Mapping User Journeys
A true understanding of your customers is critical to your success. One exercise that can be helpful is mapping the journey of your customers across their interactions with your company. Even if you have a fairly transactional business, for example selling products, this process helps to identify where there are barriers for customers that prevent them from going ahead with a purchase or even where you can go above and beyond to enhance their experience to ensure they keep returning.
What is a journey map?
A journey map is usually a way of describing how your customers interact with your business. There are various approaches you can take but it might be a document or visualisation. You need to think about each step someone might take from their initial contact with you to getting a proposal or browsing product to buying something or receiving a service. There may be multiple pathways or journeys that can fork in different directions or different types of customers or parties that interact with your business. At each stage of every journey it’s useful to ask yourself some questions to reflect on how your users or customers are feeling so that you can identify those critical areas to improve or adapt.
What are the benefits?
Benefits might include spotting operational inefficiencies in your business, finding things that you do to really please and delight customers, identifying barriers that prevent customers from buying products or services and seeing where there may be challenges as the business scales. It can also help you work out where to focus resources - always useful if you’re a smaller organisation. Ultimately, this is an exercise that helps puts the customer at the centre of everything you offer and so it contributes to improving the overall experience of your customers. Usually, if you manage to please your customers, you tend to see this reflected in the profitability and success of your business.
Where to start?
Step 1: Determine who your customers are - you can pick a specific person to really get into the right mindset or if you have a sense of different types of customer you could create a journey for each group.
Step 2: Map the interactions of the customer with your business across time. Think about all the digital and human touch points as well as those with third parties (eg the postal service).
Step 3: For each interaction think about exactly what the customer is experiencing and how it makes them feel. Are there any points of frustration, fiddly processes or things that take longer than expected?
Step 4: Identify opportunities for improvement for each challenge.
Step 5: Validate your map by working through it with some real life customers and data.
Step 6: Prioritise opportunities for improvement - you could even tie these to company goals.
Once you have your map(s) don’t forget that it’s important to review them regularly as you make changes or as your products and markets change so that you are up to date with what’s most important to your customer.
This can feel like a tricky process. If you are a founder of a business, it can particularly difficult to take an impartial view, but it’s certainly worthwhile to step back and do it so you make sure you are focusing on the right things for your customer. If you need any help with Journey Mapping (as always) please feel free to get in touch!
