What is the Customer Journey Map ?

The Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of the user’s journey, that is, the history of their relationship with the company, service, product or brand throughout the time.

Developed by Design Thinkers Academy, this map serves to investigate, analyze and innovate the user experience. 

It helps companies and professionals deepen their perception of the needs and motivations of their customers and target audience. 

A customer journey map “illustrates” the process a potential customer goes through to take action with your business.

With the help of this map, you can get a clearer, more objective picture of your customers’ motivations – their needs and pain points.

Most customer journey maps begin as Excel spreadsheets that describe key events, customer motivations, and areas of friction in the user experience.

This information is then combined into a comprehensive diagram that describes what the average customer experience with the company in question looks like.

By understanding how this relationship works, you can find out how to structure your touch points to create a more effective and satisfying process for your customers. 

Today, with the many existing media channels, the customer journey can no longer be represented linearly, as buyers often take a cyclical journey using multiple channels.

That’s why savvy business people use a variety of ways to represent this journey, from annotations on a meeting room wall to Excel spreadsheets and infographics.

However, before you can start building your customer journey map, you need to collect data from your customers and prospects. 

The process of creating an effective map is extensive but valuable.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Check out some tips we worked to create a Customer Journey Map Client with our partners on Envixo:

1. Draw your personas and set your goals

The best way to know exactly what your audience wants, is through surveys, ie by asking them directly. 

To get this valuable customer information, invest in questionnaires and testimonials.

– 10 free softwares for creating online surveys

Focus on addressing only leads or real customers. You want feedback from people who are really interested in buying your products and services and who have interacted with your business before or plan to do so.

Some good questions to ask:

• How did you hear about our company?
• What attracted you to our website?
• What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? 
• Have you made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
• Have you interacted with our site with the intention of making a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how easy is it for you to browse our site?
• Is there any way to help you further?

Complement the responses you get with comments and ratings left by customers on your site or social networks, and you’ll have a good idea who your persona is and what they are looking for.

– How to get more Reviews to your business

2. Define your personas 

After learning about the different personas that interact with your business, you will need to narrow your focus to one or two of them. 

Remember, a customer journey map tracks the experience of a type of customer who is following a very specific path with your business. If you group many personas on one journey, your map will not accurately reflect your customers’ experience. 

If you are creating your first map, it is best to choose the most common customer persona and consider the path they would normally follow when interacting with your business for the first time. 

Don’t worry about the ones you leave out, because you can always come back and create a new map specific to them. 

3. List all touchpoints 

Touchpoints are all channels through which your customers can interact with you. 

Based on your research, you should list all the touchpoints your leads and buyers are currently using, as well as those you believe they should use.

This is an important step in creating a customer journey map, as it provides insight into the actions your audience is taking. 

You need to look at all the ways your customers can find you online. This may include:

• Social Channels
• Paid Ads
• Email Marketing
• Third Party Sites or Mentions 

Do a quick Google search on your brand to see all the pages that mention you. 

Narrow your list to the most common touchpoints and most likely to see an action associated with them.

– How to Create an Email Marketing Campaign

4. Identify the elements you want your map to show

There are four types of customer journey maps, each with its benefits. Depending on the specific purpose you have for the map, you should choose from them, which are:

Current State

Most used type. They visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience while interacting with your business. They are used to continually improve the customer journey.

Day in Life

These customer journey maps visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience in every activity they participate in daily, regardless of whether or not your business. This type gives you a broader view of your customers’ lives and what their real-life pain points are. They are used to uncover unmet customer needs.

Future Status

This option is intended to visualize what you believe will be the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers will experience in future interactions with your company. Based on current experience, you map where you want to go. They are used to illustrate your vision and set a clear goal.

Service Blueprint

Model that begins with a simplified version of one of the map styles above. It then addresses the factors responsible for providing this experience, including people, policies, technologies, and processes. It is most often used to identify the root causes of the customer’s current journeys or to identify the steps required to achieve the desired future journeys.

5. Determine the resources you own and what you need 

Your customer journey map will cover almost every part of your business. This will show you all the resources you need to create the customer experience you want to deliver.

Therefore, it is important to take stock of the resources you have and those needed to improve this process. 

For example, your map may highlight some flaws in your customer service offering, and you find that your team does not have the tools to properly follow up after an interaction. 

Using your map, you can advise management to invest in customer service tools that will help your staff better manage this demand.

– 10 Tips To Improve Your Customer Service 

6. Analyze the results

How many people are opening and closing your site before making a purchase? How can you better support customers? These are some of the questions you should answer with your finished map.

Analyzing results can show you where customer needs are not being met, and the best way to find out is by following the steps on your map yourself. 

For each of your personas, follow the journey they take in their social media interactions, reading their emails, searching online, and so on.

7. Make the necessary changes

With this data analysis in hand, make the necessary changes to correct what is not working well and achieve your goals. 

You may need to create more attractive CTAs or perhaps write more complete descriptions of your products and services.

No matter how big or small the changes are, they will be effective as they are directly correlated with what customers listed as pain points. 

Your map should be a constant work in progress. The monthly or quarterly review will help you identify gaps and opportunities to further optimize the customer journey map. 

Conclusion

There is no defined model for developing this map, it can be adapted to the reality and goals of your business. 

You can create a simpler one, for example by focusing only on touch points and drawing an empathy map. Or choose to design the complete experience, from first customer contact to after sales. Here are two examples below:

The important thing is to use the tool to find opportunities for relationship innovation. 

Now that you know how to improve your customer relationship, it’s time to focus on delivering the best solution possible. 

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– How to sell online course

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– Learning Management System: What is it?

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