Strategy Driven Design for Web Success

The process of a Customer Journey Map

The ultimate goal is to gather data to help draw insight that will help you understand how your customers experience their journey around your website and identify the potential issues along that process. It’s also important to note that not all customer journeys are linear, they often happen in more of a back and forth, cyclical journey.

What do you include in your customer journey:

1. The buying process

To determine this you need to pull data from multiple sources using behaviour analytic tools such as;

• Traditional analytic like Google Analytics
• Session replay tools such as CrazyEgg
• Heatmap tools like Hotjar or Inspectlet
• Feedback from real customers

This way you can accurately predict your customers path around your site.

2. Emotion

Without emotion, customer journey maps are essentially process maps and lack a story.

So why is emotion sometimes overlooked in the journey mapping process? In the business-to-business world, it is often neglected because organisations under-estimate the importance of emotion and emotions drive most of human behaviour – even if we are not aware of it. While this fact is taken for granted by B2C marketers, it is often overlooked in B2B settings. Whether your customers are individual consumers or businesses, you will retain more of your customers and gain more new ones if the experience you deliver results in positive emotions.

3. Pain Points

And where there is negative emotion there’s a pain point. Adding these to your Customer’s journey can help you identity at what point they are experiencing the negative emotion and determine what action needs to be taken to avoid this in the future.

4. User action

What does the customer do at each stage of the journey? This is the point at which you need to explore what the customer is doing and how they behave.

5. Solutions

This is where you take all that information gathered and you work out potential ways to improve the customer journey so that they encounter fewer pain points in their future journey.

Once you have mapped out the customer journey should be armed with details of your customer touchpoints (an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business), customer persona, empathy map (visualising user attitudes and behaviours in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users), moments of truth and journey map. This gives you a strong basis to generate ideas and explore the website user journey in greater detail.

The website user journey is the path a visitor takes through your website. Analysing how users interact with your website will help you to understand what is important to your visitors and potentially how they react to language, visuals, layouts and content.

UX journey map – this focuses on user experience of a specific product through a website or app. This type of map helps you gain insight into how a customer interacts with you.

Sales journey map – this follows the buyer’s journey and can be looked at through several phases; awareness, consideration and decision. Understanding the emotional state of the customer will help unlock the right approach for your customer to interact with your brand and improve communication channels to maximise sales.

Customer Experience journey map – offering a high-level view of the customer brand relationship across a period of time.

Current-state customer journey maps focus on the current customer interactions.

Day in the Life– visualising the actions, emotions and thoughts of your customer as they experience them in their daily life. Giving you insight into their pain points.

Future-state customer journey maps to help motivate innovation by imagining new customer experiences.