Customer Journey Maps: A Guide to Understanding Your Customer and Creating One

Quick Summary: Whether you are selling products, or services or managing a company, a better customer experience is key to success. Creating an excellent customer journey map is the finest way to understand your customers, team, and competitors. So, are you looking to create a customer journey map? This guide will help you explore your customers and create an outstanding map for the customer journey. Let’s explore.

Digital transformation is shifting customer journeys like never before. While customers have more choices, the traditional approach of marketing or selling products/services needs a revisit. A fresh and expertly crated customer journey map can help companies provide more personalized customer experiences which can bestow you with improved customer satisfaction and higher retention rates. Apart from this, better customer journey maps will help you gain more qualified leads by charting courses to better communicate with clients.

In this article, we will explore customer journey maps in detail, along with their benefits, type, and how to create one. Let’s explore one by one.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

Did you know the cart abandoned rate in 2021 was 70% which rose to 73.29% by Feb 2024? The prima facie of the higher cart abandonment rate is businesses failing to address specific customers' needs. Customer journey maps address this challenge by helping you create an effective visual representation of how customers interact with your website for buying products or services. It showcases the intact points between your customers and brand to help you understand the journey of each customer, stages customers will face and predict customer behavior, and suggest how the business should map the journey of customers and provide a better user experience.

A well-designed UX, keeping customers' journey map in mind helps businesses set out effective buying journeys for users after understanding their emotions, pain points, comfort, and convenience. In short, it’s a comprehensive plan with a series of interactions a customer has with your products and services — how you keep them engaged and make your returning customers.

Types of Customer Journey Maps

There are four types of customer journey maps, they are;

• Current State
• Future State
• Day in the Life
• Service Blueprint

Current State: The current state helps businesses understand and take stock of how customers are currently interacting with the product, brands, or services.

Future State: Future State helps businesses anticipate the scenarios and stages customers may come across or encounter in the future.

Day in the Life: This type of customer journey map refers to the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience in their daily lives.

Service Blueprint: It’s compressive illustrations of customers' journey that visualize the process of how products and services will be delivered to end users.

How Customer Journey Maps Improve Customer Experiences?

In one word, a customer journey map will help you improve customers' experiences. In order terms, with customer journey maps, you understand your customers' needs, their s pain points, challenges, and motivation. You will know your customers and improvise your products, brands, and services accordingly. Let’s explore the points of improvement in detail.

Understand your Customers Better

With a customer journey map, you know your customers better, understand their buying behavior, and how they would interact with the products and services.

Identify Their Pain Points

When you create a customer journey map, you can easily identify your customers' pain points, and understand the possible challenges they may face while interacting with the products.

Improve Your Products and Services

With a customer journey map, you get a chance to improve your products in favor of your team, employees, and customers. You create services that customers need and improve your brands, making them interactive.

Work on User Experience

A customer journey map gives you every detail of customers' interaction with your products and services. Keeping that insight in mind, you design your product and services accordingly.

Create Stages by Reducing Obstacles

Picture this: your customers log into your portal but face difficulty in finding the product they need. Or the product menu is hidden somewhere on the website. What will you expect here? Yes, your customers will leave your website for another. But, when you know this challenge you can instantly make that product visible to your customers.

Increase Customers Engagement

You can easily identify areas where you need to improve for a better customer experience with a perfectly created customer journey map.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Creating customer journey maps is easy, given the right process you follow. You need to create a plan first and know what factors will matter when creating the map. Now, if you are designing your digital products, connect with your UX design team as they can better assist in creating user journey maps. Now, explore the steps you are required to follow for creating customer journey mapping.

Define Your Goals

Do you know why you are creating a customer journey map? Knowing your goal will help you clarify what of the journey you need to be more focused on. It will also help you stay on the right track of the mapping process. Explore what goals you want to achieve by creating a customer experience journey map. Who are you creating this for? What pain points it will solve and what experience will it deliver?

Start with User Research

Now, know your users or customers. When we say to know your users, it means you need to understand everything, from location, buying behaviors, and preferences to pain points, expectations, and stages. You may begin by creating a user persona. It will help you with everything you need.

Understand From Customers' Lens

Once you are done with your research, you need to think about customers. For example, think about how they would interact with your product. Will they face any problems while exploring the products or services? Will they be able to find the products or services easily when they are on your website or app? What are the obstacles they may encounter? Find the solution for every point or discuss with your UX team how they would solve the problem.

Review Touchpoints and Channels

Before you begin with the mapping customer experience, think about every touchpoint a customer may encounter. Check if there are any obstacles. If yes, solve them. An organization has various touchpoints. For in-store acuity, online searches, social media, contact information, blogs, and more. You may consider all points and improvise to make them accessible for users.

Make an Empathy Map

It’s the template that is centered around the user’s behavior and feelings. It works to fill the gap between your brand/products and customers. The empathy map is one of the crucial parts of design thinking, creating emotional relationships with customers and the brand. Basically, it goes through a process to understand the steps, and touchpoints, and improve experiences.

Sketch the Customer Journey

Now, create a journey, keeping your customers at the center stage. How will your customers interact with your products? From blogs and social media to product features, menus, and others, consider the point and create a rough sketch of the customer journey.

Iterate and Refine

Now check out the sketch, identify loopholes, and improve it. You can do it by putting your sketch on test among real users. Take feedback from them and work on it. This is also called validating your map. Take every feature and touchpoint work according to users.

Treat Your Map as a Living Document

Now that you have created your customer journey map, keep updating it regularly. Make changes in the touch point, and keep removing and adding so your users stay Engadget.

How Does TheFinch Design Help

We are the one-stop shop for all your design needs. We are an experienced design agency with vetted UX experts. We have experience in caring for outstanding customer journey maps that perfectly resonate with your users' needs, challenges, and requirements. We have a research team that explores the market and fetches data that help you create a design using customer journey mapping tools. Connect with your project today and let us make a perfect product for you.