How To Solve Your Biggest Problems With a Journey Map

Creating a Customer-Centric Business Through Journey Mapping

At the heart of every business is its customers. When businesses are able to align their entire organization around its customers, businesses are able to create exceptional and delightful experiences. As new technologies become more prevalent in customers’ day-to-day lives, interactions now also occur in more channels and platforms. This increases not only the opportunities, but also the gaps wherein businesses should strengthen efforts around the customer experience. A helpful way to illustrate this is through customer journey maps.

What is a Journey Map?

In the simplest terms, customer journey maps illustrate the process that customers go through to accomplish a goal. Journey Maps show how customers interact with a business over time. They create a visual picture of the customer-business relationship. Customer journey maps tell the story of how a customer interacts with your company, its products and/or services and staff by describing how and when specific customers engage with you. What are they thinking, doing and feeling as they interact with your company?

Journey maps generate empathy by going through your customer’s journey and illustrating your customer needs and frustrations. User research methods help validate journey map assumptions.

Why Should You Create a Journey Map?

• Get everyone in your organization on the same page to better understand where your customers interact with you and your organization.
• Identify where customer service gaps and/or overlap exist.
• Step into your customers’ shoes by focusing on their behaviors, thoughts and feelings as they interact with your organization.
• Gain a clear understanding of what’s working and what’s not, which identifies opportunities.

Beware of Assumptions

While you have to start somewhere, assumptions don’t paint an accurate picture. Journey maps allow your teams to come together to empathize with customers and, as a group, pinpoint where more information is required. Creating journey maps can act as a framework to determine what additional research is required to validate your customer’s journey. Customer experience metrics provide quantitative data for journey maps.

Start Your Journey Mapping Process with Personas

Customer personas focus on fictional representation of a real user’s tasks, gains and pain points, they also include psychographics and demographics. Using validated customer personas means that you have talked to real users (at least 5) to confirm the steps and actions they take while interacting with your organization. Service blueprints can complement journey maps for a complete view.

Benefits of Journey Map Collaboration

Involve key members from your organization, try to get at least one representative from each team. There may be friction between individuals at times but the different perspectives of each team member often includes important feedback that should be considered when stepping into your customer’s shoes.

There isn’t one format that is correct, the design of a journey map will vary on what you are trying to accomplish.

Essential Elements to Include in Your Journey Map:

• Customer Personas
• Timeline
• Activities
• Phases of the lifecycle
• Varying emotions
• Pain points and opportunities

Want more information on creating a journey map? You should check out our Learn to Create Effective Journey Maps at Our Workshop at UX Camp on Friday, October 20th.