What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a process to visualize and empathize with your customers in order to understand the journey or touchpoints that the user goes through to complete the task or tasks.
The focus is not to create perfect or lay down every interaction the user has with your product or employees, instead it is about getting a holistic view of your customer experience through the lens of the customer.
In order to get started, these are some of the prerequisites which can help build an effective Customer Journey Map: User Research, Persona, and Data Insights
The Customer Journey can be broken down into 5 segments:
Stage or Phase of Journey
The stage helps divide the customer journey map into phases that the user goes through.
Activity
Activity is the actions that the user takes during that stage. It can also include what the user is thinking.
Touchpoint
Touchpoint can be interaction with the company’s products, services, or employees.
Experience
It is about empathizing with your customer and getting a better understanding of their emotion when interacting with your product or services.
It is also important to have qualitative and quantitative feedback about the experience. Quantitative will help you understand the current state using metrics and qualitative will help with the understanding of human emotions.
Opportunity
It is about listing the opportunities for improvement to enhance the customer experience. It can be gaps or challenges the customer is facing during a touchpoint or it can be an upsell opportunity.
Why is Customer Journey Map Important?
Here are some of the ways we have seen organizations benefit from customer journey mapping:
Alignment across the board
One of the biggest impacts of the customer journey map is that it brings the internal stakeholders on the same page and educates them on how the customer views their product and services.
This is important as a lot of times stakeholders and product owners bring in their biases and already have perspective on how they think the customer interacts with their product. This is especially true when being part of a large organization, or their customer interactions have been limited to a certain project or department.
When a stakeholder or a product owner sees the holistic view of the customer journey, it helps in altering their perspective on how the customer interacts with their product and services.
Also, it helps them realize the importance of their department and the impact a positive experience can make on the overall journey of their customer. This is also true in the case of co-founders when each of them has a different perspective on their customers, this helps them gain alignment.
Deeper Customer Insights
Having deeper customer insights can help address the challenges customers are facing with the product or services. This results in identifying the touchpoints where maximum friction is present and the majority of struggles. Focusing on improving these specific areas can have a drastic impact on the bottom line.
Opportunity to increase top-line growth
When stakeholders or product owners see the holistic view using the customer journey map, they also see opportunities where they are missing upsell opportunities. During the customer journey, it becomes easy to identify which touchpoint they should focus on to upsell products or services to the user to ensure where they are more likely to convert, resulting in a direct impact on top-line growth.
Create a unified experience across multiple services and products
As the company grows, products and services being offered by the company will grow resulting in different experiences for the user when interacting with their products.
This can occur due to several reasons:
- Changes in Senior Management
- Products being managed in isolation
- Certain products getting better funding while others are being left behind
- Many more reasons depending on the organization
This will help the organization unify the experience that the customers will receive from all its products and services, resulting in a stronger brand and more growth through referrals. As the statement is true – your current customers can also become your best salespeople 🙂
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What’s Next
Idea Theorem is an award-winning design & development agency based in North America. Through our empathy-driven approach, we have crafted digital products that have positively impacted over 10 million users. Our mission is to shape the digital future by delivering exceptional experiences. Contact Us if you have any questions; we will gladly help you.
