Customer journey mapping: Frequently asked questions to help you stay on track

Ordinarily, a customer journey can be summed up as the seller offering a product and the buyer buying it. But as you get into details, you find customer journeys to be quite complex. For instance, your customers can find you through innumerable channels and from different starting points, such as referrals, organic searches, social media advertisements, and offline campaigns. To make sure that you give your customers a superior experience, you need to map out every possible touchpoint or experience along the customer journey.

What is it?

A customer journey represents every experience your customers have with you. It is a story about understanding your users, how they behave while they visit your website or application, and what could be done to improve their interaction in order to retain them. Customer journey mapping helps you step into your customer’s shoes and see your offering from their perspective.

Why is it important?

Using journey mapping, you can gain insights into common customer pain points, how you can improve their experience, and define what they need to complete a purchase without the necessity to repeatedly state their needs. The customer journey mapping helps you to:

• Identify touch points where customers interact with your business
• Address different needs at different stages in the buying funnel
• Take a logical approach to customer journey design
• Identify gaps between the desired customer experience and the actual one
• Set development priorities

At [x]cube, we understand that offering the right kind of customer experience is critical for organizations. With a proven track record of customer-centric approach towards developing solutions, our experts have answered some frequently asked questions that have enabled them to stay on track while planning numerous successful customer journey flows.

1. How do I define my customer journey as a process flow?

This is the first misconception. You may believe that customer journey is a set of well-defined processes but it is, in fact, not a process flow. Customer journey varies for different customers and trying to translate the experience of all customers as one would defeat the purpose of having a customer journey map.

2. How should I design effective tutorials?

While preparing tutorials, we assume that a customer would follow the same path that we think he would and hence we make them do what we want. A thought here is- are we allowed to dictate one thing for everybody? This necessitates understanding different personas and predicting their unique journeys.

3. Could there be any divergence from the planned customer journey?

There could be a divergence from the path but most of the cases are straightforward with a definite purpose. Most solutions do not have the scope of uncertainty.

4. What should I focus on to keep my solution relevant?

Relevance in journey mapping isn’t about different paths but a single, seamless journey. The focus should be to keep everything hassle-free and simple. To ensure that and to keep the cognitive load to a minimum, ask yourself- what problem do you want to solve? Are you making a compelling enough argument/case? Is there room for including customer journey? How do you ensure that you are doing it well?

5. What are the elements of a good customer journey mapping?

Your journey mapping could have two elements:
Elements to help customer
Elements to make you look good
Assessing the elements and categorizing them into either of the above would help you eliminate the unnecessary ones and keep the context relevant.

6. What are the trade-offs that could help me plan journey mapping better?

Having the right trade-offs ensures a simple, fast, and seamless journey for your customers. Ask yourself the following questions while planning a journey map:
What is the focus on- doing something in a better way or creating a new solution?
What causes a customer to go on a journey? Is it more rewarding for them to figure a way or follow what someone is mandating for them?
Are you focused on pushing digital or tangibly cutting efforts?
Is it an obligatory journey or an optional journey for a customer?

7. How do I determine the effectiveness of my customer journey map?

The only way is to collect data points along the journey and measure. Set an acceptable limit for customer effort score- a parameter that evaluates how easy or difficult it is for someone to follow a step. The idea of measurements and identification of bottlenecks represent maturity in thinking.

8. How do I identify points of friction?

Coming to a pause, mandatory decision making, too many choices, complicated onboarding, blind spots, thinking-feeling-doing, are some common friction points.
A leading retail outlet couldn’t locate their stores using bill numbers. If an incident was raised with their customer care, they couldn’t provide the expected resolution without struggling. Such experiences contribute to friction points.

Conclusion

While designing customer journeys, we as organizations tend to make it more about ourselves and less about customers. We often feel in control of what and how a customer would do on his journey and mandate a lot of obligations for them. But in reality, customer journeys are authored by them, not us. Therefore, the design should strive to make us a part of that journey.