How To Map Out The Customer Journey

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s relationship with a company from initial touchpoints, through to final results. The method of mapping your customer journey involves empathising with your customer whilst analysing your business processes.

We have broken the method of customer journey mapping into 10 simple steps to get you started.

Review the goals for your business or product:

Outline the current customer journey using your business processes and review your goals.

Research your customers’ current experience of your business:

To capture the voice of the customer and gain key insights you can carry out research such as: conducting surveys, holding customer interviews, reviewing customer logs and looking at Google Analytics.

List touchpoints:

Make a list of all the customer touchpoints and their channels. For example, the touchpoint could be “pay a bill” and the channels could be “pay online”, “pay by phone”, and “pay in person”.

Build representations of your customers:

Transform the research and data you have gathered into customer personas. A customer persona is a representation of your current and/or ideal customer.

It can be useful to create visual representations of your customer personas rather than using text to help you empathise more.

Here’s a blog that could help you create your marketing personas: https://blog.bufferapp.com/marketing-personas-beginners-guide

Create an empathy map:

Once you have the personas you can begin your empathy map. Look back at your touchpoints and the various scenarios around them. Consider how these will make the persona feel and act.

Identify Moments of Truth:

Whilst creating your empathy map, you may have already started to look at the positive and the negative outcomes of the purchasing decision.

Assess the key points in the journey where customers may pause and evaluate the experience, or make a crucial decision.

Define the Ideal Journey and Identify Gaps:

Plan out an ideal customer journey based on your findings so far and compare with your current customer journey. This will enable you to identify where gaps exist between the two.

Generate ideas:

Generate problem solving ideas to resolve any gaps that have been identified and reduce negative experiences for customers.

Organise your ideas:

After you have generated ideas it can be beneficial to organise them into a visual structure (such as an affinity diagram). This will make it quick and easy to see how the business can improve the customer experience.

Design, refine, and digitalise:

Get together with a graphic designer and transform your personas, empathy maps, moments of truth and ideas into exciting digital graphics. Converting the data into graphics will make it easier for your colleagues to engage with the information.

Now that you have mapped out the customer journey in a visual format share it with the entire business. It will help to align all staff with the same customer insight which will assist you in meeting your goals.
We will be looking at the points above in more detail in the coming weeks, so do come back again!

In the meantime, if you would like help looking at your CX journey mapping to help you understand your customers’ experiences and ultimately help you to create sales, then give us a call on 01536 560 435.