Customer journey mapping is a unique scenario for a customer’s interaction with any project. It can be a website, online-store, offline project like a restaurant and any other product or service. The user’s route is non-linear in most cases, it has a lot of branches from the point of the first interaction with you to the order or other target action. It is important not to lose a client on every step of the way. CJM development will help to prevent it and in addition improve the customer experience.
Customer journey mapping: the main essence
User journey maps are one of the most popular UX tools out there. They are presented in a variety of ways, rolling both onto A4 sheets and covering the corridors of the office with them. The customer journey map visually depicts the customer’s entire journey to make a purchase, which clearly shows the stages of customer maturation. The points of contact with the company, actions, thoughts, emotions, problems of the client, and also what is missing for making a decision are described in detail at each stage. This path is called a user’s or customer’s journey.
The fact is that modern sites and programs that can be called digital products are usually part of a large service. And the further, the more digital products (websites, applications) will be involved in the interaction with the user. CJM displays exactly how the consumer interacts with the service – what points of interaction exist, through which channels the interaction is carried out (web, mobile application, offline point of presence, etc.), as well as what happens inside each point of contact. The better you know your audience and understand their needs, the easier it will be for you to adjust your business to its wishes and make a quality product.
Why do you need to make customer journey maps?
You should use a customer journey map for the following reasons.
- First, the process of creating a map leads to an unambiguous dialogue and a single mental model of all team members. It is a hard fact that partial understanding of the work of a product or process is a very common problem in companies, since each team has its own metrics for assessing work results, and there is no person who would be responsible for the entire work process from the user’s point of view. Therefore, a holistic understanding of the user-product interaction is the primary and most important goal of the CJM card. The agreement on how to improve the user experience will never be reached without it.
- Understand the client’s behavior, what they think and feel. This way you will be able to speak to the customer in their language, modify the product according to their needs, develop solutions, design and marketing strategy focused on your customer.
- Find out the pains of clients and see at what stages they arise. By eliminating their causes, you reduce the number of failed trades. And having learned what causes the effect and at what stages, you can enhance it.
- Spend less on attracting customers. There are statistics that it is 3-30 times more expensive to attract a new client than to retain an old one.
Journey maps can also serve as an excellent basis for making decisions on the path of product development.
How to create a useful customer journey map?
The map is built as follows:
- Define a goal. Record the goals you want to achieve as a result of creating a consumer journey map and take them into account when designing it. An example of goals can be studying the feelings of a certain group of consumers when interacting with a service, assessing the level of satisfaction;
- Collect consumer data. This includes market research, field consumer research, focus group surveys, web analytics services, interviews with the project owner or information holders (sales managers who personally communicate with customers and, like no one else, understand their needs and pain). You can also become a client of your product or service – a “mystery shopper”;
- Select a tool. Markers, stickers, and boards are the best option. The whole team participates in the design of CJM, each participant will see the results of the work. For remote collaboration look for online solutions;
- Next, you should display all user actions on the timeline;
- Then add barriers, insights, thoughts and emotions to the timeline to create a story. This story should be as clear as possible in order to ultimately show us the full picture of the user’s interaction with the product.
Avoid common mistakes when drafting customer journey mapping. To do this, it is necessary to collect only objective data.
Wrapping up
A customer journey map is a visualization of the user’s journey based on global research. Knowing the path of your buyer, you can clearly understand how to improve the product, service, and what to change in the marketing strategy. It is a system that will help your team understand the entire user experience clearly and holistically by identifying both pain points and moments when the user experienced joy and satisfaction. When properly mapped, a user journey map can help eliminate his pain points, lead the team to a shared vision, and ultimately improve the user experience of the product.
