What are the best tools and methods for creating and updating customer journey maps?

Reasons for customer journey mapping: - Understand customer interactions - Identify touchpoints - Understand customer emotions - Create an empathy map

There is a danger that focusing on the goals of knowing your customers and meeting their needs become lost as the process of journey mapping becomes more complex. Creating and colorful charts must not become the end product. Start with a manageable segment and develop your map in depth, not breadth.

Customer journey mapping is essential for businesses striving to stay competitive and customer-focused. It enables the identification and prioritization of key touchpoints and moments of truth. By aligning teams and stakeholders around a shared vision, it enhances understanding and collaboration. Through continuous updates, it reveals gaps and opportunities for improvement in products, services, and processes. Additionally, it facilitates the measurement and optimization of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and conversions. Ultimately, it drives enhanced retention and referrals, ensuring a seamless and satisfying customer experience essential for sustained success in today's market.

Customer journey mapping is often overrated; it's not a silver bullet for customer engagement. While understanding touchpoints is valuable, an overemphasis on mapping can lead to analysis paralysis and divert focus from actionable improvements. Steve Jobs famously said, "You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around." Start by delivering exceptional experiences, and the journey will map itself naturally.

Conduct interviews and surveys with your target audience to gather qualitative and quantitative data about their experiences, preferences, pain points, and needs at each stage of the customer journey. Develop detailed customer personas based on demographic information, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. Facilitate collaborative workshops or brainstorming sessions with cross-functional teams to map out the customer journey together. Instead of focusing on some costly tools, it will be good to stick to basics and keep it simple with Excel like tools.

Steps to create customer journey map: 1. Define your objectives 2. Gather Information 3. Identify your customer touchpoints 4. Outline the Key Stages of Your Customer Experience 5. Start mapping 6. Validate Your Results 7. Analyze your map 8. Treat Your Map as a Living Document

Updating a customer journey map shouldn't become an endless loop of feedback cycles. Frequent updates can lead to constant changes without significant improvements. Instead, focus on major milestones and significant customer feedback that indicate real shifts in behavior or needs. Henry Ford said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Sometimes, visionary updates are better than endless tweaks.

Often times one can simply look up service blueprinting examples as well to help guide the process. Service blueprints will offer a layout that is easy to understand and may also help you understand internal processes that are part of the customers journey.

Here are some tools for customer journey mapping: Lucidchart: Good for journey maps with built-in collaboration features and integrations. Totango: Good for digital customer journey mapping. InDesign CC: Good software for complex graphic design. Smaply: Good for its support for multiple persona journey maps. Canvanizer: Good free customer journey mapping tool. Microsoft Visio: A flowchart and diagramming tool that's good for creating customized customer journey maps. SuiteCX: Provides a comprehensive set of features for creating and managing customer journey mapping, persona creation, touchpoint analysis, sentiment analysis, and more.

While there are a number of incredible interactive and visual tools to create customer journey maps, access to those tools can vary from organization to organization (i.e., IT policies, cost of subscription and seats, familiarity with the tools). What I've found to be helpful in democratizing access to the journey maps and spurring engagement and inputs/feedback is leveraging spreadsheets (e.g., Excel, Google Sheets) or slides (e.g., PowerPoint, Google Slides) in order to provide cross-functional stakeholders with the ability to view, comment, and edit with ease and familiarity - and to more easily port the content between formats.

Customer journey mapping can help businesses understand their customers and improve their experiences. The goal of a customer journey map is to create a better overall experience for customers.

Don’t forget the human element in all this digital mapping. No tool or method can replace real human interaction and empathy. Use journey maps as a guide, but keep direct communication with customers to truly understand their needs. As Richard Branson puts it, "Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming." Focus on genuine connections to ensure you never miss the bus of customer loyalty.

There is another aspect to the Customer Journey which is mapping of the detailed process which I believe sits below the mapping described above. The lower map looks at all the collateral and platforms that need to support each step in the journey along with identifying all the outcomes from each step and making decisions about which of the outcomes require further process. It incorporates the data requirements, the segmentation based on outcomes and allows the business to streamline and control the process. For small and micro businesses this provides a lot of value and challenges their thinking.