Understanding customer journey maps is an essential element of advanced marketing analytics. By recognizing consumers’ complex pathways from awareness to conversion, brands can craft better strategies and double down on high-impact touchpoints.
This article will help you learn more about journey mapping and how to apply it to your organization’s goals.
What Is a Customer Journey Map?
Creating a customer journey map effectively visualizes how customers interact with your business and understand their pain points. Identifying these pain points can create a more positive customer experience and improve brand loyalty. You can also find differences between the expected and actual customer experiences with the aid of this procedure.
Before embarking on your journey mapping process, defining the type of information you want to collect and how you plan to measure its effectiveness is crucial. Creating a buyer persona—a fictional individual representative of your ideal customer with specific attributes like age, job function, personal aspirations, and pain points—based on market and user data is an excellent starting point. Reviewing successful customer journey map examples can provide valuable insights and inspiration for crafting your tailored map.
Once you’ve defined your buyer persona, you can map out the customer experience. Typically, a journey map will include touchpoints and all your customer or buyer persona interactions with your company, from advertisements to social media posts to customer service calls. Identifying these touchpoints and understanding how they impact the overall experience can help you improve your product and service processes. For example, if your buyers have trouble finding what they’re looking for on your website, you may add an instant chat feature or FAQ section to address these issues.
What Is a UX Journey Map?
A user journey map is a visual tool that provides visibility into the customer’s perspective and shows how their interactions with a product can be improved. Ultimately, these maps are one of many tools that UX designers can use to build products and experiences that delight customers.
While there is no right or wrong way to create a journey map, beginning with a clear understanding of what you want to achieve is best. This might include assessing the current state of an existing product or developing an ideal future experience. Setting a goal will guide the process and ensure the resulting map is helpful.
Once you have a goal in mind, it is time to start collecting data. Ideally, you will use qualitative research methods like diary studies or in-home visits with real customers to get the most accurate and detailed information possible.
You must compile information on the touchpoints and channels your consumers utilize at each stage of their product journey before you can construct a customer journey map. You should also identify their goals and needs and the emotions they feel at each stage of the journey. Finally, you must define the actor whose journey you are mapping (usually a persona created from research data) and decide whether you are making a customer journey for an existing product or an anticipated future one.
What Is a Future State Journey Map?
A future state journey map is a helpful way to envision a new product or service. It examines what the user experience could be in the future based on research and informed assumptions. This type of journey mapping is most beneficial for a company looking to change its current business process or create a new customer experience.
Depending on the project requirements and goals, a company may make a journey map for just one primary user or multiple users. For example, a toy shop may create a journey map for a child and their mother during the toy purchase experience. They can then examine what each person will want to do or not do and why they will do it.
For instance, a child may have a specific reason to purchase their favorite toy, but their mother is against it because she thinks it is too expensive. Using the information collected during the journey map creation process, a team can develop empathy for the primary user or users and identify their needs and wants and any frustrations or obstacles. This will help decrease friction in the process and improve the overall customer experience. This is why teams need to take the time to complete this exercise regularly.
What Is a Current State Journey Map?
A current state journey map illustrates the customer’s recent experience with a brand or product. It captures the customer’s emotions and actions at each touchpoint, including the pain points they experience. The goal is to identify the best opportunities and metrics for improving the customer experience.
For example, if a child is frustrated when her mother refuses to buy her favorite toy, that frustration can be mapped and shared with the entire company. Then, everyone can work together to solve the issue. The resulting resolution may be as simple as updating the FAQ page or as complicated as implementing new features to help children navigate purchasing.
This type of journey map also helps companies understand what they need to do to anticipate the future needs of their customers. For instance, if your customers often complain about expensive shipping costs, you can use the data from your customer journey map to recommend a free shipping option for your products.
The next type of journey map is a future state template that visualizes the experiences and interactions your customers will have in the future. It predicts how your customers will react to new products and services, including highs/peaks and lows/troughs. This type of journey map can be a great way to set strategic goals for your business.
