A customer journey map is a visual representation of the end-to-end customer experience from the customer perspective. It reveals the customers' experiences and motivations when interacting with a specific brand and products at various touchpoints. This allows organizations to deliver personalized and highly relevant customer experiences.

Description

Organizations undertaking digital transformation have created a heightened need to ensure a robust and seamless customer experience across all customer touchpoints. Due to their holistic nature, customer journey maps provide insight on:

• Customer needs,
• Emotions, and
• Touchpoints.

They reveal opportunities to:

• Satisfy pain points,
• Alleviate fragmentation, and
• Expose new opportunities to improve the customer experience.

There can be several types of journeys for different customer segments. Before a Product Owner creates journey maps, they should articulate the objective and know what they want to get out of it. This will help them to determine what type of journey they need to map.

• Understanding how a customer felt before they started the journey may provide:
  • Insights or additional questions,
  • Knowing why they like the way something works, or
  • Hearing what they wish it did (each time they do the thing that they do not like).

Knowing what the organization wants the customer to think, feel, and say at the end of their journey helps them have a better way of understanding customer value and differentiating from their competitors.

Customer journey maps are beneficial in:

• Identifying touchpoints (i.e., where customers interact with the organization),
• Giving an external perspective to the sales process,
• Focusing the business on customer needs at different stages in the buying process,
• Showing gaps between desired customer experience and the one received, and
• Allowing to concentrate resources on what matters most to maximize effectiveness.

Components of customer journey maps:

There are variations of customer journey maps. However, common components include

• Stages or Touchpoints: These include the occasions when the customer interacts with the organization in some capacity.
  • Awareness - The potential customer is aware of a need or problem, and the product is one of the possible solutions.
  • Consideration - The customer has researched the product and compared it to its competitors to help evaluate whether to purchase it or narrow down the options.
  • Decision - The customer has evaluated the product against competitive products and, based on it being "fit for use" and "fit for purpose," decided to purchase one of them.
  • Retention - Post-purchase, the organization needs to remain engaged with their customers, and gather their feedback to improve the product and the customer experience.
  • Advocacy - The organization needs to convert customer loyalty to word-of-mouth advocacy.
• Activities or Actions: These occur within each of the stages that include communications and interactions between the customer and the organization.
• Channels: The channels through which the customer interactions and communications happen.
• Expectations: The organization's perception of what the outcome of each stage should be, including what the customer should feel or experience.
• Experiences: The outcome and experience of each stage, from the customer perspective.
• Feelings: How the customer was feeling at each stage, choosing from a range of emotions.