Customer Journey Map
The importance of customer experience
The experience a customer receives will have a direct impact on your success and revenue:
Bad experiences will drive customers away. PWC states in their Experience is Everything report that “One in three consumers (32%) say they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience. This figure is even higher in Latin America, at 49%.”.
Inc. quoted the White House Office of Consumer Affairs in this article: “Dissatisfied customers typically tell nine to 15 others about their experience; some tell 20 or more.” This means that not only will you risk early churn of customers, but it can damage your brand’s reputation and impact future sales.
In this article from the Harvard Business Review: “Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.”
Customer Journey Map
A customer journey map is a technique designed to understand and improve a customer’s experience. It shows the steps a customer goes through with a product or service, such as joining, studying at and leaving a university. Rather than focussing solely on identifying pain points, this technique can enhance the customer’s experience by bringing a holistic perspective. In the example below, we see the high-level steps that represent an end-to-end journey. This one starts with the buying process:
Customer journey steps can be tailored to your specific organisation, as shown in the example university admissions flow below. Each stage can contain a lot of detail and you may wish to “zoom in” and build out a specific area:
Defining the customer
This section of the Market Positioning Canvas explains how to identify your customers. Creating the map with people within your target customer group is essential. Picking a customer who is not part of this can give unhelpful information. For example, if you target holidays for young families and create a map with input from senior citizens, you may end up with confusing feedback. If this feedback is acted upon at its worst, you can make the journey worse. You will create the journey map with these people:
Business-to-Customer (B2C) - The individuals buying your product are usually the same as the user. They can be profiled using the B2C Customer Persona Canvas. You will create the journey map with people who best represent your target customer group.
Business-to-Business (B2B) - In B2B, the user may be a different person from the buyer. In this case, you should profile these two groups separately. They can be profiled using the B2B Buyer Persona Canvas and the B2B User Persona Canvas.
The buyer persona is key for insights into the buyer’s journey stages. This includes aspects like buying motivation and procurement processes.
The user persona is key for insights into the product usage stages. This includes set up and day-to-day usage.
The scope of a map
Customer touchpoints can be either with software, such as a website, or an organisation’s teams. It is worth noting that Customer Journey Maps do not include the Service Design aspects. This is the part of a service that the customer cannot see, for example, a team working on accounting reports. “Service Design” is focused on efficiency, whereas “Customer Experience” cares not only about processes but also about how a customer thinks and feels.
The customer journey map
You can map out your entire customer process at a high level or zoom in. Below is an example zoomed-in customer journey for just a part of an overall process:
Optional aspects
In the example, we have considered a number of aspects of the customer’s journey. You can track additional aspects if they have value to you:
Goal - A summary of what the user is trying to achieve. This is useful if the steps are not self-explanatory.
Supporting Systems - Although the journey map does not contain service design aspects, you can list the software systems that support each step.
High-value strategic input
The “Issue/opportunity & work purpose” on the journey map will help you think through what you can do at each stage. You may wish to expand this out to the entire stage. For example, you could give the whole sign-up and security process to a third party. Strategy is categorised into one of five areas:
Aligned with these, you may have set a strategic priority in the Strategic Direction stage. For example, if your priority is to reduce operational costs, look for journey steps that are strongly contributing to these.
When recording items, seek to quantify their impact. This helps you prioritise and provides a baseline state for improvement. In this first example, we have started with a solution with a login via PayPal or LinkedIn. This may be a good idea, but we have no idea of the impact. If 20% of customers were dropping out of this stage, you would likely consider it. If it was 1%, we may not even record it.
The dangers of journey analysis
There can be dangers in focusing solely on journey steps. Consider performance issues, these could impact every single feature. Poor implementations of personalisation or difficult to use tasks may be present throughout a journey. Additionally, your other products should be considered. By only using a journey map, you may find many small issues and ignore them. By zooming out, you realise their overall impact on customer satisfaction is very high. The diagram below shows the different issues and opportunities associated with a journey:
Customer Journey Mapping process
The following instructions will guide you through creating a journey map and identifying high-value strategic options to improve it:
Identify the experience you want to analyse.
Identify the user(s) of the experience.
Create a basic map based on what you already know.
Interview users and walk them through the map to complete it. Pay particular attention to pain points.
Consider these sources for identifying additional issues and opportunities that feed into the map:
Customer support requests and complaints.
Public forums and review sites.
Software metrics such as error logs and the number of help pages loaded.
Internal quality reviews, such as a security audit.
Observation of individual users fulfilling tasks.
Results of user surveys, interviews and focus groups.
Here are some further inputs into issues and opportunities on your journey map:
Automating organisational touchpoints
As detailed in the Automating organisational touchpoints tab.
Trend analysis
As detailed in the Strategic Direction process stage, trend analysis can provide a strategic advantage. For example, a new technology trend enables you to cut costs significantly.
Utility, usability and accessibility canvas
One of the primary problems with working with a customer journey map is ensuring you have considered the many aspects that can impact a customer’s experience. For example, without a specific prompt, you may forget to evaluate issues and opportunities with personalisation and customisation. The Utility, usability and accessibility canvas has been created to help you do this in a structured way. It provides detailed instructions on many factors to help you maximise success. You should create the journey map first, then apply the canvas.
You may have identified a lot of options. You are ready to move to the Creating Strategy Items tab to filter and build these out.
Automating organisational touchpoints
There are two main reasons a software user will interact with an organisation:
Manual processes - for either an entire process or for specific scenarios
Error handling - where a problem occurs that a user cannot solve and needs additional support
It is beneficial to an organisation to minimise its people-based touchpoints with users by automating tasks and creating high levels of usability. For example, an automated digital system could replace a manual passport check. As a caveat, it does not mean replacing a high-quality personal service with a poor-quality digital one. These touchpoints and failures can be added to the Customer Journey Map.
Business case for digital automation
Reduced errors and compliance risk
The capacity for human error is higher with manual processes. You may need to add additional expensive layers of quality control and auditing to avoid mistakes. Failure can result in financial penalties, reputational damage and law-breaking. When prioritising your product strategy items, you should take these risks into account.
Faster processing
Automation can be much faster than manual processes. The cost is not just the process itself but the time it takes for a person to be seen by a support agent. In addition, if support is only available during standard office hours, delays can be significant.
Improved scaling
Scaling digital processes is much easier than manual ones. Manual processes can even hold back your organisation’s growth. Seasonal variation can be a high-cost scaling problem for organisations. For example, an increase in purchases at Christmas. Having to recruit staff at these times can be very challenging. Failure can result in reduced customer satisfaction, loss of sales and churn.
Lower costs
Where a lot of one-to-one support is required, especially for large numbers of customers, you will typically require large call centres with many highly skilled staff. Using automation, you can employ fewer people and get them to focus on more complex issues.
Employee satisfaction
Having your people focused on simple, repetitive tasks is bad for morale. You should free them up to focus on improvements or more complex processes.
Customer satisfaction
Customers prefer to solve problems themselves. A Zendesk study found that 91% of people would use a knowledge base that matches their needs.
Improved data gathering
When solutions are in software, you can more easily gather data. For example, you can create a real-time warning if a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is about to be breached. Improved data analytics can help you design better services. For example, by seeing where customers keep getting stuck.
When you shouldn’t automate
In some cases, automation won’t make sense. Here are four factors to consider:
The process needs to be customised for each customer
The customer doesn’t want automation
Cost/benefit of automation is poor
You have more significant market threats
Let’s use some examples to demonstrate these.
The process needs to be customised for each customer
You are running a work Visa process from applicants from high risk countries. The gathering of security information could be automated. However, if you do this, you will miss the opportunity to ask questions and gather deep insights. Capturing these digitally will not work well.
The customer doesn’t want automation
You sell a low-volume, high-price business-to-business (B2B) service. Customers are paying a premium for your offering and expect you to set up the product for them. Moving to automation will cause a loss of sales. This is included in the relationships section of the Business Model Canvas. This is the relationship the customer wants with you. In this case, they want a personal service and not automation.
The cost/benefit of automation is poor
You work in security and automatically validate passports. There is considerable effort involved in the automated scanning and validation of these. You have automated many of the world’s largest countries and are deciding what to automate next. The Vatican City is discussed, but with a population of 764 as of 2023–24, it makes sense to leave this as a manual process.
You have more significant market threats
Automation does have a strong business case, as detailed in the benefits below. However, you may have more pressing needs, such as creating better differentiators or responding to a competitor’s new service. This is part of the broader subject of prioritisation.
Creating Strategy Items
Strategy Items are high-level options that are ready for prioritisation. Here, we can see an example. Your aim should be to create these for high-impact issues and opportunities. This can include strategic risk. You can still keep track of lower-priority items, but don’t create Strategy Items for them. More minor issues can often be picked up as part of other changes, such as improving a screen design.
See this page for full information on Strategy Items.
