Customer Journey Map

A bird's eye view of customers' needs

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the interactions your customers have with you across all touchpoints. It helps you ensure every interaction with them, no matter how small it may be, will not go unnoticed or forgotten and ensures that no one falls through the cracks. Mapping customer experience is a valuable process to ensure nothing is missed.

It tells the story of your customer's experience from their first interaction with the organisation through to the end. Mapping the customer journey reveals gaps in customer experiences and explores innovative solutions that customers value. It works for B2C and B2B customer journey mapping.

They help businesses to walk in their customers' shoes and experience the brand from the customer's point of view. They give everyone in the business a complete picture of how customers experience the products, services and brand in their daily lives to build empathy and understanding on how the business can become more customer-centric.

What a customer journey map reveals

The way that you can really get into the mind of your customer is by understanding how they experience each point on their journey. You need to look beyond just metrics and explore human behaviour at every step in order to truly understand what it's like for your customers.

There are many different points of interaction and each can have an effect on how the customer feels throughout their experience with your company. In order to design a great customer service experience, it is important that you understand your customers' underlying mindsets, emotions, motivations and desires. By undertaking rigorous methods of research, an organisation can begin mapping out the steps that customers take throughout each stage so they know how best to engage with them.

Customer journey maps have three main components: a perspective, an experience and findings and insights. These components enable organisations to understand how customers experience their products and services.

The Perspective is the person the consumer journey is being mapped for and the goal they are aiming to accomplish. We've discovered that taking a typical customer's trip and mapping it gives coverage of 70-80% of issues across many personas. A Customer Journey Map can also be deconstructed by persona. Understanding the needs, pains, and goals of your customer makes it simpler to develop a suitable solution. These findings may also assist you in determining which persona to focus on in your Customer Experience Program, or they might help you identify new problems and possibilities.

The Experience is the core of our journey and catalogues every customer action, thought or emotional experience. To make it feel real you should include verbatim (direct comments from customers), videos and images captured during research that helps understand what they're going through in order to increase empathy with them.

The Finding and Insights is the part of your Customer Journey Map used to transform insights into profits. What key learnings, or "insightful" moments did you uncover during research? Based on these findings what opportunities are there for moving ahead with a plan in mind that would meet customer needs better than ever before? How might we put some practical use outwards so internal teams can begin meeting those high expectations?

A comprehensive journey map is a tool that helps the organisation understand their customers by showing all channels they interact with, including emotions behind it and insights into what makes them tick. This empowers employees within your company to have empathy for each individual customer so you can approach every situation holistically and with a full understanding of what your customers want and how they feel.

How a customer journey map is created

Customers go through more stages than just buying and using a product or service. They interact with an organisation directly and indirectly across multiple channels and touch-points.

At each point for a customer, there are many incentives and obstacles to doing business.

A comprehensive journey map shows each customer touch-point clearly, and viewers can absorb each interaction from a new perspective.

Why customer journey maps are valuable

Customer journeys are not an afterthought; they should be at the heart of your content marketing strategy and processes for all team members, from designers and developers to marketers and customer services.

What makes a customer journey so valuable is the process that you undertake. Creating one requires detailed research and storytelling, which helps identify areas of friction as well as creates empathy for customers during their interactions with your business. Take your teams out of their silos and ask each one to step into the shoes of your customers. In doing this, you will be able to identify friction points - areas for improvement for your own processes and customer interactions.

Businesses today know that customers are their biggest asset and a customer journey map reveals key customer pain points and moments of truth where process, system and service failures are revealed. It digs deep to indicate what your customers are thinking, wanting and doing as they engage with your services. It keeps the customer at the heart of every decision.

When it comes to discovering exactly where customers struggle with a service or interaction, and where change is most needed, there are few tools more powerful than customer journey mapping.