You already know that your product works. Hundreds, thousands or even millions of unique users use it; they have different needs, problems and different ways of using it and its functionalities.
Perhaps now, you wonder if there is a way to clearly present their behaviours and to analyze how the product or service is being used. Are you able to define sectors in which you are doing well and those in which you should improve something? - Well, yes, you are... A Customer Journey Map is a perfect tool, which will enable to visualize your clients experiences, feelings and needs, and will provide loads of valuable information.
What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map is nothing but illustrating your clients experiences in the entire process of using a service or a product. It allows to understand a customer and answer questions such as how and when the customer uses your product? How does he feel? Is he satisfied or does he need anything else?
What’s in a journey map?
To be useful, a map should contain some various information, seen from customer's perspective: touchpoints between the brand and the client, experiences and feelings accompanying at each of these touchpoints; as well as customer’s expectations on which he assesses his entire journey with your brand. The map is complemented by information about tools, processes and tasks, which affect these touchpoints. But remember, when creating a map, you need to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and just take his perspective.
The map should have a clearly defined beginning and the end of customer’s journey. It’s also important to specify the customer for which we create a journey map; for this purpose first you should define your target groups (read our article about defining target groups here), and then you can create a user persona profile (a hypothetical profile of your customer).
To build a journey map, you can use ready-made solutions. Internet provides loads of useful tools, which allow to create customer journey maps, I truly recommend:
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https://uxpressia.com/ - a fantastic tool to build visually attractive, colorful journey maps, user persona profiles and empathy maps
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https://touchpointdashboard.com - great if you want to create simple and clear journey maps, user persona profiles and generate graphs, reports, analysis.
What are the benefits?
Journey maps allow to understand customer’s needs and perspective better, and thus to create and improve products, services and the entire customer’s purchase processes, by improving his experience and finding new touchpoints and paths to reach prespective customers. However, there are much more additional advantages of creating journey maps; when implementing them:
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You gather valuable knowledge in one place - as map clearly visualizes the most important interactions between customers and your product;
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You deepen knowledge about customers - map presents that we know how the product is used and we can seize this opportunity;
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You know strengths and weaknesses of a product, service or purchasing process - on the map you can see what you are doing well, and what you should improve.
Although the text focuses on creating journey maps for existing products or services, nothing stands in the way of to use a map to create new solutions - as it supports innovation by revealing new opportunities, hidden potential and new applications.
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