Building a customer journey map provides several key benefits:
- Comprehensive understanding of the user experience: It allows you to see the entire journey your customers go through, from start to finish, and offers multiple perspectives. This structured view gives a clear understanding of what’s happening at every stage.
- Deep user empathy: A journey map helps you understand how users feel and why they feel that way. It organizes their actions and emotions into a narrative, making it easier to empathize with their experience.
- Encouraging cross-functional collaboration: A customer journey map brings together different teams by letting each department focus on what matters to them. Designers may be interested in the user flow, engineers might want to see the technology behind it, and marketers could look at touchpoints like emails and notifications. This shared map fosters alignment around customer experience and company priorities.
- Identifying key problems to solve: The map highlights major pain points in the customer experience, helping you prioritize problems. It also suggests solutions by linking customer goals to touchpoints and the emotions they generate.
Typical Components of a Customer Journey Map:
- Customer Persona: A fictional representation of your target customer, outlining their characteristics, needs, and motivations.
- Stages: The distinct phases the customer passes through while interacting with your product and trying to reach their goal.
- Touchpoints: The interactions customers have with your product, whether visiting a website, receiving an email, or talking to customer support.
- Emotions: Throughout the journey, customers experience a range of emotions, both positive and negative. Mapping these emotions can help pinpoint areas for improving the experience.
- Opportunities: These are the pain points or challenges worth addressing, based on customer emotions and possible solutions you’ve identified.
Despite its effectiveness in aligning teams and pinpointing areas for improvement, creating a customer journey map is a relatively quick and straightforward process. It can be built in seven steps:
- Define your customer persona.
- Identify the customer’s goal.
- Outline the journey steps.
- Add customer touchpoints.
- Map out customer thoughts and feelings.
- Enrich the map with additional details.
- Pinpoint areas for action.
Finding the Actionable Goal
Customer Journey Maps often start out as a marketing or UX exercise. The hope is, that along the way, you will learn some key insights.
As a consultant for many years, my first job was to build a journey map, a handful of personas, and then look at the overall performance of the website and marketing efforts. The goal, 99% of the time, is sales. And that’s an easy KPI to measure. What the customer journey map does is help you see the areas where you can make changes, track results, and optimize further. If you get in the mind of your “most desired customer” you begin to see their journey as a riddle to solve. When you have clear points of measurement, it’s easy to try something new, measure the result, and either add budget to the program or kill it.
When I was working with a new business, I would look for 2 – 3 opportunities to make a big impact. The low-hanging fruit were the adjustments we could make in the first week. The longer challenges were to continue growing the demand and optimizing for LEADS. Personas help a lot in determining the tone of voice and pain points your product addresses. When you understand the PATH of your successful customer acquisition, you can amplify and enhance that motion. Finding the WIN is the first step to increasing your effectiveness.
John McElhenney — let’s connect online
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