Best Practices for Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps are one of the best ways to understand your customers better. It visualizes the customers’ journey while interacting with your product (here, website or application). They help you track their steps, actions, and behavior and anticipate their next moves. But to make a successful customer journey map, you must plan properly. As easy as it may seem,?customer journey map design thinking?requires research, effort, and thought. If not done right, it can always go south and hamper your customers’ experience.

This blog will walk you through 8 best practices to make a?successful customer journey map?or to improve the one you already have. Implement these to get better results and increase customer satisfaction over time.

1. Establish Clear Goals

It is imperative to set clear goals and objectives for your customer journey map before starting the research or design process. Define what you want to achieve through your customer journey map. Following specific objectives throughout the process of user journey mapping ensures your map is aligned with your customer and business goals.

To establish clear and effective goals, you must start by asking a few critical questions:?

a. What do I want to achieve with this customer journey map?

Do you want to understand your users’ needs better? Or perhaps you want to optimize your website for increased conversions?

b. What are the specific KPI goals?

Decide on the most critical customer journey metrics. This will help you monitor your overall customer and business goals. It could be conversion rates, customer satisfaction metrics, engagement statistics like on-page time, the number of click-throughs, or even social media shares. Setting specific KPIs enables you to track key journey touchpoints and determine the success of your efforts. But remember that you can only track them once you start using your map to?optimize UX.

2. Understand Your Customers

Research is of utmost importance when creating a customer journey map. You must understand each different buyer persona as every user is unique. To build your customer personas, you must interview different types and categories of users. You could also run offline and online surveys by them. Ensure you diversify the interviews, focusing on different demographics like location, age, gender, and socioeconomic status.

You must not fit your entire audience into one or two personas. Merging the needs of different people into one box will do no good but mess up the results. Therefore to avoid this pitfall, you must speak to a wide range of users and create as many diverse personas as you need.

3. Create a Distinct Map for Each Type of Buyer

Once you’ve created your primary buyer personas, create a unique?journey map design?for each of them. Note that different buyers operate differently depending on their roles and demographics. Hence, you must not generalize every user persona under one broad customer journey map. This will cause you to miss out on the opportunity to create an enjoyable product experience for different buyers.

For instance, a Gen-Z group finds your brand through social media and values these touchpoints more before and after purchase. On the other hand, there could be a sub-group of millennial buyers who connect more through?paid ads?and?organic search. They might also be interested in email follow-ups. This is where?customer journey CRM?comes in handy.

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