Did you know that the secret to discovering what customers want is right under your nose? The ancient secret can be found on a journey map. Well, it’s actually not that much of a secret or on an ancient map. A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.
Do you want to give consistently great services to your customers?
Are you curious why customers aren’t meshing well with your brand?
Why aren’t customers engaging like they used to?
Boom! All of these questions can be answered by journey mapping. A journey map exists to reveal your customers’ goals and not the goals of your business. What’s more important than putting customers first?
Yep, nothing.
A journey map is going to guide your team out of your own heads for a while and put you in the shoes of your customers.
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Examples of a Journey Map
So, you’ve heard of this amazing tool called a journey map and have heard that it will help your business run in a more customer-centric efficient way. What good is a strategy that isn’t working? We think we owe it to you to get more specific on what a journey map can do for your business:
- reveals gaps in content and reality
- allows us to remove inconsistencies and barriers for users
- gives an overall yet specific view on how customers interact with your brand
A journey map will ultimately help your team to have an accurate understanding of how customers are navigating and connecting with your website. Then, you will be able to adjust existing strategies or create new ones based on what the customer wants, not just what aligns with company goals.
Key Components of a Journey Map
Journey maps are totally customizable and come in all shapes and colors. There are general components that every journey map will have in common and it’s important that yours follows a similar key.
Personas- who will be taking the journey? Assign goals, motivations, choice criteria, etc. to the persona. If you are looking to explore the journeys of multiple personas then assign one persona per map. This will allow your outcomes to be specific.
Concerns & expectations- make the concerns and expectations specifically built around the item or area being evaluated. These can be with products, services, or systems already in place or ones that are anticipated.
Stages of the user’s journey- these stages or phases of the journey will allow a business to better understand step four (questions, emotions, and experiences of the user). These stages reveal the customers' thought process specific to your business and will vary depending on the niche of your business. For example, an eCommerce business may have the journey map stages be discovered, try, buy, use, seek support.
Questions, emotions, and experiences of the user- this allows you to see the actions taken by the user. Your team will also take in the mindset of the user. What are their reservations? Is the user delighted or frustrated with their journey?
Opportunities & pain points- How are you going to implement the changes that the user-guided you toward? Where are the areas of improvement and are there areas that you have neglected to nourish?
Wrapping Up- Why You Need a Journey Map
A journey map is an insightful tool that will guide you in understanding why customers are frustrated, not engaging, or ambivalent about their experience with your brand.
Who should you invite to the party? The key people of your team that should be in your journey mapping process are one representative of each team: the sales team, marketing team, product developers, and customer service. Keep the mapping teams small for best input and understanding (3-4 people). Journey mapping isn’t only a great tool to use, but also one to teach to your team. Keeping personas and stages of the customer journey are things we could all keep in the forefront of our minds.
It may not be a cool ancient map, but it’s the key to your success if you do it right.
See what we did there?
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