Designing an effective Customer Journey Map

4 key ingredients

December, 2023

Author: Dasha Lukiniha,​​​ Vice President

It is no secret that a user-friendly customer journey is key to attracting and retaining clients. 80% of customers now view the experience a company provides just as important as the product or a service on offer (1). Superior omnichannel customer experience helps drive loyalty to retailers. In fact, 60% of omnichannel customers would change retailers as a result of experiencing a poor and disconnected omnichannel experience (2).

It all starts long before the client takes that journey – it begins with building an effective Customer Journey Map – a tool specifically designed to understand and address key customer needs and pain points in their journey with the company. A customer journey map can be used to visualize your existing product journey or to explore future opportunities, showcasing all the different touchpoints a customer encounters when interacting with your company.

Below we explore some of the key ingredients that go into building an Effective Customer Journey Map.

1. Focus and clearly define the “Scenario” and the “Persona” you are working with.

It can be tempting to go big and map the entire end-to-end customer experience. However, the more you can focus on a sub-section and map the interaction-level view of the specific customer experience focused on achieving one particular goal, the more effective the map will be. Defining the right scenario based on the priorities your organisation is facing is key.

Scenario = journey to be mapped.

Ask yourself the following questions when prioritising the scenarios for your journeys:

1. What is the goal you want to achieve by designing this customer journey map?

2. Are you looking to assess the overall customer experience or a specific interaction or flow?

Gaining a higher-level view of the overall customer experience can help you with gaining an understanding of how the customer experience is delivered in broader terms. Focusing on the specific interaction, on the other hand, allows you to assess and correct inefficiencies in a specific interaction.

  • Example: A fintech deciding to focus on its onboarding Current Account experience as a result of determining that this flow has a significant impact on long term customer loyalty and CLV.

  • Example: A global retailer deciding to focus on its online payment customer journey as a key interaction point with a customer with a potential to impact sales volumes and customer acquisition rate.

  • Example: A financial services company deciding to focus its efforts on the Current Account application process as being one of the key interaction points with the company and looking for Moments of Truth in that experience impacting dropout rates.

Choose one persona and one scenario for each map to ensure it really speaks to a specific user persona.

Examples:

  • Stretched Fabio wants to sign up for a current account that will help him monitor his spending patterns to be able to start saving money. He is currently struggling to understand where he is spending his money and ways in which he can optimize his spending. He is used to shopping online and completing applications digitally end-to-end. Fabio prefers to be able to review the account and apply for it fully online while being sure that if he gets declined for an account, this won’t impact his credit score – so he favours the ability to utilise eligibility checker tools as part of the pre-application process. As part of his review and the decision-making process, he would like to easily see the innovative ways in which the issuer offers spending insights analytics.

  • Energised Cathy is looking to open a financial services account that will allow her to easily invest her money into stocks and cryptocurrencies. She has a full time job and is building a side business, and she is looking to start on the “user – friendly” digital investing journey. As she is busy and eager to start investing, she is looking for her vendor review and the application process to be digital end-to-end, with telephone support easily accessible if she gets stuck. As she is new to investing, she would ideally like to see a comparison of different plans and a comprehensive overview of account capabilities on offer, together with educational tools she can access when she signs up for an account.

  • Busy Susanne who wants to find a broadband subscription plan that provides her with high-speed internet to be able to perform her job well, as she is working from home. She is comfortable paying more for the service that is more reliable. She is very busy at her job and is expecting for the provider information to be clear and easy to understand when she is reviewing a plan, for her customer journey to be very efficient and she would prefer for the telephone support options to be easily accessible if she gets stuck, to save her time.

2. Get to know your customer to formulate and validate your hypotheses.

One of the important elements in designing an effective customer journey map is to build it with a customer’s viewpoint in mind. It needs to represent the path in a way the customer experiences and sees it, not what you perceive to be true based on the internal organisation’s perspective. Solid customer journeys are based on understanding key customer pains, needs and desires and this can only be achieved by formulating a hypothesis, testing and validating it.

Validate, don’t base your Customer Journey Map on assumptions 

Formulate   

Initial brainstorm and utilizing internal sources of information to understand:

  • What the user persona’s pains and needs are

  • How your existing customer journey stacks up and / or how well the journey you are about to build is designed to address key customer requirements in the market

Test

Test using internal sources for validation and external customer research to answer the following:

  • Do we need to modify parts of our initial hypothesis around customer needs and pains?

  • Do we need to focus our journey on addressing particular challenges

  • Where do the opportunities for improvement reside in our customer journey?

Validate 

Reinforce and enhance your hypothesis by:

  • Supplementing qualitative data and research with quantitative insights

  • Collecting additional data to fill gaps based on hypothesis tests

    Design the first draft of the map based on validated information

The power of research I: utilizing internal resources

Organisations with strong collaboration cultures are more likely to report higher revenue growth, according to Asana’s 2023 Anatomy of Work Global Index, which surveyed almost 10,000 people globally - with 55% of workers at collaborative organisations reporting revenue growth over the past 3 years, almost double the weak collaborators (3). Obtaining information and insights from the core team across departments can provide valuable information on understanding what the customer’s expectations, pains and needs are.

Customer success

Sales

Operations

Marketing

Other?

Product

Engineers

Assess your existing insights.

  • Identified user personas and their needs and pains

  • User stories and avatars

  • Customer feedback

  • Customer surveys

  • Market research

Conduct internal interviews.

Members of your organisation likely already hold a wealth of knowledge about the customer’s needs and pains and interviewing them as the first point of contact with the process can streamline your customer journey mapping process greatly.

Given the goals you have outlined for yourself, ask yourself the following:

“Which core teams are likely to hold relevant information for the journey I am looking to map?”

For example, if you are looking to map your product onboarding experience, examples of the relevant stakeholders might include:

  • Sales Department, able to speak about the needs and pains and desires as voiced by the customer across digital support channels or in real time contact with the sales operative.

  • Marketing Department, able to share User Persona profiles, their behaviours, habits and needs as well as feedback and analytics from the website and other channels.

  • Customer Success Department, able to share customer support logs and direct feedback from the customer around friction points and moments of delight.

  • Operations, Engineering and others…

The power of research II: Collect data from the end-users

  • Customer interviews

  • Surveys and Voice of the Customer

  • Focus groups

  • Workshops

  • Diary studies

  • Direct observation

  • Mystery shopping

  • Communication logs

  • Competitive landscaping

3. Keep the solution focused lens on.

It is easy to stay within your comfort zone and use a descriptive approach to mapping a customer journey where the main question you answer is – “What does the customer journey look like for the customer now and what are the current points of delight and pain?”.

To generate significant value, it is important to go one step further and answer the question:

“What insights, opportunities and solutions can be generated from this Map?”

A customer journey mapping workshop can provide a good starting point for solution idea generation:

1) SHARE the findings, role play and do interactive walkthroughs

2) EVALUATE how well the current customer flow solves customer needs, identify points of pain and delight and key Moments of Truth

3) GENERATE potential solutions and changes to the user experience flow

4. Set the right goals and expectations.

Customer journey mapping can seem like an intimidating process as many people view the map as “final” once it is ready. It is important to remember that Customer Journey Mapping is an iterative process with additions and modifications along the way. Conducting a streamlined customer journey workshop can help increase the efficiency of the process.

Customer Journey Mapping workshop can help:

1)      Align the major stakeholders across the Departments and get their buy-in

2)      Arrive at key “Customer Moments” and points of pain and delight

In designing your workshop, remember to involve all the key stakeholders to get their points of view and their alignment on what the optimal Customer Journey looks like. In addition to the core UX working teams, you may consider inviting people from the Product, Marketing, Sales, Operations, Engineering or Customer Success teams – teams that have contact and knowledge of your customer and their needs and pains.

Managing expectations is important and the speed of the process can depend on the type of interaction being mapped – whether it is a customer journey within a specific part of the customer experience being mapped or a broader customer experience throughout the product lifecycle. It can be more effective to focus the journey on a specific scenario and a persona, unless the goal is to assess broader customer experience of a product, which might involve a slightly different process.

One mapping workshop doesn’t guarantee a ready to go customer experience map, nor should it be expected. Walking away with a set of validated hypotheses, aligned stakeholders, further gaps identified to be tackled with customer research and a draft of a customer journey map focused on a specific scenario can be a realistic goal to aim for.  

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