How to create journey maps to improve customer experiences

It’s a given now that businesses wanting to create real value for their customers are placing them at the centre of everything they do. The customer-centric approach helps brands to create products and services that their customers want and, more importantly, that their customers love. Good customer experiences drive better brand engagement, conversion, loyalty and advocacy. Good customer experiences get talked about and shared. Bad ones even more so. It’s important for businesses to understand the bigger picture when it comes to customer experience, and to understand where their customers are experiencing pain and what the root cause of that pain really is so they can fix it.

So how do you get started?

How do you check your CX health and put together a programme of improvement? The answer is to dig out a bunch of post-its and sharpies (other brands are available) and get busy mapping out some key customer journeys on a wall. Going through the physical activity of journey mapping will help you to fully immerse yourself into the worlds of your customers and understand how they interact with your brand, products or services through various stages of engagement. There are plenty of digital journey mapping tools available, but I always find that the lo-fi approach just has a physical presence that cannot be ignored. It’s also really useful when taking stakeholders or other invested team members through the journeys.

The whole purpose of journey mapping is to map out the current state (the ‘as-is’ experience) and to use this to inform the ideal state (the aspirational experience or how you really want your customers to experience your organization or product). Once you have the ideal state, you can identify key areas for improvement and start to plan a roadmap of activity.

Journey mapping can be a collaborative exercise that any organization can adopt. Ideally, you’ll need one person to drive it forwards and act as facilitator, but it can involve customers, stakeholders or employees. You can positively change people’s attitudes and culture by getting them to work alongside their customers and, in many instances, alongside each other. This gives larger organisations, where teams are often more siloed, the opportunity to work together on something with a clear shared goal.

1. Identify a problem area — the wall

First, you need to understand what problem you are trying to solve and why. Are you looking at a particular area of the business which your customers are engaging with based on data that has highlighted it as underperforming in some way? It could be that your customers are giving negative feedback around the quality of your products or services and it’s having a damaging effect on your overall brand image. You might have invested money on a new website that isn’t performing as well as you hoped. Whatever the problems are, they should be backed up by factual evidence (data) that these are indeed real problems and not just assumptions. The problem area becomes the wall, and the wall is where you’ll try to solve it.

2. Choose your key customers

You need to consider where will you get maximum impact by focusing on the ‘right’ types of customers. Typically these are the types of customers that you actually want, the customers who will help you to deliver on the goals of the business. We often talk about the 80/20 rule, and it’s certainly applicable here. Be ruthless and be honest. Don’t waste time focusing on edge-cases, they won’t give you the returns that you need. Create a persona (a representational profile) for each type of customer and prioritise them. It may be sensible to only focus on the top 3 to begin with. Give each persona a name and photo, then stick them up on the wall in priority order.

3. Identify their needs

Now that you have your key personas, identify what he/she is trying to achieve to help drive out their desired outcomes. For example, are they trying to purchase something online? Or maybe they are trying to get help or support around a particular product or service. Write out the desired outcomes for each persona and stick them next to their names or photos.

4. Map out their existing journeys — the current state

List out all of the actions that the customer has to take to reach their desired outcome. This must be exhaustive, leave nothing out. You need to capture the journey even before the moment they initially engaged with your product or service for the first time so that you can understand and visualise behavioural patterns (e.g. perhaps they were reading reviews on an independent website or chatting to a friend on Facebook). Write each action on a separate post-it and stick them in a line next to their photo. Each persona’s journey will potentially be quite different, so do it for each one.

5. Identify the different touchpoints

So you now have a set of actions associated with each persona — their customer journey. Against each action, assign the channel or service touchpoint that the customer encountered. This could be anything from a web page to a phone call. It’s important that you capture all of the touchpoints — even the ones that aren’t yours. This exercise will give you valuable insight into the landscape as the customer sees it.

6. Identify your brand’s touchpoints

Highlight those moments when the customer encounters your touchpoints and channels. Use a coloured post-it, and capture the people responsible for this touchpoint — it may be an entire department such as marketing or sales. People who are responsible for multiple touch points may be spread too thinly to be effective, so this exercise can help to highlight potential organizational issues in terms of ownership and resourcing. This exercise will also visually highlight those areas of the customer journeys where you have little authority or influence. Often these areas can lead to big wins for improving customer experiences.

7. Capture the customers’ experiences of these touchpoints

So for each touchpoint (including those that you have no visibility with), write down how each customer felt at that particular moment. How did they feel about that engagement with the product or service? Were they delighted, confused or frustrated? Remember, this should be based on insight gathered from real customer research — don’t try to make it up or it will invalidate the exercise. Try to score each emotional experience from 0 to 10 (0 being where an experience simply doesn’t even exist). As usual, make sure you capture this on the wall in the relevant areas.

8. Analyse customer pain points for root causes

You’ll now be getting a much clearer picture of where you are potentially failing your customers by not satisfying their needs. For all of the low scoring touchpoints (anything under 5 should definitely be considered as a priority) you need to figure out why this pain is happening in the first place. Customer pain points can sometimes be just the tip of the iceberg. Don’t be afraid of looking below the surface to understand the real root cause of the pain. This involves looking below the ‘line of visibility’ — examining the things the customer doesn’t see, e.g. employees & partners (how are they behaving, skills, etc.), digital tools, processes, policies, technical infrastructure, physical and virtual spaces, data, etc.

9. Design solutions to root causes

Having got to the root cause of why your customers are experiencing pain points, you can start to consider how to fix them. This is the fun bit where people can get creative. Ideas can come from unexpected places, so encourage people to get involved. Some problems will be much easier to fix than others and these ‘quick wins’ might form the initial part of your customer experience improvement roadmap. Other problems will be much harder to solve, and more time may be needed to give them the due consideration they deserve. How much ‘thinking time’ solutions require can be a good indicator of how much investment is likely to be needed.

10. Assess the viability of solutions and create a roadmap for improvement

To assess the viability of each solution, you need to take into account two things, the customer considerations and the business considerations. These will give you a good understanding of the value the solution delivers to the customer versus the impact to the business in terms of cost and impact.

Customer considerations:

• Number of customers affected by the pain point
• Types of customers affected by the pain point — profitable customers?
• Degree of pain — mild annoyance vs huge showstopper

Business considerations:

• Cost to implement
• Expected ROI
• Impact on brand perception

Capture and plot these details against each touchpoint to help determine which areas will deliver the highest value for both your business and your customers. Prioritise these into a roadmap of activity simply by assigning them as priority 1, 2, or 3. All priority 1’s should form the first phase of your customer experience roadmap so you have a coherent plan of activity which can be agreed upon by all stakeholders.

Going beyond the customer journey

Share the journey maps themselves with your wider teams to develop broader customer empathy and understanding. And remember, the journey map itself is NOT the end goal, it’s the insight you get from it to drive forward a programme of change to improve your customer experiences. Customer experiences are always evolving, so it’s important to constantly re-evaluate and improve how your customers engage with your products and services. Customers, rightfully so, can be harsh critics if they feel that their expectations have not been met. It’s your job (and mine!) to ensure that they come to us in the first place, and then keep coming back.

At Yoyo, we specialise in helping businesses create better customer experiences through the use of digital channels. Get in touch if you’d like to discuss anything you’ve read in this article or visit our digital agency website.