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The principal goal of almost every business is attracting customers and driving profit. This is no secret, and some of the most successful companies make an effort to put the intentions and priorities of the customer first. How then, do you plan around what your customer wants Using various versions of a customer journey map helps teams identify, empathize, and target their customers in ways that position them toward their specific customer-facing goals.
This article will talk about what customer journey maps are, why they’re so important, and some common applications through IdeaScale Whiteboard. Check out our guides to online whiteboards and visual collaboration if you want to learn more about how IdeaScale Whiteboard enables collaboration for teams everywhere.
What is Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is defined as the visualization of the experience or journey that a customer travels as they are exposed to your product/service. It can follow their tangible actions, assumptions, or motivations through each different step of their interaction. It helps you tell the story of your customer’s experiences with your brand across all of their interactions.
Customer journey maps and customer journey mapping can sometimes get confused with one another, but they are essentially different steps of the same overall process. Customer journey maps are the templates, steps, and actions you use to determine your principal user’s journey, while customer journey mapping is the process of actually determining the actions or motivations of the customer. Mapping is where you really decipher their journey and visualize each step.
Customer Journey Map Importance
Customer journey mapping is all about understanding your customer’s intentions and creating the most optimal user experience while interacting with your brand. In order to both attract new customers and maintain loyalty with the ones you currently have, optimizing your customer experience is vital.
Creating a unique, personalized, and effective customer experience increases the value of your brand to new and existing customers. This experience can create important actions depending on the specific endpoints different customers interact with and you customize their experience.
Revealing the different scenarios where customers interact with your product/service and their reasons for doing so helps create a better understanding of why they are using your product/service. Having a clear understanding of these reasons allows you to target different sectors of your potential customer base with different strategies to best turn use into conversions.
Customer journey mapping is a key point of interest with the end goal of improving customer experience, and without mapping their intentions and actions it can be easy to mislead the experience provided to the customer. For that reason, customer journey mapping is a vital step in determining how to effectively target your customers.
Learn more: Experience Map vs. Customer Journey Map
Customer Journey Map Examples
Storyboarding
Storyboarding is one of the most principal methods of applying customer journey mapping. Begin by defining the scenario you are examining. This sets the parameters for your collaboration and creates boundaries to align your contributions. Next, explicitly draw out each step in the user’s journey. Try to make these steps as simple as possible to break down every small change that the users experience during their journey.
By breaking down each small step you are able to isolate the user’s feelings and intentions with every action they take, every screen they see, and every interaction they have. This makes it incredibly easy to understand where something goes wrong, why they like a certain feature, and what makes them click.
Storyboarding represents the core dynamic that customer journey maps seek to create and enables a deep dive into the user’s experience around your product/service. They are a great place to start if you are new to customer journey mapping and effective for any customer-facing scenario.
Persona Diagram
Persona diagrams are not the most common customer journey maps because they don’t deal with the precise interactions that your customers experience with your product/service. However, what persona diagrams do handle is the breakdown of who your customer is and what traits they have.
By better understanding the identity of your customers you gain insight into the reasons they have for using your product/service. This insight will pay for itself many times over because it allows you to go straight to the point that the users are looking for rather than beating around the bush and getting to the core of the interest.
Persona diagrams lay out multiple different aspects of your principal user. They mainly deal with the user’s description, their goals, their attitudes, some feedback you receive from them, and finally some solutions to their issues based on the previous sections. By highlighting all of these items you gain a deep and nuanced understanding of your customers and can better target their specific customer needs.
Customer Experience Map
The customer experience map focuses less on the actions and specific steps that your customer takes and more on the feelings and impressions that are felt by them during the process. Begin on this board by agreeing on a specific scenario that you will analyze. Based on this situation, break down what your customer has to learn, what they have to use, and what they have to remember.
By thinking about the specific items that you want your customers to use, learn, and remember, you not only think about the experience that you are providing but also target how they will react to this experience and interpret the changes. This is just as important as the changes you make because their interpretation and feelings about the experience create their opinions about it.
By targeting the things you want to create, you also expose where those feelings/experiences are currently lacking for the customer. This provides an easy method to help fill the holes in your current solution based on the value the customer is receiving.
Engaging New Customers
When considering how to diagram the journey of possible users it’s important to not only consider those users you already interact with but the customers you want to attract as well. The engaging new customers board is focused on methods to reach new customers and meet their needs.
This board allows you to target customers at each stage of their interaction. You begin with how you plan to initially reach them and proceed to follow through with the details you will use to impress them, engage them, and prompt their return. By focusing on different stages of their interaction with your product/service, you are able to separate their intentions from each action and therefore directly target their intentions.
While it is not a traditional customer journey map, the engaging new customers board allows you to target the assumptions and needs of any new customers which is vital if you are to optimize their experience. For this reason, it should be considered by any team looking to break down and optimize their user experience.
Learn more: What are Customer Needs?
Conclusion
Customer journey maps provide some of the most effective methods of targeting new users and optimizing their experience. If you are looking to learn more about how to target your customers and create an enjoyable customer experience then try using the boards above. You can check out our recent article on the Lander blog to learn more about content marketing, and if you are interested in learning more about virtual workshops check out our guides on IdeaScale Whiteboard and use our boards in our web app!
