Why we need a Customer Journey Map
Customer Journey Map is a diagram which demonstrates the moves your customer(s) go through with your product. It’s a condensed visualization of end-to-end customer experience. Your product can be an online experience, e-commerce website, retail experience or any combination. The more touchpoints you have, the more complex but inevitable it becomes.
Customer Journey Map helps in identifying key interactions customer has with the organization.
It talks about the motivation behind each action, user’s feelings and questions on each of these touchpoints. It can be in the form of simple steps with touchpoints or infographic with customer interactions data. Whatever it forms, the goal is the same to teach the organizations more about their customers.
Here is an example of a Customer Journey Timeline. Which includes few touchpoints:
- Engaging with customer (It might be the advertising, word of mouth etc.).
- Buying the product or service.
- Using the product or experiencing the service.
- Sharing about the quality of the product or experience of service.
- Finishing the journey by upgrading, replacing or restarting the journey with another company.
There are several scenarios where it is essential to use Customer Journey Map. Some of them are:
- Are you facing difficulties understanding your customer experience across touchpoints, channels, and relationship stages?
- Not having any methods to estimates progress and command changes to CX (Customer Experience) and UX (User Experience)? Use the map as a CX Dashboard.
- Not able to innovate business plans? Create a future state journey map to generate thoughts. Then, create a vision for the future and bring it to reality.
Over the time, I have tried different methods, skipped some of the steps, added few steps. Nothing is working out for me better than below steps.
Define
Define objectives, target customers, and the scope of a journey you wish to comprehend. Gather existing quantitative and qualitative data to examine. Data will ensure the right path and crisp result towards perfect CJM.
Research
Contemplate and examine your customers in their natural habitat. Contextual inquiry provides deep insight into behaviors, emotions, motivations and expectations. Validate with quantitative research and understand the user journey.
Personas
Based on the research, create personas that represent your customer’s key roles. These personas will allow you to visualize journey through their eyes.
Journey Map
Facilitate a workshop to investigate all the research and map out a hypothesis and current state journey map. After that, follow the same process to create future state journey map to show your idea customer journey.
Activate
Discover opportunities and problems to fix. Cultivate recommendations and solutions, then grade them according to customer and business value. Create a long-term roadmap and assign teams to projects. Measure your progress and observe your customer experience improved.
I believe, the map should be simple and clear. Something that you can access anytime or you can pin to the office wall. Crafting a clear map is a design job. Work with a designer to find the right approach.
Any thoughts on better way to build Customer Journey Map? I would love to experiment that method.
