Customer Journey Mapping is a powerful way to understand what motivates your customers: what are their needs, hesitations and concerns.
The Customer Journey Map (CJM) is a simple chart or a board that illustrates all the actions your customers do in engaging with your company. The journey history allows product managers understand and improve their customers' experience.
Customer Journey Mapping may be focused on a specific part of the story or give an overview of the entire experience. The level of complexity for CJM can also be different and depends on the degree of elaboration of the stages of client interaction.
Customer Journey Map components
Must-have components:
Personas (main characters) that illustrate the goals, needs, thoughts, feelings, expectations, and pain of the users.
Timeline (a specific amount of time)
Emotion: feelings that illustrate happiness, satisfaction, frustration, anxiety, etc.
Touchpoints: the interaction points of the customer and the company.
Channels where this interaction takes place (a website, app, call center, in-store, etc.)
Optional components:
A positive interaction to leave a lasting impression.
Supporting characters that may contribute to the experience (friends or colleagues).
CJM is usually based on a timeline of events that may be linear or cyclical.
Customers go through several stages throughout the timeline. These stages are often reflected in your company’s sales funnel. Here are some examples of the stages in the customer journey:
Awareness - your customer becomes aware of the problem they need to solve.
Consideration - the stage when customers research the ways to solve their problem.
Decision - customers decide to purchase and evaluate different options.
Onboarding - customers purchase the product.They interact with it.
Post-sales - the Retention stage
Renewal and Advocacy - customers invite others to try the product.
How to create a typical Customer Journey Map?
There are no required rules. It is important to understand the strong points without which the document will be incomplete, the rest remains your discretion.
You can visualize your CJM with Hygger.io boards. Let's look at an example of CJM for B2B SaaS product.
In common words, you can use 7 main stages to create CJM:
1. Set up clear goals about what you want to achieve from the mapping process.
2. Plan the major steps your customers will take in their entire relationship with you.
3. Understand the customer motivation at each point.
4. Add your Business Goals at each point. Download a free trial at the Decision stage.
5. Conduct a Touchpoint Audit. As a touchpoint is every interaction that you have with your customers, so it can be emails, advertising, social media content, and so on.
6. Rate yourself by assessing the Brand Experience.
7. Plot the Opportunity section.
A single look at the map should be enough to understand which channel and content the client needs at this interaction point. It is necessary to rely on real practice and experience of communication with the customer service department and the support team.
What are the results?
Creating CJM organizes relationships with customers and helps provide the right content at the right time. The real impact of CJM can be seen not earlier than a half of a year after the map is put into service.
Moreover, after initial assessment and design, CJM needs to be constantly adjusted.
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Want to find out more about the method? These resources should be helpful: