What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer’s Journey is what a customer experiences from the beginning to the end of their time spent engaging with your product. The journey is a complete sum of their experiences from your marketing, to the service, the website, the app and the final transaction. Mapping out their journey in its entirety will help you to understand where the user is coming from increasing the likelihood of long term retention.
A Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of the interactions and experience a user is having with your organization. It’s oftentimes in the form of a graph that allows you to quickly identify the pain points as well as the pleasure points. The map is created from the customer’s perspective and allows an organization to identify opportunities to improve the experience for the user which in turn can lead to a repeat customer.
Creating a Customer Journey Map
Buyer Personas
The first step in creating a Customer Journey Map is to develop your buyer personas. You’ll want to identify who has been doing this activity for a period of time and who has just entered into the initial interest stage. It’s important to keep in mind that your users will be at different buying stages and your Customer Journey Map should reflect this.was
Buyers Goals
In this phase, you’ll want to identify what your customers’ primary goals are. They may be looking for the lowest price, they may be seeking an exclusive product or experience, or they may simply be browsing and curious. You can identify a customer’s goals in various ways like analytics, customer support emails, surveys, and transcripts.
Pleasure Points and Pain Points
Mapping out your customers’ touchpoints during the entire scope of the journey helps you to identify their pleasure points and their pain points. It’s important to take all touchpoints into account so that you don’t miss any pain points that provide opportunities for improvement. To map out all of your users touchpoints you can speak users’ directly, put yourself in the users’ shoes and walk through the product as if you were them, or try working with analytics.
Optimization
Once you’ve identified the roadblocks and pain points you can get to work on improving your users’ experience. In this phase, you can also look at the pleasure points that you found and optimize this area. By understanding your entire customers’ journey you will know how much emphasis to place on each pleasure point and each pain point in order to maximize the overall user experience.
Evaluation
Customer Journey Maps should be both actionable and measurable. So far we’ve covered how to take action, it’s also important to be able to evaluate and measure your success and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) help you to do just that. It’s best to apply metrics that will allow you to measure your current customer experience as well as all future engagements to that you can track and measure your success.
When to Use?
A Customer Journey Map is most useful in the research phase of a new Product. Most often A Journey Map is often created to help the product align with a business or product goal. Another useful time for a Customer Journey Map would be when a Product is going through a major shift or adjustment.
Why Use a Journey Map?
The Customer Journey Map puts the user at the forefront during the development of a product. It helps Product Managers to have an overview of the users’ experience with useful insights about roadblocks and pain points which provides the opportunity for corrections in the early phases of product development. Lastly, A Customer Journey Map highlights the ‘ feelings and helps the entire organization to empathize with the user.
Creating a Customer Journey Map should remain unique to the product. The steps listed above are a basic guideline. Every product is different, and the process for creating a Customer Journey Map should be adaptable. The main goal in creating a Customer Journey Map should always be a happy customer and when applied correctly Customer Journey Maps can be an effective tool in creating long term users.
