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It’s time to put the customer at the center of everything you do
Today's well-informed buyers expect an excellent customer experience whenever they interact with your product. A customer journey map visualizes the entire journey through a user's perspective and creates consensus on what problems to solve — it paves the way for your product to help customers achieve their goals.
Have you ever jumped into designing a product without considering the user’s most impactful touch points? I have. I spent months on building a Chinese Astrology Web 3 app (Random right? I know), launched the product and we heard crickets.
Why were people not downloading? Lack of discoverability — users typically search on Google or go to their local fortune teller preferring an offline experience.
Why did people sign up? Lack of a convincing value proposition and positioning — users needed Web 3 education and there was too much controversy in the market.
Why was our key features suffering from low engagement? Lack of stickiness — typical user cases are seasonal with a spike around Lunar New Years.
Why did we not get any sales for 6 months? Lack of a personalized experience — user wants advice/guidance specific to them.
According to a customer journey mapping report by CXPA, almost 90% of the customers surveyed who use customer journey mapping said that their project delivers a positive impact, especially in customer satisfaction. They see lower churn rates and fewer customer complaints.
Why is it crucial?
Let’s take a look at how customer journey mapping can benefit your product and your customers:
- Empathize with the user's experience better
- Creating a logical order to your buyer journey
- Understanding where users struggle to complete actions
- Comparing customer expectations against the actual experience
- Gaining invaluable insights about your potential and existing customers
On the surface, customer journeys may seem simple, but when you look closer, it's easy to see that the journey can be increasingly complex. So what better ways to prepare your team before they start mapping their customer journeys? A customer journey map workshop!
The workshop will be a collaborative exercise that enables stakeholders to agree on how users or customers engage with their brand or product through key touch points that will help the users accomplish a specific goal. For example: Booking a VIP concert ticket from their e-commerce website.
How to run a customer journey mapping workshop:
- Decide on the type of customer journey map.
- Current state: If you want to gain a deeper understanding of what your customer experiences while interacting with your product or service right now, consider using the current state customer journey map.
- Future state: It helps you visualize the ideal journey you’d like your customers to embark on as they interact with your brand. It is ideal for teams who want to close the gap between the current customer’s experience and where it should be.
- Define the workshop objective. Surface the most impactful touch points to solve problems or create solutions.
- Choose 3 to 5 people that may have knowledge about the customers and users of the product/service.
- Start the workshop with a persona. A customer journey map should concentrate on the experience of a single persona in a single scenario with a single objective.
- Brainstorm and list all touch points that accurately reflect a customer’s journey with your brand. Consider both online and offline steps.
- Discuss and decide the entry and exit points in your product. Make decisions based on data and analytics. Look into your existing insights.
- After deciding on an entry and exit point in the map, your team will need to arrange each touch point in between in chronological order. Indicate loops that can potentially happen.
- Create an empathy map under each touch point. Ask questions like:
- What are the users Doing?
- What are the users Thinking?
- What are the users Feeling?
- Plot the persona’s emotions under your customer journey map, so that you can see how their emotional experience changes with each touchpoint.
- Summarize, vote for the touch points that the team believes have the greatest influence across the whole journey and close the workshop.
Tools for Customer Journey Map
Now that you know how to conduct a customer journey mapping workshop, it’s time to get the ball rolling. Invest in software that can help. One that will allow you to easily create customized journeys and automate marketing actions.
Some tools:
- Paper & pen (my favourite)
Summary
Journey mapping is a process that provides a holistic view of the customer experience by uncovering moments of both frustration and delight throughout a series of interactions. Done successfully, this framework reveals opportunities to address customers’ pain points, alleviate fragmentation, and ultimately, create a better experience for your users.
Read more about UX Frameworks.
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