Customer Journey Mapping

What is a customer journey map?

It illuminates the holistic customer experience, demonstrating the emotions of people while interacting with your product.  It is a strategic tool for capturing key insights into the complex customer interactions.  

Customers choose products based on the quality of experiences they have with them

Why does customer experience matter?

• Bad customer experiences are shared. With social media, word gets around a lot quicker.
• Good customer experiences make a brand stand out.
• Your customers’ experiences impact the bottom line.

The value proposition

• Gain knowledge about customer behaviours and desires across different channels.
• Discover key customer insights.
• Capture potential areas of opportunity.
• Transition to a customer-focused design.

Essential steps to understand customer journey

Discover reality: Study customer behaviour and interactions across channels and touch-points. 

Journey model: Collaboratively synthesise key insights into a journey model 

Visualization: Visualize a compelling story that creates empathy and understanding 

Ideation: Follow the map to uncover new ideas and better customer experiences 

How to develop a customer journey map?

Touch-points and triggers

Begin by listing all of your current customer touch-points under each customer life cycle stage. This will show the gaps in your touchpoint inventory, and you’ll immediately be able to see where the opportunities are.

Customer research

Start doing some qualitative research. Of course you can pull comments from social media or ongoing research, but it is also very important to set up direct qualitative research to create your customer journey map.

Stakeholder workshops

Organize customer experience workshops with your internal stakeholders. When stakeholders read customers’ comments and feelings firsthand, they develop empathy and are more likely to act on and resolve customer experience problems.

Customer emotions

Develop an initial model of customer feelings. We focus on feelings to identify highs and lows in the customer experience throughout the life cycle.

Build journey map

Do a complete analysis of your customer research. This analysis pulls all your research together to show you what your customers are thinking, feeling and doing at each stage of their journey with you. The consolidated research is used to build your customer journey map. 

Case study

Lets choose an example that anyone can relate to - opening an personal bank account. The typical banking customer cycle looks like this:

Consideration --> Account opening --> Onboarding --> Account management --> Expanding relationship --> Ending relationship

Now, lets take a closer look at what customers are doing, thinking and feeling at the very beginning of the journey, the consideration stage. 

Below is a visual representation of customer journey at this stage:

Thinking(What are customers thinking about?)

• Who do my friends and relatives bank with
• How do I choose the best account for my needs?
• Does the bank offer the services and technology I need?
• How close are the nearest branches and ATMs?
• How do fees and rates compare to other banks?
• How helpful and knowledgeable are the bank employees?
• Will the bank help me grow and progress financially? 

Feeling(How does a customer feel while interacting with your brand?)

Positive:

Comfortable - I’ve done my research

Confident - My friends/family have recommended the bank

Respected - Branch representatives spent sufficient time explaining different financial services.

Convinced - Switching will deliver a better experience than my current bank

Indifferent:

Confused - How do offers differ from bank to bank?

Concerned - Will I be taking a step backwards, since the bank doesn’t have a global presence?

Dissatisfied:

Distrustful of large banks that are sneaky and rude.

Opportunities

• Create personal connections with prospective customers.
• Make it easy to understand and differentiate between account options.
• Share stories from advocates 

We have analysed just one stage in the customer cycle. This process is repeated for all the stages, which completes the customer journey map. I would suggest reading 'When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps'.