What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a visual representation of end-to-end customer experience in a product from a customer’s perspective. It reveals customers’ experiences and motivations while interacting with the product, thus helping organizations to deliver personalized and relevant customer experiences.
Why is a Customer Journey Map relevant?
To keep up with the current trend, digital transformation has become a paramount requirement among many organizations. In order to adapt to such transformations, it is necessary for the organization to address customers’ needs, emotions and touchpoints.
Studying customers’ behavior can help to study the objective of the customer, what hurdles they are facing to complete an action and address the actual pain point.
Mapping of customer’s journey helps the organization to
Identify the customer’s interaction with the product,
Stay abreast of its competitions,
Address the gaps between the desired and actual customer experience in the product
Maximize the effectiveness
What are the components of the Customer Journey Map?
Customer Journey Map covers the following components,
Stages / Touchpoints
Activities or Actions
Channels
Expectations
Experiences and
Feelings.
Let’s see what each one is about!
Stages/ Touchpoints:
This is the stage where the user comes to contact with the application or a product and it involves the following steps,
Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention and Advocacy
Activities/ Actions: The activities or interactions that happen between the product/ organization and the customer.
Channels: The medium through which the conversation happens between the product/organization and the customer.
Expectations: What the organization/ product expects from interaction with the customer as the outcome.
Experiences: What the customer experiences on interaction with the organization/ product.
Feelings: What the customer feels at each and every stage mentioned above.
What are the steps involved in creating a Customer Journey Map?
Though there is no standard step-based process to create a customer journey map, some of the below-mentioned practices can be helpful, to create one.
Identify a Goal:
Firstly, you might have to come up with your need for a Customer Journey Map. In order to do the same, take a look at,
The current state of your problem
What is the intended future state that solves the problem
Design and Plan to move from current to future state
Develop a customer-centric roadmap and
Come up with innovative offers for customers.
Identify your target customers. Select two or more customer types for each persona to be used in your customer journey map.
Determine the type of journey each customer is taking, based on their interaction with the product. You might have to capture customer goals, determine their possible touchpoint and channel experiences and map out each of them.
Understand what your target customers’ wanted to achieve using those touchpoints and the expected value they are looking for.
Identify customers’ pain points and capture both quantitative and qualitative data.
Assess, prioritize and add actions that help in implementing the expected customer experience.
Repeat the process and keep improving!
Limitations:
Though Customer Journey Mapping can help the product team to directly capture the customer’s pain points and address them directly, improving the overall user experience, it comes with little limitations too.
If your product or service is in the ideation stage, it may become a little challenging to talk to real customers and capture their experience and their likeness. Also, one has to be dedicated enough to validate and update the customer journey map on a regular basis, as the target customers’ needs keep changing continuously.
References: Learnings from "IIBA-CPOA"
Comments