Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool to understand and improve your customer experience. But before you can create a map, you need to research your customer journeys. How do you do that? Here are some tips to help you get started.
Before you dive into research, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and what you want to focus on. What are the main objectives of your customer journey mapping project? Who are your target customers and segments? What are the key stages and touchpoints of their journey? How will you measure the success of your map? Having a clear scope and goals will help you plan your research methods, sources, and questions.
There are many ways to research customer journeys, but they can be broadly categorized into two types: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative methods involve talking to or observing your customers directly, such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, or user testing. Quantitative methods involve analyzing data from your systems, platforms, or tools, such as analytics, CRM, or feedback. Depending on your goals and scope, you may want to use a combination of both types of methods to get a comprehensive and accurate picture of your customer journeys.
Once you have chosen your research methods, you need to collect and organize your data. This may involve recruiting and screening customers, designing and conducting interviews or surveys, recording and transcribing conversations, extracting and cleaning data from your sources, or using software or tools to visualize and analyze your data. The key is to collect enough data to cover your scope and goals, but not too much that you get overwhelmed or lose focus. You also need to organize your data in a way that makes it easy to find, sort, and compare.
The next step is to identify and validate your insights from your data. This means looking for patterns, trends, gaps, pain points, opportunities, or emotions that emerge from your customer journeys. You may want to use techniques such as affinity mapping, persona creation, empathy mapping, or journey mapping to synthesize and visualize your insights. You also need to validate your insights by checking them against your goals, scope, and other sources of data or feedback. You may want to test your assumptions or hypotheses with your customers or stakeholders.
The final step is to share and act on your findings. This means communicating your insights and recommendations to your team, organization, or clients in a clear and engaging way. You may want to use storytelling, presentations, reports, or workshops to share your findings. You also need to act on your findings by prioritizing and implementing changes or improvements to your customer experience. You may want to use frameworks such as action plans, roadmaps, or experiments to plan and execute your actions.