How To: Customer Journey Mapping

Experience the Journey through Your Customer’s Eyes

Journey Mapping visually maps the customer’s interactions – and most importantly their emotions – across the various touchpoints of the customer experience.

Why is Journey Mapping Important?

Identifying customers’ emotional lows & highs can inform strategies to improve customer experience, brand promoters, & loyalty.

Customer Journey Mapping 101

Conduct Customer Research – use research to get to an in-depth understanding of your customer and what each step in the journey is like from their perspective

Hold a Journey Mapping Session – usually done in a cross-functional team setting, this allows all stakeholders to come to a common understanding of customer touchpoint interactions and emotions

Identify and “Fix” the Problems – use the customer journey map to brainstorm, target opportunities where customers are most unhappy, and implement initiatives that impact the journey

Measure Customer Experience Efforts – measure the impact of the initiatives with your customers and continue to retest the customer journey and make improvements

Talk to customers to understand their journey

Research Methods can include:• Interviews• Shop-a-longs• In-home

Observations

• Online Journals• Mobile Qualitative• Customer Summits • And more…

In many cases, it is helpful to follow the qualitative research with a survey to quantitatively measure various parts of the journey.

Research will help you understand the following for each part of the journey:

• What customers do at each step in the journey

• How they feel at each step of the journey

• What they are expecting • Who or what they are interacting with• How they feel today and how they

want to feel

Use the inputs from the research to collectively map the customer journey with your team. This is typically done in a cross-functional team meeting. This hands-on, collaborative mapping activity reinforces the research, gets buy in on the customer viewpoint from the team, and engrosses everyone in the customer’s voice.

Example Customer Journey Map included on the following slide

Hold a Journey Mapping Session

Discovery of Need/Want

Research/Decide on Company

Begin Shopping/ Enter Store

Evaluate Options/Decide

Make Purchase

Repurchase Loyalty/Engagement

CustomerExperience

Emotion Graph

Customer Quotes

Opportunities

1 2

3 4

5 6

7 8

9 1

0 Delighted

Dissatisfied

CUST

OM

ER JO

URN

EY M

AP T

EMPL

ATE

Include customer quotes that support the emotion at each touchpoint in this row

Identify opportunities for improving the experience at each touchpoint in this row

Note the customer emotion at each step in this row – from dissatisfied to delighted

Identify specific steps in the journey and customer experience in this row

Note: The sample template is intended to be an example, and should be customized to reflect a specific consumer journey.

Map the GapsAs you map the journey, circle the gaps in how the customer feels and how you want them to feel, as well as the gaps in what the customer expects and what they are getting today. Afterwards, conduct group brainstorming activities to determine what initiatives can be implemented to overcome those gaps.

Your Customer’s Ideal JourneyBy the end of your Journey Mapping Session you should be able to identify the desired customer journey and the initiatives that can be taken to get there.

Next you will want to: • Implement the initiatives that

your team has identified to impact the journey

Use the journey map to understand where customers are feeling emotional lows (unsatisfied, disappointed, frustrated, etc.) and strategize around ways to make those experiences a high. Conversely, you can look at the highs and strategize about ways to leverage those highs for loyalty, referrals, etc.

• Identify clear objectives for what you want to learn, develop baseline metrics, and ensure the insights gathered are actionable

• Measurement can be a combination of existing metrics (i.e. customer satisfaction, referrals, etc.), and new metrics gathered through research conducted with customers using surveys, interviews, and focus groups

• Continue to retest the customer journey and make improvements • Combining quantitative and qualitative measurement tools can be very

impactful:– Customer surveys and existing metrics: Provides baseline and tracking measures– Customer interviews, focus groups, and observations: Provides the “why” behind the

results as well as new ideas for improvements

Develop baseline metrics to measure improvements from your initiatives

Customers are at the center of what we do. We would love to chat with you about making your customer’s experience even better.

Ask us about how we have helped companies large and small get closer to their customers and create compelling experiences.

At Clearworks we help our clients connect with their customers to create clear and compelling products, services and messages. We get what it takes to bring a product or service idea to life and how to create an actionable plan to get there. We understand what you need to know and how you’re going to use that information to make decisions. Let us bring clarity to your products and services.

customers. connections. clarity.

Thank You.