Customer Journey Mapping Made Easy
Like many, I’ve spent countless hours looking for ways to improve my customer’s journey. It can be challenging to even know where to start. Rather than tackle the improvements straight away, have you defined your customer journey in the first place?
Documenting the entire customer journey from beginning to end can seem a bit overwhelming given the number of touch points you have with each user. Plus, each user can behave differently than another. In this blog, I’ll cover an easier way to document and improve the customer journey by focusing on what matters most.
How Many Journeys Are There?
Because there are so many different ways a customer or end-user can experience your product and brand, there is not a single customer journey. Rather, there are many different paths (or journeys) that a customer can take with your company.
Warning: Mapping out every possible journey can be a rabbit hole. Determine the key experiences first and then work back into other journeys if needed.
Here are a few to think about first:
Focus on the key milestones
- Welcoming the Customer
- Onboarding/Implementation
- Primary adoption (when the end users are beginning to use your product)
- Steady state (after the end users have been fully trained)
- Upsell (where applicable)
- Renewal (where applicable)
Other Journeys that can be important
- Onboarding a new end user of an existing client
- Customers who have been onboarded and are not adopting
How to Define a Journey
There are four basic things that you need to begin:
- A mapping tool
- A starting point of the customer journey
- An ending point for the journey map
- An inventory of resources you can provide to the customer
Mapping tools
I prefer a fishbone diagram for customer journeys because I can more easily include plays for key milestones. If you’re looking for a mapping solution, try XMind’s mapping product – it’s free!
The Beginning
Where the customer journey begins is a bit of a religious debate. There are some customer experience professionals that believe that the customer journey begins after the first sale with the client, and others believe that the customer journey begins with the first time the customer learns of your brand.
I’m in the latter camp. I firmly believe that the customer journey begins with the first time a prospect hits your web site. The reason for this is that the entire relationship with your customer is predicated on their first impression of your brand, which directs them to continue to research your brand and enter into some form of early relationship with you (or not).
The End
It’s hard to say where the customer journey ends, if it ends at all. It depends on a few factors – if your company services businesses or consumers and how your product is sold (subscription / recurring purchases – or not).
For documentation purposes, let’s go with an evergreen customer journey. This will allow you to get a feel for how to set up any post-renewal programs that you want to put into place.
Resources
The journey map should be rich with opportunities to deliver content to your clients and/or end users. Ensure that you are familiar with the types of resources that your marketing, customer success, customer support, and product teams have curated so that you can leverage their great work to influence your customer’s experience and advance their journey.
Break it up by Milestones
As I mentioned, to sit down and create one giant customer journey can be time consuming and arduous. To make the job more manageable, break up your customer experiences by milestones.
For example, give consideration to what happens today with your customers/end users after they execute a purchase. The customer welcome milestone might look like this journey:
Repeat this process for each of the milestones in your company and create separate diagrams.
For more advanced milestones (such as onboarding/implementation), give consideration to the potential “highs and lows” that your customers will experience during that process and plan for added support and/or accelerated advancement:
“Other” Journeys
There really isn’t a term for what I’m calling “other journeys”. Essentially I’m using this term to describe a customer or end user who has gotten off of the ideal customer journey that you’re mapping for.
When this happens, that end user or customer will go off on a separate path and your effort is to get the customer/end user back on track. For more common situations, your Customer Success team may have an actual playbook that they follow. However, not all companies have Customer Success Managers or have playbook processes established.
By creating a plan of action for customers or end users who have strayed away from the ideal journey, you’re in a great position to better retain those clients.
To plan for these events simply use the same process outlined in the “Break it up by Milestones” section.
Put it All Together
Once you’ve accounted for the major events, assemble your journey into a larger diagram:
The larger diagram will serve the entire company on a wider basis as it will visually represent the various teams (and even team members) that have a role to play in your customer’s journey. Additionally, it will aid you to identify areas of required improvement more easily as well as areas of exposure.
Final Thoughts
I’ve been asked a few times if there is a generic customer journey template that can be augmented to suit. Initially, I attempted to create a genericized version of the customer journey as a sharable resource.
What I learned through that process is that your customer experience is unique to you. The relationships and experiences that you create for your customers are better suited to be built by you.
That said, as you’re creating your customer journeys, there are a few elements that are best practice, ensure that your journey map includes:
- Dates (or time frames) for each milestone
- Resource lists and/or action plans for each milestone
- Teams or Owners for each milestone
- Call out areas of exposure for churn (such as hand off processes)
Happy Mapping!
