Customer Journey Map, its application and effectiveness

Vladyslav Danylchuk, UX/UI designer at Revend Group, gave a presentation on ‘Customer Journey Map, its application and effectiveness’. In this article, we would like to share with you the key conclusions and knowledge we gained during the presentation.

What is user experience and why is it critical to brand success?

User experience is not just a line in a business strategy. It is the foundation on which any successful product or service is built. The modern world is extremely saturated with information and offers, so it’s easy to lose the customer’s attention. This is where the need arises for a detailed understanding of the user experience at every stage of the customer journey — from the first encounter with the brand to the completion of the purchase and subsequent service.

The task of a product designer is to focus on maximizing customer comfort and satisfaction, creating a continuous positive experience. In this context, the Customer Journey Map is a tool that allows you to see the entire customer journey, understanding their emotions, behavior, motivations, and pain points.

What techniques in UX (User Experience) will allow a designer to build a great user experience?

First of all, you should clearly understand the existence of different types of methods and how to apply them in the process of researching and building a truly high-quality product.

Methodologies are structured approaches that help design and development teams develop products focused on creating exceptional user experiences.

Among the most important methods, the following should be emphasized:

1. Information Architecture: The main purpose is to organize the structure of the product, providing a logical relationship between all internal pages.
2. User Personas: It helps us to understand the characteristics of the target audience in order to create a product that exactly meets their needs.
3. User Flows: Allows us to track the user’s journey through the product, identifying how they interact with it and achieve their goals.
4. Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD): Focuses on the real tasks and needs of users, which leads to the creation of a more functional solution.
5. Customer Journey Map (CJM): Analyzes each stage of interaction with the product to identify strengths and weaknesses and increase user satisfaction.
6. Wireframing & Prototyping: Developing the basic structure and placement of elements for testing and collecting feedback to improve the design.

Why is a Customer Journey Map the key to creating a deep connection with a customer?

The Customer Journey Map not only helps to improve the customer experience, but also allows you to understand them on an emotional level. In an era when competition is getting tougher every day, it’s no longer enough for businesses to just offer a quality product. It is necessary to provide a unique, pleasant, and flawless experience of interaction with the brand.

And it is CJM that allows us to do this, because thanks to it, we can:

• Understand the customer’s motivations: Why does he use this particular product? What drives their choice?
• Analyze emotional changes: When is the customer satisfied and when is he/she disappointed?
• Identify opportunities for optimization: What barriers prevent the customer from achieving their goal? Is there an opportunity to eliminate these problems?
• Build loyalty and retain customers: True loyalty does not arise from a one-time interaction, but from a constant positive experience at all stages of interaction.

What is a Customer Journey Map: A deeper look at the structure and elements?

A Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of every user interaction with your product or service. But it should be much more than just a diagram. It should dive into the details of the user’s emotional states, motives, pain points, and opportunities for improvement. Each touchpoint is important because it affects the overall perception of the brand.

The main goal of CJM is to understand how users interact with the product at every stage, from the initial contact to the achievement of their goals, which helps to identify opportunities to improve the user experience.

CJM contains several key components:

• Interaction scenarios (Journey Stages): These are the different stages of the customer journey, from initial product familiarization to post-purchase loyalty. They can include the stages of need awareness, information search, decision making, purchase, and post-sales service.
• User actions: What specific steps does the user take at each stage? For example, does the user search for reviews, browse product pages, or contact customer support?
• Emotional Journey: How do the user’s feelings change throughout the journey? Research shows that emotional experience plays a crucial role in creating loyalty. Positive emotions at all stages lead to repeat purchases, while negative emotions can cause customer loss.
• Barriers and Pain Points: What prevents a customer from achieving their goals at certain stages? Perhaps the purchase process is too complicated, or the information on the website is not detailed enough. By identifying these problems, you have the opportunity to solve them before they become a cause of customer churn.
• Opportunities for Optimization: What new solutions can you offer to make the user journey easier, faster, and more enjoyable? This could include improving the user interface, simplifying the order form, additional post-purchase services, or personalized recommendations.

When to create a Customer Journey Map: At what stages of the business does it bring maximum benefit?

A Customer Journey Map is a versatile tool that can be used at any stage of your business life cycle. However, there are key moments when it is most useful.

When should it be done?

• Launching a new product or service: When you introduce a new product to the market, it’s important to have a clear idea of how customers will interact with it. Creating a CJM will allow you to anticipate customer expectations, identify possible problems, and avoid fatal mistakes.
• Drop in conversion or increase in customer churn: If you notice that users have stopped staying with you, or if conversion rates are falling, CJM will help you understand at what stage they leave the journey and what factors contribute to it.
• Changes in audience behavior: The market and customer needs are constantly changing. CJM allows you to quickly adapt to these changes and maintain competitiveness.
• Analysis and optimization of existing processes: If you have been operating in the market for a long time, CJM will allow you to analyze in depth how effectively your interaction with customers works. Are they satisfied with your service? Are there opportunities to improve the quality of services or products?

When should this stage be avoided?

• If the project does not include a service: CJM should not be used if the project does not include a service or an end user.
• Lack of objective assessments: A map will be inappropriate if it is based only on the subjective opinions of the team or stakeholders.
• If the only task is to look good: CJM is also not needed if the task is only to visualize the user’s interaction with the interface.

What metrics should you pay attention to when building a high-quality CJM?

1. Conversion at each stage: Each stage should be analyzed in detail, taking into account the percentage of users who successfully move from one stage of interaction to the next.
2. Time spent by users: You should also focus on the average time users spend on each stage of the journey. After all, users often leave a stage for specific reasons that should be identified.
3. User satisfaction: This should be measured by interviewing users, encouraging them to leave feedback, or conducting surveys to determine the level of satisfaction with the interaction.
4. Number of negative experiences: The number of negative interactions or complaints received at each stage should be taken into account.
   Net Promoter Score (NPS): Be sure to consider this indicator, which reflects the willingness of users to recommend a product or service to others. The better the product, the more likely it is to be recommended to others.
5. The time it takes to solve problems: Time is the greatest value in human life. And the time it takes to solve problems or queries that a user has during interaction is much more valuable.

Method of creating a CJM

Before you start building a CJM, you should understand the purpose for which it will be used. This directly affects the methodology of research and construction. As a result, you will have 2 differentiated categories

To analyze the existing product:

First, conduct interviews. When interviewing users, it’s important to simply ask how they found out about your service and how they use it. You can use a variety of options for interviews, from a 1-on-1 meeting or call to a Google Forms survey.

Analyzing the answers you receive will help you identify key touchpoints and improve the user experience overall.

To analyze a new product:

First, clearly define your business goals and user needs.

Only after conducting a multi-level research, and only after that, will it be possible to describe the desired user journey that you plan to lead customers through to achieve their goals and satisfy their needs.

Stages of CJM creation: Step by step to the perfect user experience

Creating a Customer Journey Map may seem like a complicated process, but it can be broken down into several clear steps. By completing them sequentially, the result will be an effective tool that will help increase customer satisfaction and increase product revenue.

1. Define User Persona

The first and most important thing is to clearly understand who your customers are.

A persona is a conditional image of your typical customer based on real data. It is important to create several different personas to cover all audience segments. For example, for a tech store, you can have different personas for young tech enthusiasts looking for new products and for older people looking for reliability.

The purpose of this step is to map the user experience in the specific context of using a particular service to gain a deeper understanding of their needs, motivations, and behavior. This helps teams create more targeted solutions by adapting the product to the expectations and requirements of users.

2. Identify the key touchpoints

At each stage, the customer interacts with your brand through different touchpoints: advertising, website, social media, email, customer support, etc.

This step will help you understand when exactly the contact between the customer and the service occurs in order to identify key moments of interaction and, of course, problems that may arise.

3. Study the user’s actions

The actions that a customer takes during each interaction with your brand can be both physical (e.g., a visit to a store) and digital (e.g., browsing the website). Understanding these actions will help you better understand where the process can be simplified or improved.

4. Start creating Stages & Customer Journey

The purpose of this step is to start implementing a scenario of user interaction with our service by studying the different stages of the user’s journey. This allows us to identify key touchpoints, improve the experience, and create a holistic picture of how customers perceive our product or service.

5. Analyze interaction channels and processes

Map the environments where touchpoints occur to understand which platforms or channels customers use to interact with the service. By defining the environments, you can understand exactly where the touchpoints occur and what processes accompany these interactions.

6. Analyze user actions

The goal of this step should be to find out what actions the customer needs to take (or is taking) to achieve their goals. This will greatly help you understand the path to successful interaction.

7. Be sure to take into account the goals and needs of users, the result they expect to receive

By identifying the goals and needs of the user, you will understand what they want to get from the service. And by understanding what the user expects to achieve after performing an action, you can properly configure the service to meet these expectations at the warframe and prototype stages.

Also, specify the questions that customers have at each step to understand their doubts and needs in the process of interaction. But remember, for each action, be sure to record the real thoughts and emotions of users that arise during the execution of actions to gain a deeper understanding of their experience and feedback.

8. Analyze emotions and pain points

Each interaction evokes certain emotions in the customer. Does he feel frustrated because of the long process of finding the necessary function? Or maybe he is delighted with the speed of the problem solved?

You need to describe all the obstacles, barriers, problems, and limitations that may prevent the user from achieving the desired result in order to get rid of them later and create a truly user-friendly product.

Note both positive and negative emotions, as they determine the overall perception of the brand.

9. Draw conclusions and think logically

Based on the information you’ve collected, you’ll have a general map, but it’s not a solution to all your problems. Now you need to think about and propose specific strategies to improve each touchpoint. By identifying the barriers, problems, and limitations, you will have ideas for possible solutions and fixes to increase user satisfaction. These may include recommendations for improving the interface, reducing the time for the entire interaction process, or personalizing content for different customer segments.

CJM example: A typical customer journey in an online clothing store

Let’s take a look at a real-life CJM example for an online clothing store that sells youth streetwear:

1. Awareness — A customer sees your store’s Instagram ad for the first time. He is interested in the style of clothing and goes to the store page.
2. Consideration — Browsing the site, the customer looks at product photos, reads reviews, checks the page on the site with new arrivals. He begins to weigh his options: is it worth buying now, or is it better to wait for a sale?
3. Decision — A customer adds several products to the cart, but stops because the checkout process is too complicated or because of an unclear delivery policy.
4. Purchase — After improving the ordering process, the customer completes the purchase. His emotions during this process are an important factor in loyalty.
5. Post-purchase service — A week later, the customer receives the parcel. Was he satisfied with the packaging? Did they contact customer support, and how quickly was the issue resolved?

Key benefits of Customer Journey Map: Why is it a must-have tool for modern businesses?

CJM doesn’t just help you understand what a customer is doing at every stage of their journey. It provides insight into the user’s thoughts, emotions, and motivations, which allows you to:

• Create personalized offers: Understanding your customers’ actions and emotions allows you to tailor your offers to their needs and desires.
• Improve conversion rates: By identifying pain points, you can eliminate barriers that prevent customers from completing a purchase.
• Increase loyalty: A consistent, positive experience at every stage of the journey leads to greater customer satisfaction and thus loyalty.
• Improve internal processes: CJM can help identify issues in internal business processes that affect the customer experience.
• Increase communication efficiency: By knowing where customers are at and what problems they are facing, you can better understand them and offer effective solutions.

Conclusion: Creating a product with the customer in mind through CJM

The Customer Journey Map allows you to see the entire user journey and create a product that meets their real needs.

It’s a way to not only understand how customers interact with the company, but also to find out what they think and feel at each stage. Thanks to CJM, we have the opportunity to create products and services that will make customers want to come back again and again.

We hope that our presentation was of interest to you and helped you better understand the importance of CJM in the modern design world.

If you have any further questions or need a consultation, please do not hesitate to contact us.

We strive to be not only a source of information, but also your reliable partner in the world of design and technology. Our team is ready to help you realize your ideas, develop your projects, and achieve great success together.

Thank you for your attention and see you soon!

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