Business professionals often build a customer journey map when it comes to understanding customer buying behavior. No wonder since it is one of the most powerful ways to describe how users achieve their goals.
So, by identifying how to fill out a journey map, you will learn to:
- anticipate customer behavior,
- understand how to capitalize on it,
- outperform your competitors.
In this regard, it is best to know some of the specifics before creating custom journey maps.
Our helpful guide will walk you through all the main peculiarities of a customer journey map. With its benefits in mind, we will assess the role in terms of your business goals and describe what happens at each stage of the user journey. Plus, Arounda's proven expertise and successful examples will help you easily determine real value when designing a custom journey to best suit your long-term product and marketing needs.
Customer Journey Map on UX Design stage
User journey mapping is currently one of the most powerful processes that reflect customers' actions, thoughts, emotions, and problems while achieving their goals. The latter means that a customer makes a purchase, joins a loyalty program, subscribes to a store's mailing list, etc.
"The UX journey map gives you a clear idea of what motivates your customers to achieve those goals and what obstacles they might face."
User scenarios are stories that designers create to show how a potential user will interact with a product or act, keeping in mind how they will use it. Once completed, they can be analyzed to obtain specific information. Customer journey use cases describe scenarios for specific user experience, actions, interaction with the product or service, and system reactions.
However, it isn't easy to imagine and take into account all the factors at once. That is why this journey is visualized with a flow chart on the UX design stage that all stakeholders can refer to if needed. The diagram below shows horizontally how a customer interacts with a company. It vertically shows the customer touchpoints or concerns and interactions with key tasks at each journey stage.
A customer journey map (CJM) consists of important milestones. Each company defines these milestones individually based on unique product or service requirements. In other words, milestones can be called stages on the customer journey, where you can understand what the customer is doing when they enter that stage.
When creating a map, it is necessary to track customer behavior at all user touchpoints with the company. Touchpoints are met when your potential customer comes into direct contact with your business and can form personal feedback. For example, it can be a display ad, google review, an error, etc.
In a well-crafted customer journey map, a UX designer describes what happens at each user journey stage from the first user touchpoint till the final key interaction with the product.
Designers need to collect enough information about the buyer and the product for decent analysis and correctly reflect it in the diagram. That helps to see the unresolved needs of the client and evaluate specific problems when interacting with the product to improve the user experience using this knowledge.
Four benefits of user journey mapping for product
A journey mapping UX stage enables your organization to maximize customer success to a greater extent. What's more, according to a CSMA report, over 90% of organizations that have used customer journey mapping have agreed to have a positive impact on customers and the whole organization. Collecting practical insights from CJM on solving customer problems or expanding their opportunities in the long term provides the following important benefits.
Driving customer loyalty
You would agree, your organization's profitability and revenue are largely depending on customer retention. In this way, customer-centric organizations seek to reduce barriers for customers to return them to using a product or service through user journey maps.
Stimulating customer conversion
CJM helps remove unnecessary touchpoints and streamline the customer journey to meet their needs in the fewest steps. In other words, it helps your organization identify key pain points to eliminate them or turn them into opportunities for improvement. With a complete view of the customer journey, it is easier to identify some of the actions or problems that users face before they decide to stop using your product or service.
Increasing customer focus
If you know all the touchpoints of your customers, you can better understand how your customers move through the conversion funnel. Journey map UX helps improve overall customer experience and shift focus from organizational issues to customer issues. In this way, a clear customer journey map can be distributed across all departments of your organization to create a customer-centric approach, from initial attention to post-purchase support.
Correctly prioritizing a product or service
By mapping out a customer journey, you can highlight the main and important areas to make the most of your efforts. Plus, it works for both goals and also helps to highlight unimportant areas for rework and cost optimization. Since all parts are interconnected in your CJM, you focus on areas that matter most.
As a result, the right priorities are set for the further development of the product or service. And it becomes clear where you can optimize your customer service costs.
How to fill the journey map?
After having the basics in mind, let's start understanding how to visualize this process step by step. Your map can include more or fewer steps depending on your industry, customer type, or product. If you're wondering how to create a customer journey map from scratch, we recommend that you start with one target person and one customer scenario for exploration and visualization. Therefore, it will be easier for you to figure out how user journey maps are built.
1. Set goals
Everything new starts with defining the purpose and scope of your customer journey map template. Here, cross-functional teamwork is required. Without collecting unique opinions and ideas about every part of your existing customer journey, it's hard to imagine the impact your CJM will have.
In addition, you should choose a tool with which you will collect data for the map and draw it. You can choose from many options, such as Miro and Figma, which are often used for this purpose.
2. Conduct persona research
To fill out the map template, your team needs to collect real user experience with the help of conducting client interviews or leveraging web analytics to understand what is needed from the business. This step requires the business to immerse into the project and get as much information as possible from your customer. It requires more than four real interviews with clients or users.
To see the big picture through the prism of the client, your team will have to spend a lot of time collecting all the relevant data about the user persona. It also takes time for the team to brainstorm internally to make data-driven decisions. Otherwise, you can order the services of an external specialist. It will be even better and more useful. It will help you get an outside perspective and confidence in what is going on.
Additionally, formulate problems or tasks that this map can solve and choose the research method of building the map, for example:
- Surveys
- Interviews with users
- Observations
- Diary research.
After that, you can select an audience and determine when and what tasks this audience begins to contact the business.
Important to note, you need to understand that this is not a one-time study, and once filling out the map, it will give the desired effect in the short term. You will achieve a stable effect if the team regularly works with the map.
3. List out all customer touchpoints
Once you've learned all the essential information on the customer's target persona, it's time to reflect on these interactions and list all the touchpoints. They describe how and where your customer interacts with your product or service. At this stage, you also need to consider all the ways your client might come across. For example, you can include mentions, social channels, email marketing, or paid ads here.
4. Map out pain points and opportunities for improvement
By knowing the customer touchpoints, you can list all the actions, emotions, or motivations your customers might experience when interacting with your business. Map the survey data with your team. As a result, you can highlight pain points, generate some interesting ideas, or think of great features to help you engage your customers and solve problems.
5. Make the necessary changes
Your data analysis will give you a sense of what is needed to make. Based on the backlog, it is important to update these maps regularly. To produce results, you need to constantly apply different UX research methods to the data obtained to generate new ideas for product development. In addition, you should look for opportunities for improvement and ways to change the product radically or, if necessary, launch a new one.
Below you can find some successful customer journey map examples to help you better understand how other companies describe their user maps.
- Dapper apps
This map shows the five steps Dapper believes their customers experience when interacting with the app. This map is effective because it helps the company understand their customers' problems, how they feel, and respond to them.
- IdeaRocket customer journey map
Idea Rocket’s clearly describes the process at every stage of the customer journey. As you can see in the picture, they define six stages to generate valuable information.
Arounda’s Experience: Effective CJM for Fintech Solution
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When we talk about real and effective experiences, we're referring to one of our great examples of team design thinking. Designed for the Fintech niche, BlocFX is an OTC platform that offers users a two-way exchange of cryptocurrency and fiat money. Users can buy foreign currency and make payments through their bank accounts and wallets. In addition, OTC service and transaction history are available.
Thanks to our experience, we were able to define a strategy and help implement UX and UI design. Based on modern technologies, our highly professional designers and developers guided the OTC platform development process.
To fulfill a customer’s requirements, we have made every effort to conduct customer research to develop an actionable user journey map. After the client approved the map, we continued to apply our core expertise to implement a fintech solution. As a result, we’ve managed to ensure a successful and hassle-free customer experience on this project.
Develop Best UX Map with a Reliable Partner
Simply put, a UX customer journey map allows you to understand your business through the lens of a customer. Here are the main takeaways:
- A customer journey map on the UX design stage describes the customer's journey towards purchasing a product. This map reflects the actions, thoughts, emotions, and pain points your customers can encounter.
- By leveraging the customer journey map as a useful tool, you will drive the client's loyalty to your business, increase customer conversion, improve customer focus, and set the right product development priorities.
- Creating a journey map involves setting goals, doing target persona research, listing all customer touchpoints, mapping pain points, and making the necessary adjustments.
Hope you found this article useful in helping you to better interact with customers in full swing.
Either way, you can rely on our niche-deep expertise to maximize your chances for a long-lasting and successful customer experience. Contact us any time and ask for our professional team's advice. We are always ready to provide you with ongoing digital product UX/UI and web design support. You can always rely on our rich experience and look at our works.
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