A customer journey map is a powerful visual tool that can help you understand your customers’ experience with your company and identify areas for improvement. In this guide, we’ll discuss what a customer journey map is, how to create one, and the benefits of using one. We’ll also provide tips for using your customer journey map to improve your business outcomes.
What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map is a graphical representation of the steps your customers take to interact with your company, from their first point of contact to becoming a loyal customer. It allows you to see the customer's perspective and identify areas where the customer experience can be improved.
Benefits of Customer Journey Map
There are many benefits to creating a customer journey map. A customer journey map:
1) Helps businesses understand their customers better
By mapping out the different stages that a customer goes through when interacting with a business, companies can gain valuable insights into what motivates and influences them. This in turn allows businesses to tailor their products and services to meet the needs of their target market more effectively.
2) Improves customer experience
By identifying potential pain points and areas for improvement, businesses can make necessary changes to their processes and procedures to ensure a smoother customer journey. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3) Facilitates cross-functional collaboration
Customer journey maps provide a common language and understanding for all team members, which facilitates better communication and collaboration between different departments.
4) Helps businesses stay ahead of the competition
By understanding the customer journey, businesses can anticipate the needs and wants of their target market, and make changes accordingly to stay ahead of the competition.
5) Enables businesses to make data-driven decisions
Customer journey maps are based on data collected from various touch points along the customer journey. This data can be used to inform business decisions and help companies track their progress over time.
What Can Product Managers Learn from a Customer Journey Map?
As a product manager, it's important to understand your customer's journey and what they go through when using your product. A customer journey map can be a helpful tool in this process. By understanding the customer's journey, you can improve the user experience and make sure that your product is meeting their needs.
There are a few things that product managers can learn from a customer journey map:
1. The Customer's Motivation
One of the most important things to understand about your customers is what motivates them. Why do they want to use your product? What needs does it meet for them? A customer journey map can help you to understand these motivations by showing you how the customer interacts with your product. This can be helpful in developing new features or redesigning existing ones.
2. The Customer's Pain Points
Another important thing to understand are the pain points that your customers experience. A pain point is anything that makes the customer's journey difficult or inconvenient. By understanding these pain points, you can work to improve the user experience and make it easier for customers to use your product.
3. Where There Are Opportunities for Improvement
A customer journey map can also help you to identify opportunities for improvement. This could be anything from improving the overall user experience to adding new features that meet the needs of your customers. By identifying these opportunities, you can make sure that your product is always evolving and meeting the needs of your customers.
Improving customer experience with customer journey map
Creating a customer journey map can help you improve the customer experience by:
1. Identifying touchpoints where customers have positive or negative experiences
A customer journey map helps you in identifying touchpoints where customers interact with your company. These touchpoints can be online, offline, or a combination of both. You can use the map to identify both positive and negative experiences that customers have at each touchpoint.
2. Determining the root cause of customer pain points
A customer journey map can help you determine the root cause of customer pain points. By identifying these pain points, you can take steps to address them and improve the overall customer experience.
3. Improving communication between departments
A customer journey map can help improve communication between departments by providing a clear view of the customer experience. This can help ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards improving the customer experience.
4. Implementing changes based on customer feedback
Customer journey maps can be used to implement changes based on customer feedback. By constantly monitoring the map, you can quickly identify areas that need improvement and make the necessary changes.
5. Measuring the impact of changes on the customer experience
Customer journey maps can help you measure the impact of changes on the customer experience. This allows you to determine whether or not your efforts are actually improving the customer experience.
The different stages of the customer journey
There are four main stages in the customer journey:
1. Awareness:
At the awareness stage, potential customers become aware of a problem or need that they have. They will start to search for solutions to their problem and gather information about different options.
2. Consideration:
At the consideration stage, potential customers evaluate their options and narrow down their choices. They will compare different products or services to find the one that best meets their needs.
3. Decision:
At the decision stage, potential customers make a purchase decision. They will choose the product or service that they feel is best suited to their needs.
4. Retention:
At the retention stage, customers use and remain loyal to a product or service. They may also provide feedback or review the product or service to help other potential customers in their journey.
How to create a customer journey map for your business?
According to marketing expert Aaron Agius, there are six steps in creating a customer journey map.
Step 1: Decide what you want from this journey map.
The first step is to determine what you want to use the customer journey map for. Do you want to track and improve the customer experience? Identify opportunities for new products or services? Understand how customers interact with your brand? Once you know what you want to use the customer journey map for, you can begin creating it.
Step 2: Figure out your personas’ goals.
The second step is to understand your personas’ goals. What are they trying to achieve? What do they need to do to complete their goal? Once you understand your persona’s goals, you can begin mapping out their journey.
Step 3: Identify all touchpoints
.Touchpoints are any interaction that a customer has with your brand. This can include everything from visiting your website to speaking with customer service. It’s important to identify all of the touchpoints so that you can understand how customers interact with your brand.
Step 4: Determine what you want your journey map to show.
Here Agius lists the four types of customer journey maps you can use:
Current State:
This map shows how customers currently interact with your brand.
Day in the life:
This map shows how a customer spends their day and how your brand fits into that day.
Future State:
This map shows how you want customers to interact with your brand in the future.
Blue Print:
This map is a combination of the current state and future state maps. It shows how customers currently interact with your brand and how you want them to interact with your brand in the future.
Step 5: Take the customer journey yourself.
After you’ve decided what type of customer journey map you want to create, it’s time to take the journey yourself. Find someone who is willing to be your persona and go through the journey as them. This will help you identify any pain points or areas where there is room for improvement.
Step 6: Adjust your journey map as needed
.Once you’ve taken the journey yourself, it’s time to adjust your map as needed. Add in any new touchpoints or remove any that are no longer relevant. Make sure that your map is accurate and up-to-date so that you can use it to improve the customer experience.
Creating a customer journey map can be a helpful way to track and improve the customer experience. By understanding your persona’s goals and taking the journey yourself, you can identify any pain points and make adjustments as needed. Use Agius’s six steps to create your own customer journey map today.
Tips for improving the customer experience
Following are some tips that can help you improve the customer experience:
1. Use your customer journey map to identify points of friction
2. Address pain points and remove roadblocks
3. Improve the customer experience at every touchpoint
4. Encourage customer feedback and listen to what they're saying
5. Continuously measure and track the customer experience
6. Make improvements based on data-driven insights
Producter is a product management tool designed to become customer-driven.
It helps you collect feedback, manage tasks, sharing product updates, creating product docs, and tracking roadmap.
