Customer Journey Maps
- paul shustak
- May 5, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: May 25
A customer journey map is a diagram that shows how customers interact with a product as they move through different stages of use. Creating a journey map has several benefits:
Uncovers problems and opportunities – Journey maps are a great way to identify pain points that your product can potentially address. Conversely, they help you identify parts of the journey where customers are satisfied with their existing solution and may not be interested in yours.
Empathy – Journey maps help bring your customer’s experience to life and create shared empathy among your team.
Inspires system-level thinking – The process of creating a journey map forces you to break down how the customer experiences your sales process, marketing and product into discrete touchpoints that work in unison to influence customer behavior.
Journey Map Design
The type of data displayed on journey maps vary widely but the basic format is the same: a horizontal diagram divided into columns representing stages or touchpoints. Each touchpoint represents an interaction with a company or its product. The diagram’s rows are used to communicate various aspects of the customer’s experience at each stage. The possibilities here are nearly endless, but you will probably want your map to answer the following questions at each stage:
What goal is the customer trying to achieve?
Are they satisfied or dissatisfied?
What problems are they encountering?
Creating your Map
Prior to launching your product you will be using the journey map to diagram your customer’s interactions with existing solutions. After you launch, you can use journey maps to analyze customer interactions with your own product. Here’s how to create your first journey map:
Choose a customer profile – What type of customer will your map focus on? For maximum accuracy, you should base your map on the experiences of your interview subjects. You can even combine multiple subjects into a single profile. You can also bring these profiles to life with a technique called personas. If you haven’t yet created personas, we provide more information about them here.
Define a scenario – What overall goal is the customer is trying to achieve? For example, if they are buying a car, the map should be confined to activities related to that scenario.
Define your touchpoints – What stages does the customer go through as they complete the scenario?
Decide what to analyze – For each stage in the journey, you will be analyzing some aspect of the customer’s experience. Create horizontal rows for each type of experience you wish to analyze.
Map the customer journey – Fill out the horizontal rows on your map with the data you are analyzing at each stage. If you have insufficient knowledge to complete this step, you can conduct additional interviews or surveys.
A Few Final Tips
Validate your assumptions - When you first create your map it's acceptable to leave gaps or make assumptions when you don’t have enough data. The process of creating the map is valuable in and of itself because it forces you to put yourself in the customer's shoes. However, it is risky to continue the product discovery process for too long without closing these gaps because over time you and your team are likely to accept these assumptions as facts. Therefore it's important to have a plan in place to validate your map by asking actual customers about their journey.
Start with the pre-purchase experience – Even though you are focused on product discovery, it's important to map the parts of the journey that take place before the customer encounters your product, such as your sales and marketing funnels. These can provide valuable insights about how to design a better product. By the same token, don’t forget about the post-purchase experience. How do customers get support if they have problems, or refunds if so desired?
Next Up – The MVP
Next in the series we dive deeper into the Minimum Viable Product – a battle tested approach for validating your product idea.
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