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Using Customer Journey Maps To Improve Customer Experience

A customer journey map diagrams the steps customers go through when engaging with a company from first contact through completion. It is useful for understanding pain points and improving experiences. For example, setting up a home theater system is notoriously complex, leading to customer confusion and support forums. Mapping the home theater journey shows opportunities to simplify each stage such as awareness, research, purchase, and out-of-box experience. Understanding customer actions, motivations, questions, and barriers at each stage through research helps companies improve problematic experiences.

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Maria Paula Segura
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300 views

Using Customer Journey Maps To Improve Customer Experience

A customer journey map diagrams the steps customers go through when engaging with a company from first contact through completion. It is useful for understanding pain points and improving experiences. For example, setting up a home theater system is notoriously complex, leading to customer confusion and support forums. Mapping the home theater journey shows opportunities to simplify each stage such as awareness, research, purchase, and out-of-box experience. Understanding customer actions, motivations, questions, and barriers at each stage through research helps companies improve problematic experiences.

Uploaded by

Maria Paula Segura
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Customer Experience

Adam Richardson
NOVEMBER 15, 2010

A customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s)
go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail
experience, or a service, or any combination. The more touchpoints you have, the more
complicated — but necessary — such a map becomes. Sometimes customer journey maps are
“cradle to grave,” looking at the entire arc of engagement. Here, for example, is a customer journey
timeline that includes first engaging with a customer (perhaps with advertising or in a store),
buying the product or service, using it, sharing about the experience with others (in person or
online), and then finishing the journey by upgrading, replacing, or choosing a competitor (re-
starting the journey with another company):

Engage Buy Use Share Complete

At other times, journey maps are used to look at very specific customer-company
interactions. By way of example, let’s look at a customer journey that doesn’t work well:
home theater.

Anyone who has attempted to research, buy, set up, and use a home theater system
knows that this is one of the most frustratingly complicated customer experiences in the
consumer electronics realm. It makes buying a car seem trivially easy. Here’s a real sample
of some questions asked by a prospective purchaser on a home theater forum:

“For HD and Blue Ray DVD HDMI audio I do not understand if any post processing is done
on the 5.1 Lossless PCM channels from these players. Will DD PLIIx or THX 7.1 apply to
these? What are the limitations?”

Don’t worry if you have no idea what this means — you shouldn’t have to. There is no
good reason why a layperson just wanting to watch movies at home should be exposed to
such complexity and jargon. Yet in home theater, such confusion is rampant. It’s a bad sign
when there are numerous forums for customers to help each other out, as is the case in
home theater, since it means that the manufacturers have utterly failed in creating a
comprehensive customer experience. But it’s also an opportunity for smart companies:
retailer Best Buy bought service start-up Geek Squad to solve exactly this type of problem.

If I were a manufacturer, how would I go about understanding the customer journey so I


could improve it? Here is a diagram that shows one way of looking at the home theater
journey up to the point of getting the gear home:
The spine of the timeline in this case is based around the conventional sales funnel
(awareness, research, purchase), but then adds another step: OOBE, or out-of-box-
experience. This has become an increasing important step. Do a search on YouTube for
“unboxing“, for example, or looking at unboxing.com for many examples of people going
through what is now a ritualistic act of opening up the latest gadget.

But beyond the emotional factors, it makes good business sense. A great out-of-box
experience is like a little piece of theater. Scripting it well helps guide the customer
through the first steps of using their new purchase and minimizes expensive calls into help
lines.

The timeline is just the starting point; next we need to look at what’s happening at each
stage. A framework that I find consistently useful is to look at:

 Actions: What is the customer doing at each stage? What actions are they taking to
move themselves on to the next stage? (Don’t list what your company or partners
such as retailers are doing here. That will come later when we look at touchpoints)
 Motivations: Why is the customer motivated to keep going to the next stage? What
emotions are they feeling? Why do they care?
 Questions: What are the uncertainties, jargon, or other issues preventing the
customer from moving to the next stage? As you can from the diagram above,
home theater has a larger proportion of questions than almost anything else at
each stage, which indicates this is an area that manufacturers and retailers should
be attacking aggressively.
 Barriers: What structural, process, cost, implementation, or other barriers stand in
the way of moving on to the next stage?

Filling all these out is best done if grounded in customer research,


preferably including in-depth ethnographic-style interviews and in-context
observations. Surveys and focus groups tend to gloss over too many details
that are critical to really understanding the experience. Ask customers to
map out their journeys for you, while you are visiting them for the research.

Note that the journey is often non-linear. Someone may jump straight from
awareness to purchase if they are not inclined to do research and have a
strong recommendation from a friend, for example. Or they may spend a
long time spinning through iterations of the research process for an
expensive purchase. I remember interviewing a gentleman in Texas who
spent six months visiting stores for a big-screen TV, as he didn’t want to get
it wrong, and he would play sales people off one another to get the lowest
price.

There is no single right way to create a customer journey, and your own
organization will need to find what works best for your particular situation.
But the frameworks provided here should give you a good head-start at
better understanding the journey that your customers travel through as
they engage with your company, brand, products, partners, and people.

Adam Richardson, a Creative Director at global innovation firm frog design,


is the author of Innovation X: Why a Company’s Toughest Problems are its
Greatest Advantage. He can be found on Twitter at @Richardsona.

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