Customer journey map

What is a Customer Journey Map & Why is it Important?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer journey (also called the buyer journey or user journey). It helps you tell the story of your customers’ experiences with your brand across all touchpoints. Whether your customers interact with you via social media, email, livechat or other channels, mapping the customer journey out visually helps ensure no customer slips through cracks.

This process also helps B2B business leaders gain insights into common customer pain points which in turn will allow them to better optimise and personalise the customer experience.

 What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping (also called user journey mapping) is the process of creating a customer journey map, a visual story of your customers’ interactions with your brand. This exercise helps businesses step into their customer’s shoes and see their business from the customer’s perspective. It allows you to gain insights into common customer pain points and how to improve those. 

• Firstly, all the possible customer touchpoints are mapped out, for instance, a website, social channels, interactions with marketing and sales teams.
• User journeys are then created across these various touchpoints for each buyer persona. For example, a millennial buyer persona may typically become aware of a product on social, research it on the mobile version of your site, and finally make a purchase on a desktop computer.
• The customer experience at each touchpoint should be included in a customer journey map. This can include what action the customer needs to take and how your brand responds.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

• Customer journey mapping is important, because it is a strategic approach to better understanding customer expectations and is crucial for optimising the customer experience. 

• Customer journey mapping is just as important for small and medium-sized enterprises as it is for larger companies. Customer expectations are changing for all businesses, regardless of size – customers demand an omnichannel approach to customer service, marketing and sales.

One of the most important aspects of the customer experience is personalisation. Recent research found that  84% of consumers feel that being treated like a human rather than a number is crucial to winning their business. Customer journey mapping allows SMEs to create personalised experiences across all touchpoints – for every individual, across all channels.

Mapping the customer journey has a host of benefits such as:

• Allowing you to optimise the customer onboarding process
• Benchmarking the customer experience desired by your customers against what they actually receive
• Understanding the differences in buyer personas as they move from prospect to conversion through the buying funnel.
• Creating a logical order to your buyer journey.

 However, the biggest benefit is simply understanding your customers more. The better you understand their expectations, the more you can tailor the customer experience to their needs.

How does customer journey mapping enable omnichannel marketing and customer service?

Today’s consumers want a highly personalised experience and this includes your marketing and customer service efforts. This interconnected approach is called omnichannel marketing and omnichannel customer service.

In terms of marketing, customer journey mapping plays a crucial role in this process, as marketers can target one prospect across multiple touchpoints. For example, a customer who browses a product on a website can be retargeted with a social media ad later on.

To offer the best possible customer experience, omnichannel marketing is often backed up by omnichannel customer service. This is where the customer can receive customer support across any channel, such as on social media, messenger apps, or live chat. Again, customer journey mapping can allow your Customer Service team to better understand the customer experience and improve their ability to resolve issues.

How To Make A Customer Journey Map

Step 1: Set your targets

Identifying goals and setting targets are essential first steps of learning how to make a customer journey map. It’s important to set targets and have a clear idea of what you want to achieve before you even begin. Doing so will allow you to narrow down the most efficient ways of hitting your targets. Having goals in mind while going through with a task can also help you stay on track.

The first step in learning how to make a customer journey map should have you answer the following questions: Why are you making this map? Whose perspective will it be from? What experiences will you be factoring in?

Step 2: Create buyer personas

A buyer persona is a fictional character which represents a specific customer segment for your brand. When creating a buyer persona, be sure to consider the following characteristics: background, demographics, lifestyle, personality, information sources, and shopping preferences. This is where interviews, surveys, and other forms of market research come in. You want to gain as much data as you can through research because this information will help you place yourself in the shoes of your customers.

Quick tip: be sure to ask ‘why’ questions. These will provide you with more insight on a customer’s behavior and motivations. Since your customer journey map will be built around the buyer persona, you want it to be as accurate as possible. The more data you use when creating the buyer persona, the better!

Ideally, you’ll want to limit each customer journey map to a maximum of 2 personas.

Step 3: Identify motivations and pain points

Technically, this step of how to make a customer journey map can be included in Step 2. Motivations and pain points can still be considered part of the buyer persona. However, we wanted to highlight the importance of understanding customer motivations and pain points in the later stages of learning how to make a customer journey map. Consider your buyer persona. What keeps them going? Conversely, what’s stopping them from reaching their goals? Do they have fears and reservations?

Most importantly: How can your brand help? Keep the answers to these questions in mind. They will be crucial in the following steps.

Step 4: Map out the buyer’s journey

It’s important to note the different stages of the buyer’s journey in order to be able to provide more personalized experiences for your customers down the line.

There are 3 stages to the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision.

In the awareness stage, buyers are able to identify the challenges that they are facing. Consider these questions: How does the buyer view these challenges? Is dealing with these challenges a top priority for the buyer? Will there be any consequences if the buyer does not deal with these challenges?

In the consideration stage, buyers are actively looking for ways to deal with the challenges that they are facing. Consider these questions: What options are available for the buyer? How will they search for information on these options? How will they weigh the pros and cons of the options available to them?

In the decision stage, buyers have settled on a solution and are only searching for the most suitable product or service (Hopefully your brand!). Consider these questions: Who are the stakeholders in this decision? How would the buyer evaluate the pros and cons of your brand vs your competitors? What criteria would the buyer use to determine if a product or service is suitable?

Step 5: Maximize your touchpoints

Traditionally, brands have almost always been able to make first contact with the customer at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. In the digital age, your brand’s first contact with the customer won’t always be at the beginning of their journey. Touchpoints refer to the many channels through which a customer may encounter your brand. These are important because they are where the opportunities to make the right impression on the customer will take place.

Learn the ropes of your touchpoints so you can maximize their potential. Note that your strategy here need not be purely digital or purely traditional. Mix things up! Go with what feels the most right from the perspective of the customer.

Step 6: Find your Moments of Truth

As you move towards completing the process of how to make a customer journey map, you’ll realize that every step so far has been equipping you to deal with one of the biggest hurdles that brands face: earning your customer’s trust. Moments of Truth are crucial points in the customer journey. These are instances wherein a customer’s opinion about your brand is formed based on their experiences.

Step 7: Revise

You won’t always get everything right on the first try -and that’s okay! Continue refining your process until you get it just right. Don’t think of customer journey mapping as a one-time thing, either! The customer journey can change and your brand must be ready to adapt.

Tips to Get Started with Customer Journey Mapping

Walk Through the Customer Experience

The most foundational step in customer journey mapping is identifying the touch points where your customer interacts with your organization. Look for both major and minor touch points. In the car buying process, for instance, major touch points might be taking a test drive or sitting down at the salesperson’s desk to negotiate the final deal. Minor touch points might be when the customer walks around the lot prior to being greeted by a salesperson or when the customer is delivered their car after the sale is complete.

You want your map to cover the entire journey from marketing to post-sale follow up surveys. Any distinct point where the customer interacts with the organization should be mapped.

Map Multiple Paths at a Single Point

Often, a specific touch point has multiple paths of entry. Did the customer enter the purchase process through the website or toll-free number? Did organic search or your display ad campaign bring the customer to the toll-free number? Once the customer was on the phone, were they routed to the technical support or billing departments? Questions like these can complicate customer journey maps extremely quickly. Look at the simple graphic below, which shows the purchase of a gumball from a gumball machine. 

It’s a simple process, until the machine jams. Now, we have to entertain three different scenarios that occur after the jam: 1) the customer walks away without dealing with it, 2) the customer gets a refund from the cashier, or 3) the customer’s kid really wants a gumball, so the manager has to come open the machine.

Distinguish Between Onstage and Offstage

When evaluating a touch point, it is important to look at the touch point through the lens of onstage (what is visible to the customer) and offstage (what goes on behind the scenes). For instance, in the car buying example, talking to the salesperson would be an action that occurs onstage. Running the credit check for financing would usually occur offstage. Make sure you understand how offstage actions, like internal communication, impact the onstage experience.

Often in journey maps, offstage actions are drawn differently or placed below a “line of visibility.” No matter how you denote them, it is helpful to distinguish offstage actions from those that are customer-facing, so you can separate the customer’s actual experience from the operations that support it.

Differentiate on Touch Point Intensity

Every touch point is important. Let me repeat that: Every touch point is important. However, some are more significant to customers than others. I like to view these touch points as pressure points—those moments of truth that truly impact the customer experience.

As noted in the car purchase example above, the test drive and the sale sit-down are two particularly important parts of the car purchase journey. These are the parts where sales are made, opinions are heavily influenced, and things can fall apart easily. Of course, the minor touch points we mentioned matter. Both how clean the parking lot is and the last moment when a car is handed over should be evaluated for maximum effectiveness. However, you should always take an 80/20 approach and focus on the pressure points that impact the customer experience the most first.

Get Feedback from All Levels of the Organization

To truly understand what happens at each touch point, you have to get feedback from as many stakeholders as possible. Then, you can use that information to add a qualitative layer to the journey map. In other words, don’t just map what happens, map how you are executing your service delivery.

Focus on Function Over Form

Do a Google search for “customer journey maps.” Like the screenshot below, you will find journey maps in a variety of configurations and colors. Do not waste valuable energy worrying about the correct form, because it doesn’t exist. (In fact, customer journey mapping is not even the only name used for this process. Two others are service blueprinting and customer experience mapping.) Spend your time focused on identifying touch points and how they connect; eventually, you will find the form that is right for you.

Do More than Map: Understand and Improve

While the mere exercise of mapping your customer’s journey has value, the ultimate goal is to improve your customer’s experience by understanding what they go through at each touch point and improving the quality of that experience.

Using the 80/20 approach, start with your most important touch points, and ask one question: how can I make this quicker and easier? Can I remove parts of the process to make it go quicker? Can I empower employees to make the process easier by solving more issues in real time? Of course, there is much more to a quality customer interaction than just timeliness and easiness, but they are great places to start.

Tools to Create Stunning Customer Journey Maps

In the list below, you’ll find a brief overview of why each tool is worth checking out and how each one can help speed up your workflow. To make it easier to navigate, we’ve also split the list into five main categories: 

• Prototyping tools

Of all the options in this article, the prototyping tools you already know are likely the easiest option. The key is using your current prototyping tools more efficiently — a process made easier with templates. 

• Sketch
• Adobe XD
• Figma
• Axure RP
• Omnigraffle
• Paper and powerpoint templates 

Paper prototypes can be useful when forming hypotheses or tentatively mapping customer touchpoints to inform user research and testing. They’re also great when you need a workshopping tool to help ensure all of your company’s internal stakeholders are aligned. 

• Nielsen Norman Group
• MightyBytes 
• Dedicated customer journey mapping tools 

If you need something higher fidelity than a paper prototype and find that most design tools are too unwieldy, check out this list of dedicated customer journey mapping tools. Each one listed below either includes a built-in feature exclusively dedicated to customer journey maps or offers that as their only functionality. 

• Custellence 
• UXPressia 
• Smaply 
• FlowMapp
• Visual Paradigm
• Milkymap
• General diagramming and whiteboarding tools 

If none of the tools listed so far suit your fancy, take a look at the diagramming tools below. These tools fall on the complexity spectrum from very simple to highly technical and cater to a wide range of users and customer behaviors. 

• Lucidchart
• Microsoft Visio
• Gliffy 
• Miro
• Mural 
• Conceptboard
• Software and consulting companies

If your goal is to work faster, the manual outreach required to get started with any one of these tools will likely make them not worth your time. Still, if you’ve heard about one of these tools and want to take it for a test drive, or if you need a bit of help creating your assets, it’s worth checking out a few of the items on this list. 

• CFN Insight
• SuiteCX
• Cora Journey360

• Quadient Customer Journey Mapping

Quadient offers consulting and software tools for a unique set of applications, including direct mail, business process automation, and customer experience management. 

• MaritzCX