06 Nov Customer Journey Mapping

A Customer Journey Mapping can give a visual overview of the entire experience – identify the key interactions that customer has with the product, process or service; and find the emotions at each touchpoint.

From the Customer Journey Map, you can understand what the customers are experiencing and how they are feeling. With these insights, you can spot opportunities to enhance the customer experience. Eg. We can focus on the painful/unhappy experiences and strive to improve these areas. In addition, a Customer Journey Map can also be a good tool to decide where to invest next.

Image credit: Philips.com

How do you start on your Customer Journey Map?

1. Create the Personas to find out the main customer groups that you would like to target.
2. Identify the Channels, eg. Where does the customer interact with your company? Or is it via an application or a product?
3. Create simple Phases of the process the customer experiences, eg. Discovery, Research, Selection, Purchase. Within these phases, there should be a list of activities that the customer performs.
4. Through Interviews, you can speak to the different target groups and find out how they feel throughout the entire process of using your product, service. You can also talk to non-customers, i.e. your customer-facing staff that interacts with customers – to get first-hand information about the customer’s needs or frustrations.
5. Surveys will be another option where you can create a list of questions for your customers to understand their feelings. However, interviews will be the best avenue to extract feedback.
6. After creating the personas, identifying the channels and getting your customer research, you are ready to draw your map! Remember to include the customers’ emotions, which could be illustrated with peaks and valleys signifying happiness, frustration or anxiety etc.

With the Customer Journey Map, you are now equipped to brainstorm better experiences to improve on (or remove) existing pain points.

Sample Customer Journey Maps

There is no specific design for the layout of a Customer Journey Map – it does not have to linear, it can be circular too. We use post-its on our wall. You can even sketch on whiteboard too. After you are done, you will most likely want to convert it to a digital version to share across your organization though.

Image credit: Customer Experience Matters

Image credit: Adaptive Path

Image credit: UX Matters

Image credit: Heart of the Customer

Closing Words

It is good to go through journey maps periodically (at milestones of your product or service). This way, you can evaluate how your current product or service is performing and provide a constantly renewed and delightful customer experience.