Heat Maps For Sites

When businesses work with Pearl Lemon they quickly find that we are big fans of heat maps. In the initial stages of a project we’ll talk about them a lot and they will used to discover problems in the initial stages and then to 80% of all companies with a website labour under the assumption that their website is delivering excellent customer journeys.

In fact many of them make use of taglines that reflect that confidence. ‘We put customers first’ ‘Top Rated Customer Service’ and more.

However, statistics show that many of those companies are dead wrong. According to who? Their customers.

Heatmaps are one of the ways that Pearl Lemon uses to cut through perceptions and assumptions and expose the reality so that those taglines and promises really mean something.

Why Companies Assume They Are Providing A Great Customer Experience

Why do so many companies believe they are offering a great customer experience when they are not? Often because they do not really understand what that is in the digital space.

In the past, customer service was always seen as something of a soft skill. So, it may be that an older business, one that has had a strong physical, or even phone, presence, sis provide amazing customer service and great customer journeys. But things are very different when you get online. Online it’s all about great infrastructure, not lots of thank yous (although those still matter.)

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Online, mapping the complete customer journey, and therefore understanding what’s working and what isn’t, involves mapping all the touchpoints where the service “touches” the customer via content, a specific process or, at some point, contact with a company representative. This includes:

Branding and marketing materials
Any digital interaction with the business, whether that’s an email, a chat message, a social media contact and more.
Operational processes – menus, navigation, checkouts
Web based company standards and procedures.
Company voice
Staff training

In an ideal world a company would take the time to put themselves into a customer’s shoes and go through every single one of the options on their website from that point of view. But often that does not happen.

Instead, the company creates a web experience that revolves around their processes, their culture, their standards, their design preferences even, when in order to provide the best customer journey, which will lead to more users taking the actions a business wants them to, the customer’s needs should be driving everything. Heat maps can be used to visually demonstrate the reality of what a user experiences on a website, by showing things like

Which areas of a website, and website elements attract the most attention

Where visitors click, even if they are not clicking links

How much time visitors spend on various areas and elements of a site

See where visitors seem to get stuck

Where customers drop off your site and click away

How and where visitors complete forms or checkout procedures

See what visitors like and don’t like.

Heat maps visually highlight the areas that get the most attention and maps out clicks. What does a heat map look like?

Here’s an example

Some Of Our Clients

While heat maps are the easiest way to analyze the effectiveness of your website navigation and structure as far as visitors go and getting them to do what you want them to do, it’s just a tool. To get the most out of heat mapping you then need to be able to spot the problems and determine how best to fix them while amplifying, or even duplicating, the things that do work.

That is where Pearl Lemon come in. Contact us today to discuss what heap mapping -and customer journey optimization in general, could do for your business.