Building Customer Journey Maps

• Customer experience is inevitable, whether you like it or not
• What is a Customer Journey Map?
• What are the benefits of using Customer Journey Maps?
• Main elements of a Customer Journey Map

Customer experience is inevitable

In this initial section I would like to introduce a very important topic that some products and companies offering their services may be overlooking or simply doing what they consider is good enough to have a positive impact on their customers or potential customers. Either when they visit the organization or company website, or, when they download the app from the App Store or Play Store and they start interacting with the product / service and all the features available.

There is a notion which importance has already become critical for those organizations that want / need to succeed and reach certain goals and expectations (which is probably all the organizations, companies, start-ups, software products, you name it) and this notion is Customer Experience.

Customer experience is basically the sum of all the aspects involved in the interaction between a customer and your product or service. For example: if we are considering a mobile app, the customer experience starts with how easy it was to find the app, either in the App Store or Play Store, how is the app rated by customers that used or are currently using the product? Does it have excellent reviews? Mixed reviews or negative reviews? After the customer downloads the product, how is his or her experience while giving the first steps in the app? Does the app present a very lightweight registration process? Or is it a heavy process in which the user will first need to fill a bunch of fields with personal data that may not even be necessary for the use and navigation of the essential features in the app.

All of these previous aspects I’ve mentioned are things that are under our control. As Product Managers, if we follow UX/UI Designers advice and guidelines, the development team will be able to create a great registration process and an excellent platform for users to interact with the product. But that’s how far we can go.

There are other aspects associated with Customer Experience that are totally out of our reach. Example: What’s the perception that customers are having when interacting with our app? We all have different opinions, perceptions, different ways of seeing things, some of the users will like and even enjoy experiencing our app, the feeling they get when seeing the app and interacting with it, but some of them will not go through the same emotions, sensations, appreciations, etc. We don’t have a way of controlling that.

But, just bear with me on this, if we create an application following sophisticated components that generate very smooth transitions between features, screens, states, great eye catching designs coming from UX/UI Design specialists applying the latest mechanisms and sound practices to increase probability of success for the produce and we still have people that won’t like our product, imagine what could happen if we don’t do our job, the part that we can control, in terms of working towards achieving the best workflows possible for each aspect of our product. We are just contributing to the probability that more and more people won’t enjoy the experience of using our product, basically the Customer Experience of our app will be awful. And creating awful Customer Experiences is not that hard, we cannot allow this to happen to our products, so we should take advantage of existing techniques there are to design and improve Customer Experiences.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

The first aspect to consider when rolling up our sleeves and doing some serious investment of effort in designing and optimizing our product Customer Experience is to consider the Customer Journey. The Customer Journey is just the path we are displaying to the user for him to follow and get in the product and start interacting with it and its different features.

And of course, a Customer Journey Map is no other thing than a map showing the steps a user gives when starting to interact with our app and the available functionalities.

What are the benefits of using Customer Journey Maps?

There are several benefits of using this artifact or technique in our companies and products. Is in some way similar to a user story that contains a set of Gherkin scenarios and scenario outlines. Even if your team is not working based on BDD, who can deny the benefit of having a list of scenarios with clear examples on how the user will interact with the functionality being implemented in that user story? Developers will be grateful, QA Engineers as well, the understanding of the user story, its scope and the business will be increased significantly just by a few clear Gherkin scenarios.

The same is applicable when talking about Customer Journey Maps:

• Help to gain and increase understanding of potential and already existing customers
• Help the entire company to have a sense on how the targeted public feels or may feel while interacting with the product
• The insight obtained from Customer Journey Maps definitely supports the process of making decisions from a UX/UI perspective and from the business priorities. It helps to know what should be optimized first and what can be left for future iterations.
• They can be of great benefit for Product Managers, Software Engineers and QA Engineers, again, increasing understanding but objectively from the customer perspective. This can trigger proposals and initiatives from the team to make changes and adjustments to some features or portions of a workflow that were not clearly visible or understood from the user point of view prior to being in front of a Customer Journey Map.

Main elements of a Customer Journey Map

A Customer Journey Map can be as simple as a table with columns and rows, in which each cell contains a description, or a question and a series of possible status in which a customer can be at some point during his journey in the app, it also can be a chart similar to a flow chart with a starting point and a series of arrows indicating progress throughout several blocks of actions and states, to much more complex graphics created on specialized tools such as ProductPlan, HubSpot, Miro, etc.

Based on the approach we are going to take when creating the Customer Journey Map, certain elements will be needed or not.

The most important element is the goal of the CJM you want to create. It works like defining the agenda for a meeting, you don’t want the attendants to be all over the place, you want to schedule a meeting with very specific topics to discuss and come out from the meeting with clear decisions for each one of them. The same happens when we are going to create a Customer Journey Map. If we are going to host a workshop with our dev team, our marketing specialists, designers and other stakeholders we need to have a clear goal to achieve.

A good example could be, hosting a workshop to analyze and come up with the CJM for the registration workflow of our product.

To Summarize — Customer Journey Maps are simply well-layout map of your customer's Journey with you

• Starting with how they hear about you
• to becoming your customer
• After they become your customer, how their experience is (which will decide what kind of "word of mouth" you get - positive or negative)