A UX journey map is a powerful tool for understanding your customers and their experiences with your business. While it can take various forms, there are some underlying guidelines that all successful maps follow.
Focus on a specific business goal when designing your journey map. This will help you avoid wasting time on data that won’t result in useful insights.
Start With Personas
Understanding your customers’ needs as they move through the different stages of their journey is important. The B2B customer journey stages help you identify areas where your customer experience could improve. It can also help you find solutions to address these problems.
Start by identifying your buyer personas. These fictitious characters represent your average customers in terms of demographics and psychographics. You can then use this information to understand their goals and how they interact with your business.
While it may be tempting to group multiple personas, a UX journey map tracks one customer’s experience at a time. Including too many paths will confuse your research and not accurately reflect their experience with your company.
Once you have a rough outline of your customer journey map, it’s time to collect and analyze your data. This step is essential for creating a truthful narrative to inspire real-world changes to your website. Start by identifying the key moments of your customer’s journey. This could be anything from purchasing a product to contacting customer support.
Map Your Touchpoints
Once you clearly understand your customer personas, the next step in your journey-mapping process is selecting an experience you want to improve. For example, focus on the buyer’s journey while searching for a product or service. Or you could choose to map out the entire journey of a customer who has already purchased your product and is now evaluating their overall experience with it.
Once your selection is made, determine what specific touchpoints will be included in the map. These touchpoints can include any interactions that a customer has with your brand. This can include online reviews and in-person interactions with a sales rep. It would help if you also considered any interactions a customer may have with other companies or brands offering similar products or services.
It is a good idea to ensure that all of these interactions are represented in your final journey map. This will give you a comprehensive view of the entire customer experience, both positive and negative.
Create a Visual Representation
Once you have a full list of touchpoints and a clear understanding of the current experience, it’s time to turn that data into a visual representation. This will help you identify gaps or red flags at a glance, and it’ll also be easier to assign ownership of specific areas of the map (e.g., sales versus customer service).
This could be a timeline, flowchart, or pictograph; whatever best reflects your audience’s journey, ensure it includes the same elements as the original touchpoint map. Include all the emotions and actions that your customers are likely to have at each stage. For example, if your customers shop around online and look for reviews, they might feel frustrated or irritated.
This step is also a great opportunity to identify and prioritize pain points that will impact your business the most. For instance, if you discover that many customers are reluctant to sign up for a plan because of the price, your website can be updated with a more transparent pricing structure. This would reduce friction and increase conversions.
Analyze Your Data
If you want your client journey map to be truly effective, use data from various sources. This includes solicited data from customer satisfaction surveys and unsolicited data, such as social media comments or emails. It’s essential to have this additional data, as it will help you create a more truthful narrative.
To capture the full range of emotions that a customer experiences, you should also include behavioral data points. These could be things such as what the customer did on your website, how often they visited a specific page, or how long they stayed there.
Once you have gathered this data, analyzing the results and seeing where your customer experience could be better is important. For example, many customers leave before purchasing or give a low customer satisfaction score at the point of sale. In that case, you can prioritize these pages and try different improvements to improve the experience. Taking the journey yourself is also a great way to evaluate your completed map and ensure that it answers the question, “What would our customers want from this experience?”.
Take the Journey
A client journey map aims to improve the overall customer experience by better understanding what customers want and need from a brand. It helps marketers and sales teams prioritize what needs to happen to meet customers’ expectations and gives a clear picture of how people move through the sales funnel.
Once you’ve completed the mapping process, ensure everyone in your organization has a clear and shared understanding of the key observations. Getting everyone involved in the initial synthesis is critical, especially since cross-functional teamwork often brings new perspectives and insights.
It’s important to choose one point of view for each map (or persona or scenario) to avoid creating an aesthetic graphic that is difficult to understand. Choosing more than one can create confusion for your audience. Once your map is complete, use it to identify where your current customer satisfaction scores fall short of the expected experience. This is a great starting point to prioritize improvement initiatives. For example, if your customer satisfaction score at the point of purchase is below your target score, focus on improving that touchpoint first.
