How to Create a Customer Journey Map
We’ve talked about customer journey maps in the past — Improving Your Users’ Experiences with Journey Maps, and here’s a quick reminder of what they’re about:
Journey maps are common UX tools which allow the visualization of the process that someone goes through to accomplish a goal. They come in various shapes, sizes, and formats, and depending on the context, can be used in various ways.
A journey map starts out as a compilation of user actions in a timeline, which is then fleshed out with details on user thoughts and emotions which help create a narrative. The narrative is then condensed and given finishing touches, leading to a visualization of the user’s journey.
A journey map is a combination of two instruments: storytelling and visualization. These are essential to journey mapping because they are very effective in conveying information in a memorable and concise way, creating a shared vision. Fragmented understanding should be avoided in organizations where KPIs are assigned and measured per each department because the entire user experience from the user’s perspective is never pieced together. Without a shared vision, improving customer experience would be significantly more difficult.
A journey map helps with creating a holistic view of your customers’ experience. This process which brings together and allows you to visualize disparate data points can help you engage otherwise uninterested stakeholders from multiple departments, leading to collaborative conversations and change in your products.
Why you should map your customers’ journey
Customers nowadays want their experiences with brands to be seamless. They expect companies to remember them and their interests so that they can always pick up where they left off, without needing to repeat any steps or reiterate what they are looking for.
Journey maps essentially allow companies to get into the customer’s head and get insights into what their pain points are. They are also great for building empathy with customers, helping companies better understand what their customers want and how they feel.
Here is a quick run-down of some of the benefits of customer journey mapping:
· increased customer engagement
· identify and improve moments of truth in your customer experience
· identify and remove ineffective touchpoints
· focus on customers’ perspectives instead of the company’s
· facilitate interdepartmental communication and collaboration
· better targeting criteria for marketing campaigns
· increased employee accountability by assigning ownership of customer touchpoints
· better understanding of circumstances which may have resulted in irregularities in your existing quantitative data
· possibility of assessing the ROI of future investments in the customer experience
When you should map your customers’ journey
Customer journey maps are usually created early on in the research phase, and they should always support a known business goal. If your map doesn’t align with a specific business goal, it likely won’t offer you any actionable insights.
Examples of goals that you can apply to a journey map include learning about the purchasing behaviors of a specific customer persona or assigning specific departments ownership of key touchpoints in the customer experience.
If you don’t have a specific business goal in mind, don’t waste your time building a journey map just for the sake of it, or you will very likely find it to be a waste of time and resources.
Creating a journey map
A common annoyance with the customer journey mapping process is the lack of standardization, either at an organizational level, or at an industry level. Depending on your industry and the products or services you are selling, best practices and design guidelines may vary. This allows you a great deal of freedom to explore what’s right for your company and be creative.
Let’s take a look at the base steps you need to take to create your own customer journey map, before embellishing to meet your company’s needs.
There are five key steps you need to follow for effective customer journey mapping:
1. Goals and teams — build a cross-disciplinary team and establish what your journey mapping goals are
2. Internal research — gather any existing customer research that exists in your organization
3. Educated assumptions — use your existing research to formulate a hypothesis on the current state of the customer journey
4. External research — conduct additional research to support or correct your hypothesis
5. Narrative visualization — combine all your research to create a visual narrative depicting the customer journey
Now that we’ve counted the steps, let’s delve deeper into each of them.
1. Goals and teams
The first phase of the customer journey process is also the most essential. Before you do any sort of research and visualization, you need to have focus, to know exactly what your goals are.
A. Build a cross-disciplinary team
Stakeholders are essential in the journey mapping process as you will no doubt discover gaps and opportunities within the user experience over which, as the UX professional, you will have no authority over. You need buy-in and engagement from several departments so that when you do discover those issues and opportunities, those with the authority to make decisions will already be convinced of your method and able to understand how important solving those problems is.
Building your team should be fairly easy; being by identifying stakeholders in multiple departments with the ability to provide helpful insights along the journey mapping process and whose decision-making authority you may need when identifying opportunities.
You are responsible for explaining how valuable journey mapping is and what you expect to gain from it so that each stakeholder feels compelled to be a sponsor for your project in their department. Depending on the scope of your project and the size of your organization, gathering allies can be a quick endeavor or a long one.
B. Establish the map’s scope
Before you begin your mapping activities, you should also establish the map’s scope. Make sure you and your team members know whose experience you are mapping and what that experience is.
The “who” in your map will typically be a critical persona or audience segment, and the experience will be a journey or scenario with an impact on your ROI or customer retention and relationships.
2. Internal research
After you’ve built your team and established your map’s scope, begin researching within your organization. Piece together every bit of data on your customers from every department within your organization to see what it currently knows about them. This can help you create a holistic understanding of how the journey currently looks.
A. Put your team to work
You don’t have to search for data on your own, your team is there to help you. Put together a list of questions you would like answered and have each team member search for any relevant information within their respective departments. You can start with:
· market-research surveys
· call-center logs
· brand audits
· site surveys
B. Interview stakeholders
Now that you have some initial data, interview your stakeholders for more insights. Conduct the interviews based on the internal data you already have, using role-specific guides which can help bring clarity to your findings. You might typically want to interview these roles:
· marketing
· sales
· management
· support
· R&D
If the time is available, conduct your research across typical silos, such as channels, geographic regions, or products.
3. Educated assumptions
By this point you will have likely gathered enough insight to have some idea of how the customer journey currently looks and what the customers’ pain points are. Create a hypothesis map (or assumption map) where you lay out your hypothesis in a draft framework.
A. Synthesize your internal research
Begin by bringing all your research together into a coherent story and share your insights with the team. Get together with everyone and get yourselves up to speed with how the research is going.
B. Create the hypothesis map
Once you’ve gone over all your current insights with the team, get together again for a collective mapping activity. You can even have customers attend this meeting so you can use their input to shape this early draft. Remember, this is just a draft and external research will need to validate it.
4. External research
After you’ve completed the draft map based on insights gathered from internal research, the next step is to validate it through customer research.
A. Use your hypothesis map to shape your user research
This draft map will very likely reveal significant gaps in the customer journey which you can’t visualize because you have no existing data. It is essential to explore these gaps in your customer research so that after you’ve finished the research there are no holes in your understanding. Additionally, you new findings should validate or invalidate the hypothesis map.
B. Fill in the gaps using qualitative research methods
When conducting your research, choose methods which put you in direct line of observation with the customers. Use multiple research methods to ensure that you get insights from all the different angles. Depending on your project, some relevant methods may include:
· direct observation
· customer interviews
· contextual inquiries
· diary studies
If you have limited time or budget to conduct research, a small sample size of 6 or 8 participants should be enough to get you started.
Remember to keep your stakeholders involved and up to date on your findings so they don’t get shocked when they see the changes made to the hypothesis map that they helped build.
5. Narrative visualization
The journey map itself is simply a tool to help you share findings in an engaging way. At this point in the journey mapping process, you need to create a visual narrative which showcases the journey and all its aspects, such as critical moments, pain points, etc. After you’ve gathered more insights, get your team back together and evolve your hypothesis map based on your new findings.
Now you can decide how to move forward. If you have a small team, this likely unpolished map may be good enough to move forward with. Otherwise, if you are working with a client or need to share insights in a formal way, you may need to make some visual improvements to your map.
Evaluating your journey map
A customer journey map needs a purpose, and it needs to be actionable, measurable, as well as dynamic to ensure that it is effective.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) provide a great evaluative framework to help you make your customer journey map actionable. For example, a main function of the customer journey map is its ability to highlight opportunities for improvement based on the insights gained from researching customers’ perceptions and experiences with a product or service.
Many companies use customer journey maps to gain insights and better understand customer highs and lows. Opportunities for improvement are often visualized using indicators such as “does not meet/meets/exceeds expectations”.
There are other useful metrics you can track, such as:
· customer satisfaction
· customer emotions
· how important and helpful specific touchpoints are
Final thoughts
Businesses these days are very focused on their customers’ experiences, and for good reason. Focusing on customers’ perspectives, companies have a better chance of understanding what consumers want and need. As a result, companies can tailor more effective and satisfying experiences for the people they hope to sell their products or services to.
Customer journey maps are a widely used and proven framework for helping brands gain customer insights and improve their internal processes’ efficiency. They are a greatly effective means of identifying engagement and improvement opportunities, increase conversion rates, and improve ROIs.
Understanding your customers’ journeys across your organization helps you do more than just increase your marketing campaigns’ revenue or reduce service costs and shrink sales cycles. Having this knowledge allows you to find ways of being consistent when providing positive customer experiences and in retaining your customers’ loyalty.
If you follow the high-level steps discussed above, you should be able to produce a journey map based on user research, make use of the available data, and most importantly, after you finish the initial process of building the map, you should have a team of allies who are ready and willing to act on the information gathered throughout the whole process.
