Customer Journey Map

How to create a Customer Journey Map

Customer journey mapping is a method that visualizes and narrates how users navigate a site or app to achieve their objectives. It divides the user's journey into individual steps, each characterized by multiple layers such as touchpoints with the company, user's intent, emotions, and relevant qualitative and quantitative data.

This map serves as a holistic visual representation of the relationship between the company's delivered touchpoints and the customer's personal experience. It aids in identifying areas for improving customer experience and aligning various teams and stakeholders on user experiences.

Customer journey maps are crucial for understanding users better, pinpointing investment areas to enhance customer experience, and improving customer satisfaction and retention.

Why build a Customer Journey Map

Customer journey maps have several benefits:

1. Holistic User Experience Insight - Provides a comprehensive and structured understanding of the customer's journey from start to end, considering various viewpoints.

2. Deep User Empathy - Enables comprehension of user emotions and their reasons, framing their actions and feelings in a relatable narrative.

3. Cross-Functional Synergy - Facilitates alignment of different teams by integrating their specific interests (design, engineering, marketing, etc.) on a common map, fostering shared understanding and company focus.

4. Problem Identification and Solution Suggestions - Highlights major issues to address and potential remedies by linking customer objectives with their interaction points and subsequent emotions.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual tool used by businesses to understand the steps a customer takes to reach a goal, reflecting their motivations, needs, and issues throughout the user experience. It commonly includes:

1. Customer Persona - a hypothetical profile reflecting your typical customer's traits, needs, and motivations.

2. Stages - the various phases a customer encounters while interacting with your product to reach their objective.

3. Touchpoints - the interactions between your customers and your product, such as visiting your website, receiving an email, or speaking to customer service.

4. Emotions - the varying feelings experienced by customers at each stage, used to pinpoint areas to enhance the customer experience.

5. Opportunities - identified issues worth addressing based on customer emotions, along with potential solutions for exploration.

Guiding principles

Every customer journey will be different, but they all follow certain key principles:

1. Customer-Centric - Maps should present the customer's experience from their perspective to foster empathy and understand their motivations.

2. Multi-Channel - All touchpoints, digital or physical, should be included to provide a holistic view of the customer's experience, avoiding isolated touchpoint analysis.

3. Integration of Touchpoints and Experience - Pairing objective touchpoints with subjective feelings offers insights into customers' emotions and their reasons.

4. Visualization - Representing the customer experience visually enhances understanding, providing a more digestible format than text or slide presentations.

5. Goal-Orientation - Journey maps should depict the customer's path towards a goal, implying that enhancing the journey should increase goal achievement, thus benefiting the company.

How to build a Customer Journey Map

There are 7 steps to creating a customer journey map:

1. Define your customer persona

2. Select the customer goal

3. Define the journey steps

4. Add customer touch points

5. Add customer thoughts and feelings

6. Further enrich the map

7. Identify where to act

Workshop tips

Creating a basic customer journey map can be done individually and quickly, but involving a cross-functional team in a workshop can provide a richer, more diverse map. It also helps to highlight user issues and align multiple stakeholders.

For such workshops, allocate 90 minutes to 2 hours and consider including people from various functions such as:

• User research or design

• Engineering

• Marketing (especially CRM)

• Customer Service

• Sales and account management

• Sector experts

• CEO, founder, or General Manager

The process of each step in the workshop will be guided to aid in building your customer journey map.

Creating a basic customer journey map can be done individually and quickly, but involving a cross-functional team in a workshop can provide a richer, more diverse map. It also helps to highlight user issues and align multiple stakeholders on change justification.

For such workshops, allocate 90 minutes to 2 hours and consider including people from various functions such as:

1. User research or design

2. Engineering

3. Marketing (especially CRM)

4. Customer Service

5. Sales and account management

6. Sector experts

7. CEO, founder, or General Manager

1. Define your customer persona

The customer is the main figure in a customer journey map, necessitating a clear understanding of who they are. Personas should be defined by their needs written in the format “I want … “ or “I need … “, for example:

• I want to find what I’m looking for as fast as possible

• I need to know my item will turn up

• I want my item to arrive really quickly

2. Identify the customer goal

Decide what the goal you are mapping out for your persona, e.g.:

• Tier: book an e-bike and get to my destination

• Moonpig: send someone a birthday card

• Sky: watch a movie

Or it could be a smaller, specific journey, e.g.:

• X: create an account

• Zalando: send a return 

• Revolut: resolve a billing error

3. Define the journey steps

Break down the journey the customer goes through to reach their goal into 6-10 steps. This is the horizontal axis of the map.

4. Add customer touchpoints

For each step in the customer journey, add the touchpoints that they have with the company:

• Using the app

• Visiting the website

• Emails, notifications and ads

• Speaking to a customer service agent on the phone or via chat

• Using a physical object (e.g. using a Tier e-bike)

5. Add customer thoughts and feelings

Add how customers think and feel at each step, based on their interactions and the touchpoints. This is best based on user research, but you can empathize with your users to get going and update these sentiments with what you've heard from customer research later.

6. Further enrich the map

Add any other layers to the map that you think will be useful, e.g.:

• Provocations - state the key problems to solve in the format “how might we…”?

• Feature ideas - any ideas for new features or changes to existing features you can think of

• Quotes - actual quotes from customers in interviews or via social media and customer service

• Insights - quantitative insights and analysis that help you understand user behavior through the customer journey

• Metrics - any KPIs that you want to measure whether you are improving the customer journey objectively

• Tech stack - the internal and 3rd party systems that help you deliver the customer experience

Again, there’s no right or wrong here, it all depends on the sorts of conversation that you want to drive.

7. Identify where to act

You should now be able to see where there are gaps in the customer journey, and identify opportunities to fix these gaps . Highlight these on the map so that anyone can see them.

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