Taking the Next Step with Customer Journey Maps
Customer journey maps are powerful tools for building empathy for customers and gaining an in-depth understanding of their interactions across an end-to-end experience. We’ve worked with our clients to map the journeys of customers navigating health insurance, buying diapers, using antivirus software, purchasing a new home, and more.
Listening to and observing customers as they take us with them on their journey, we capture what they are doing, thinking, feeling and saying to gain a deep understanding of their experience. And, in the design process, we visually represent the journey in a way that brings it to life and makes the map engaging and actionable.
A lot goes into creating journey maps – it’s an immersive process. It’s important not to get so caught up in creating the actual maps that you forget why you embarked on the endeavor in the first place.
Ultimately the goal of journey mapping is for teams throughout the organization to use the maps to better understand the customer experience, identify opportunity areas, and use the insights gained to help drive decisions and actions. We’ve seen some powerful applications of journey maps:
- Marketing teams for a large health insurance company better understanding the consumers goals at each stage in journey and ideating around emotions and pain points so they can develop new messaging and positioning
- Product teams for a mortgage app company identifying the critical pain points and barriers that consumers face and creating new product features to make the experience easier to understand and navigate
- Digital Strategy teams for a CPG company understanding how consumers are interacting with different online touchpoints so they can build strategies to get the right content in front of them at critical points in their journey
But all of that requires socializing and activating the maps so they aren’t just a pretty picture. Get the most out of your customer journey maps by taking the critical next steps. We’ve written two blog posts sharing some ideas for socializing and activating journey maps. Be sure to check them out here:
Socializing Customer Journey Maps Far and Wide
Activate Those Customer Journey Maps
We always love talking customer experience and journey maps so feel free to reach out!
Sara Dougherty
sara@clearworks.net
