as a way to further humanize the customer journey. By creating queries to gather social media mentions of the client, their competitors and the product category in question, we begin to observe interesting and sometimes unexpected ways that people talk about brands and products.

Recently, we were gathering information for a pitch to a large grocery store chain. We immediately began to see the exact type of Twitter posts, Facebook updates and Foursquare check-ins we were expecting. One series of tweets grabbed our attention, and it mapped almost perfectly across our sample customer journey map.

The series began with the Need/Want; “It’s Friday night so I’m going to *brand name* to buy stuff to make smoothies. What? Isn’t that what you do on a Friday?”

Next we noted the Purchase, thanks to a Foursquare check-in at a local store. The story ended off with a near-perfect example of post-purchase advocacy; the person had posted a picture from her kitchen of all the ingredients along with the caption, “All ready to make smoothies!”

When these social media mentions were presented along with our customer journey map concept, the situation immediately resonated with the client. We’ve since began to incorporate social media listening regularly as a way to further humanize the results of the quantitative and qualitative work we do.

Social media listening is just one of the many ways that we work to keep the customer front and centre of everything we do.

[Image via Flickr – jelene. Used under CC license.]