Creating a Customer Journey Map: A Step-by-Step Guide

A customer journey map is an illustration or diagram of all the touchpoints your customers have with your company, whether online or offline, throughout the customer experience service transformation.

Journey mapping helps you visualize how customers experience your product or service and how they feel along the way.

User journey maps allow you to understand each step customers have to take, their interaction at each phase, and their experience from the first contact with your product until they become a customer or abandon your user journey.

This guide will give you a template to use as you create your first customer journey map and outline these seven steps to follow.

Step-by-Step Process of Creating a Journey Map

Set clear objectives for the map.

Customer journey mapping should ideally focus on a single persona's experience in a single scenario with a single goal. To get started, first, you need a clear goal.

Rather than creating a customer journey map just to create one, decide what goal the organization aims to accomplish through the map.

Map out the following things.

• Which customers are you targeting?
• Which types of experiences do you want your maps to highlight?
• What should be the outcome of these goals
• What metrics will be used to track the progress? (Setting clear goals is worthless if there's no standard for measuring them)

Conduct research

Collect quantitative and qualitative data on your consumers from both internal and external sources to identify trends in not just the types of purchasers your company now draws but also how they perceive their experiences.

This information can be obtained from various sources, including,

• Your own website analytics
• Social media
• Call center recordings
• Support logs
• Directly from customers themselves through surveys.

This information will help gather a range of responses, from high-level goals to pain points to requested features or services.

Read more on- Customer Experience as a Service

Profile your personas and define their goals.

From this collected data, determine which customer personas you want to target when creating maps.

Here comes a customer experience consulting company that will create well-developed personas and can pull insights from surveys, interviews, testimonials, reviews, and feedback from customer relations teams. These teams typically have an excellent understanding of the pain spots that contribute to drop-offs during the buying process.

The more particular information you can gather about your consumers and what they desire, the more useful your customer journey maps will be.

Map the current buyer journey

With the target persona, back story, and destination in place, it's time to walk a mile in their shoes.

Once you've identified your customers and touchpoints, you can map the steps that buyers take to make purchases with your brand.

Identify the channels used for each action in the customer journey. Depending on the circumstances, channels may include a website, phone, email, postal mail, in-person, and/or social media.

Here, the CX consulting teams would represent every variation on the buyer's journey based on these interaction in correspondence to small-volume and large-volume purchases.

Map the ideal buyer journey.

The journey you want customers to take may vary largely from their actual journey, and this is where the gap needs to be fixed. This happens especially when new products or services are released and the desired buyer journey changes as a result. Be sure to match the ideal and actual buyer journeys on your maps in parallel to find out the accurate gaps.

Determine the resources you have and the ones you'll need

Now comes the actual work, translating a theoretical map into a lived experience for customers requires.

Additional requirements could include new software or a larger budget to help decrease costly friction points and gaps that cause revenue loss.

Make a precise list of everything that will be required to build the new map, and avoid getting halfway through before discovering you don't have enough resources to finish the project.

Final Words

As your company or brand evolves and introduces new products and services, the customer experience changes, and so does the target persona, eventually changing the overall customer journey map.

In this case, partnering with a customer experience consulting company assists you with the required improvement initiatives within the company. They also provide the technical resources to refine the overall customer experience transformation.