Taking customers on a journey worth the trip

Plotting out a course that aligns with key business priorities

Customer journey mapping is an effective UX research tool that visually illustrates a user’s experiences across different stages within a product or company. But, before embarking on any customer journey mapping project, defining clear personas and establishing precise goals is absolutely critical to success. Not only will this help define all the applicable elements and determine the different types of journeys (future vs. current state, etc.) that you want to focus on, but also help your team visualize the actual customer journey map you want to build.

In this post, UX Research Manager, Jen Padilla, Senior Interaction Designer, Huaying Song and I talk about the process we underwent to gain a more meaningful understanding of our customers’ end-to-end journey and identify opportunities to consolidate two distinct products. Our own journey began by gaining deeper insights and identifying areas to improve the overall user experience from our product teams. Working cross-functionally helped us align our goals and execute a more holistic approach to development.

We interviewed key stakeholders (Product Managers, UX Designers, etc.) and customer-facing staff (Customer Support, Sales, Engineers, etc.) that provided us with a high-level view of our products, use cases and overarching challenges. The data we gained helped us ground our strategy and build a solid approach with confidence.

Here are some of the key steps that made our customer journey map a success:

Identify the target persona to map

A persona is a representation of the goals and behaviors synthesized from a group of users. In most cases, personas are synthesized from data based on user research activities such as interviews, surveys, etc. In our customer journey map, we focused on specific customer personas and let their end-to-end experience with our products and services unfold.

Define the stages and key tasks

By interviewing internal stakeholders and reviewing as much available literature as possible, we were able to capture and document the real-world, day-to-day tasks and interactions that our customers use our products to tackle. We used an affinity diagram tool to further categorize users’ actions into higher level stages, which helped us clearly outline our customers’ entire journey. Then, we validated these actions and stages with customers at VMworld while collecting valuable data, including key touch points and pain points.

Identify the key touch points

Touch points indicate where customers interact with products and services, and are often differentiated from channels, which are communicative mediums between a company and its customers. In our customer journey map, touch points included tools, artifacts, people, and platforms that were involved in both interactions and communications between our customers and our company throughout different stages.

Define the pain points

By capturing actions and touch points along the way, our team was able to vividly see the challenges, pain points and gaps our customers truly face when using our products and services. We also asked them to tell us about their feelings throughout the journey. We observed their facial expressions, the words they used and the range of emotions they expressed, which provided us with invaluable insight into their state of mind and their real experience with our products.

Outcomes

One of the key values journey mapping offers is its ability to help define prioritization across cross-functional teams. However, many practitioners find it difficult to convey this significance. It was also evident at the journey mapping workshops our team hosted. Especially when business goals shift from time to time, many are left with the question: “How can a customer journey map really help inform business decisions and which of our customers’ problem should we solve first?”

Indeed, we knew our organization’s business focus had shifted. To effectively respond to leadership, we reshaped our research strategy to best utilize the map data and presented insights in meaningful ways to help solidify the impact of our journey mapping initiative. To accommodate this transition, we borrowed the prioritization model to host workshops where we invited leaderships, designers, project managers, and engineers to review priorities thoroughly in different angles.

In these discussions, many representatives were able to voice important pain points and share their perspectives. As a group, we synthesized pain points and plotted our collective input out on an opportunity grid (organization efforts vs. business value) to finalize our results. By completing and discussing the map, it helped us crystalize the design thinking within our organization and align business values vs. customer priorities throughout cross-functional teams.

Lessons learned

By sharing our experience of how we went about building a customer journey map, it helped our team delve even deeper into the insights of an end-to-end in-product experience. In the end, this has proven to be an effective tool that has helped our team align with key business priorities and goals while developing key best practices that include:

• Engage stakeholders early on and encourage participation at every turn. Doing so increases the number of viable solutions and makes stakeholders aware of potential problems before they arise.
• Highlight the impact of your journey mapping efforts by reaching out to users and reflecting on their feedback.
• Communicate your design process and demonstrate your research methodology to stakeholders so they are aware of your progress and can be involved as much as possible.
• Define your goals and process, but embrace spontaneity and differing perspectives.