Customer Journey Mapping is the tool or method, with which you interpret and visualise insights about customers or users in a timeline into a Customer Journey (or customer journey).
This article is part two of the series on what a Customer Journey actually is, what you can do with it and how to set it up. The first part is about the customer journey itself. In this second part, we explain how you can easily map a customer journey yourself and what you need to do it.
This tool is also one of the many tools you can find in our Design Thinking toolkit.
Preparation
Good preparation is essential to work with a customer journey. After all, you want to innovate or improve something with your insights gained. And often you cannot do this alone.
Good preparation is therefore done by involving the organisation and identifying the stakeholders.
Start by asking yourself why you want to map the customer journey.What you want to do with these insights and how you would want to do it.
Say: you are told by customer service that visitors cannot easily look up certain products. By conducting research, you want to find points of improvement for your webshop, to serve visitors better in the orientation phase. With the insights found, you and your team devise solutions to improve this. But who is going to build it? Will it be prioritised by management?
Want to know where customers drop out and how to prevent it? Find out how we map your customer journey.
Stakeholder
Therefore, map out the stakeholders (stakeholders) who play an important role in (using) the customer journey.
Involve them at an early stage by, for example, interviewing them and giving them an active role in drafting the customer journey. Consider stakeholders responsible for budgets, for example.
A useful way to map your stakeholders is to plot them on two axes: degree of influence and importance to the customer journey.
Context of the customer journey
Before you start collecting insights or conducting research, you will need to define the context of the customer journey. In the first section on Customer Journey Mapping, you can read that there is no single customer journey and that each customer journey consists of a context and the experience itself.
The context consists of:
a persona. Give your target audience a face and try to get into their skin. You can create an Empathy Map of the persona you have in mind, for example, using this template.
the trigger and the goal the persona wants to achieve. The context is always based on a particular reason someone has to start a customer journey. And the goal he or she has in mind with it.
Suppose your webshop has a lot of customers aged 55+ who buy washing machines in a higher segment. Who exactly is this customer? What does this one hear, think and feel? Give a persona a name, because that communicates better with others.
For example, Lex, whose washing machine breaks down after 5 years of faithful service. After many problems. Lex goes on his phone to look for a new washing machine (goal), as he will not let the old one be repaired.
First phasing
After you have determined the context of your customer journey, you can make the first draft of the overall phasing of your customer journey. Your goal is to determine which phases or steps your persona goes through in realising his or her goal.
Take inspiration from, for example, the AIDA- or See-think-do-care model. Or create your own phasing.
In our example, Lex goes in search of a new washing machine. He first starts with an orientation to possible new washing machines.
He has collected a number of brands and models on various sites and from friends, which he will further evaluate.
Eventually selects Lex for a specific make and model, after which it is delivered and used.
The phases are then:
Orientation > Evaluation > Choosing > Delivering > Using
This is a simplification of practice, because often different channels or websites are used, phases are sometimes not so clear or there are other phases, for example.
So first choose those phases where you suspect opportunities or problems exist and where you can gather insights. You can always adjust them later.
Want to know why customers drop out and how to retain them? Read more about our customer journey approach.
Gathering insights for your customer journey
At Concept7, we like to collect insights in a spreadsheet in the cloud, which makes sharing and collaboration with team members easy.
You can use this template to create your initial phasing of your customer journey. On this you can plot the findings from the different sources you are going to use.
When noting your findings, make sure you make a clear distinction between actions, needs, emotions, questions people have or, for example, pain points that are identified. This is useful when talking about them later with stakeholders, for instance.
Sources you can use
Try to uncover knowledge and insights present in certain people. Are there people who can tell you more about the topic or your target audience, for example, such as customer service or salespeople?
Use digital resources such as Analytics, to gain insights into how people behave online.
Are there any internal surveys or reports available that can provide you with insights? For example, market research or interviews done for another project?
Are there any external surveys or reports available that can provide you with further insights? For example, trend reports on a specific sector or group of consumers?
Do a competitive analysis. Look at your own brand, product or service in relation to your competitors. What do they do better or worse and why?
Go and put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. By experiencing your own product or service, for example, you can observe interesting things. Leave that organisational hat at home and go to work like a real customer.
Execute additional research. Sometimes you don't have enough data available and you need to conduct additional research. You can do this in various ways, by interviewing people on the street, conducting a eyetrack conduct an online survey on your website or by organising a focus group, for example.
If you have data and insights, it is a good idea to share them with others. Especially if these are also involved in the creation of the customer journey, it is important that they join the workshop well versed and empathised.
Creating the customer journey
Once you have enough insights, you can start creating your customer journey. You often do this in a workshop with a team of people.
Make sure you make it clear what the purpose of the workshop is and what you expect from everyone. And above all, try to facilitate it tightly, because before you know it you will end up in endless discussion about alternative goals, phases or actions.
When you get busy creating your customer journey, you will never be able to be completely complete because time is often limited. And that's fine, because you can fill in the details yourself later.
Ideally, therefore, focus on a single journey and tell that story. If there is time to spare, you can always do a second one.
What you need
Print out the Customer Journey Mapping worksheet or use a brownpaper. Do use the layout of the worksheet.
A roll of painter's tape to hang your worksheet or brownpaper. Tip, you can also use the tape to divide the brownpaper into columns.
Make sure you have plenty of post-its and pens.
Creating a customer journey roadmap
If you are going to create the customer journey, you will need to structure all available insights. Use the timeline in columns and rows for the different types of insights, such as actions and issues, for example.
The following step-by-step plan will get you started on this in a structured way.
Step 1: define the context of the customer journey
First, discuss together what the context of the customer journey is. In doing so, use your previously drafted persona and the corresponding lead and goals.
Fill in the first row of the worksheet or brownpaper, by entering your persona on the left and the goal to be achieved on the right.
There may be some additions, but try not to have a long discussion about it. Because this comes at the expense of time.
Step 2: create the timeline of your customer journey
The timeline is the thread of your customer journey and consists of the stages your persona goes through in achieving his or her goal.
In preparation, you created an initial phasing, which you can now start sharing. On the first row, between the persona and the end goal, fill in the phases.
If you haven't done this yet, you can also do this with the workshop participants. Then divide group into pairs, for example, and have them think about the steps or stages the persona takes to achieve the goal. Make sure someone monitors the time and guides the joint discussion.
Step 3: discuss theactions per phase in the customer journey
What actions or tasks does the persona perform for each phase? These actions or tasks are performed to move on to the next phase and are often fairly linear. Enter these in the column below the phase they belong to.
For example, what does persona Lex do during the Orientation phase to move on to the Evaluation phase? He visits various test websites to get an idea of what are currently the best washing machines. He has his eye on about five machines that fit his budget, are well reviewed and meet his requirements. His next step is to think about which shop or shops he will visit to arrive at a choice.
Step 4: what questions exist for each phase?
Now it is time to deepen the experience. What questions does the persona have in this phase, when performing these tasks? Where does the persona really need answers before starting the next task or phase?
Does Lex have a preferred webshop or will he still look for one for the lowest price? And how reliable is such a webshop and are these washing machines in stock?
Step 5: identify problems
When searching for answers and performing actions, sometimes things can go wrong.
Information or a product is missing, a functionality does not work properly or is even absent. But it may be human actions that also cause problems. The important thing is to surface what is going wrong and why.
Lex finally made his choice and found the cheapest deal. As he has entered his details and wants to checkout, he discovers that the delivery charge is €59. So that's not that cheap at all! Why is that not mentioned earlier!
Step 6: What emotions are experienced?
Which moments in the customer journey go right or wrong? And what emotions does this trigger in the persona?
We often call moments where emotions take centre stage 'moments of truth', these are situations by which the customer experience will ultimately be remembered.
If something went very well, a positive feeling will linger. But at the end, if something goes very wrong, it will have major consequences. And it is these moments you are looking for. Here, you can write the emotion on a post-it, but a smiley that conveys the emotion also works.
The moment Lex discovers that the delivery cost is €59 evokes a lot of frustration and disbelief. It is the ultimate moment of truth, as Lex quits here and looks for another webshop with less high ordering costs.
Step 7: the remaining insights
Often, there are still some insights that you can't directly put into the above sections. That does not mean that these are not important.
Step 8: channels and touchpoints.
Including channels and touchpoints is optional in a customer journey. Include these if you want to get an overview of the overall customer journey.
The important thing is to get a picture of where people are hearing about you or talking about you. And where you can reach them to get them to your own website, for example.
If you focus only on your own site or shop, you can name the pages users interact with here, for example.
Lex leaves it alone and opens Instagram the next day. There, he catches sight of an ad from a major online retailer. "Hey, interesting. Just what I'm looking for!"
Get insights into needs, emotions and barriers of your customers with a customer journey survey
Your first version is ready, but now what?
Once you have created a first version of your customer journey, you will need to refine it further. A good way is to first digitise everything you wrote down and pasted in the workshop. You can use, for example, our Customer Journey template for this.
Once you have digitised the customer journey, you can start refining. Where is there overlap? Or which insights are wrong? By critically revisiting the entire customer journey, you can improve and sharpen it. Because that analyses a lot better.
Analysing and finding solutions
By now, your customer journey has also taught you a lot about your persona, what they want and what pain points and opportunities you see. Think carefully about this, what you want to come up with a solution for and why.
You can also use a spreadsheet for this, to get a good overview of things you want to tackle.
Once you have that clear, you can further develop prioritised pain points and opportunities into possible solutions.
About Concept7
With more than 20 years of experience in researching and designing digital products and services, we know what is needed for the highest conversion and best experience. That is why we use the proven design methods Human Centered Design and Design Thinking: the user is truly our focus.
We have collected the tools we like to use ourselves in the Concept7 Design-thinking toolkit, which you can also use to easily get started yourself.
Still, if you want to know more about Customer Journey Mapping or if you can't figure it out yourself, we can always help:
Doing research for your Customer Journey.
Developing Customer Journey.
Researching and validating assumptions, ideas and prototypes.
Converting insights into promising ideas.
Converting ideas into prototypes.
Training and master classes or customer journey mapping and other tools.
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