Product Management Skills: Customer Journey Mapping
Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
CEO at Product School - Global leader in product training
Product Design is more integral to successful digital products now than ever before.?Customer Journey Maps are a great place to start because they’ll help you to deepen your understanding of your users, which is the driving force behind any good Product Manager.
What Is Customer Journey Mapping?
A customer journey map (also called a user journey map) helps you and your teams visualize your customers’ relationship with your company, brand, and/or product.
Creating a customer journey map is useful for measuring the customer’s experience, something which can be a little abstract and hard to visualize. This helps everyone involved, from UX to marketing and to Product, to see the product from the user point of view.
This can help to pinpoint potential opportunities for improvement. When we understand the user experience from their perspective, we’re more likely to unearth pain points.
Having a centralized document that visualizes the customer journey is also very useful for getting teams aligned on what the user experience looks like. Everyone in a cross functional team will be looking at your users from a different perspective, so any opportunity to align them will help you to build a more cohesive product.
Similarly, it’s another opportunity to collaborate, and for each discipline to combine their unique perspectives. Marketing is going to have one point of view when it comes to user interactions, and customer support is going to have that in-the-trenches knowledge. It’s an opportunity to get a 360 view of the customer experience.
They can be purely text-based, but if you’re sharing your journey maps with stakeholders, it’s recommended that you make them as visual to improve communication. Case in point:
Would you have retained those percentages on visual vs text communication if I had written them out instead of showing a visual? Probably not.
The Difference: User Flows vs User Journeys
Newbies to UX design can be forgiven for confusing user flows with user journeys, as they have similar functions, but different focuses.
As you now know, a user journey depicts and predicts the relationship a user has with the whole 360 experience of your product. However a user flow deals with how users interact with the product itself. What they tap or click on, where they scroll to, and what the logic of the interface looks like.
You can think about it this way: a customer/user journey would be like a guidebook of Paris, with beautiful photos and descriptions of how it feels to walk along the Seine at night. But a user flow is a map of the metro, showing you how people get from Point A to Point B.
Want a more in-depth breakdown? Check out our guide:?The Difference: User Flows vs User Journeys
What Do Customer Journey Maps Include?
Customer journey maps can be composed of a number of things, for example…
Empathy maps?look into what a customer thinks, see, feels, and intuits in a certain situation.
Storyboards?are a highly visual element that help to humanize the user, and more firmly place teams into their shoes.
Emotions and pain points?help to identify the problem your product is solving, which is the first step in figuring out how to properly solve it!
User personas?humanize your customers, helping your teams to be more user-centric.
Touch points?are all the different ways in which you can interact with your users, whether that’s in-app decisions that they make or the conversations you have with them in your marketing.
Are Product Managers Involved in Journey Mapping?
In a word: yes!?
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Journey mapping, for Product Managers, is an essential activity which helps development teams to be more user-centric. Product Managers are the keepers of user knowledge within a company, and are experts at navigating cross functional teams and bringing everyone together to collaborate on the same goal.
Product Managers?are also the go-to person for stakeholders, who may be involved in the creation of customer journey maps and will certainly be involved in sharing them.
All together, that places the customer journey map responsibility firmly at the Product Manager’s feet.
The Customer Journey Mapping Process
Now you know what customer journey maps are, the benefits of having them, and that it’s your responsibility to give your valuable PM input, I bet you’re ready to make one! But how do you go about that?
If you're ready to dive straight in, check out this free template on customer journey mapping:
Or you can stick around and to break it down into a 5-step process.
Step 1: Laying the groundwork
Before you start gathering your data and creating your beautiful graphs, you need to lay out the groundwork. First you need to gather the team who will be working on the customer journey maps with you. In a small company this might be just you and your senior UX designers, and maybe a marketing manager. In a larger organization, where customer journey maps have more scope, you’ll probably need more contributors.
Speaking of scope, you also need to figure out what’s going to be included in your journey maps. A customer journey map can depict every single touch point that a user has with a product across multiple channels, or it can focus on the journey of a single action, such as upgrading a subscription or cancelling a membership. Getting everyone onboard with the goal and the scope of the map is essential to building the right map in the most efficient way.
Step 2: Gather/create your user personas
If you’re at the point of building customer journey maps, you probably already have your user personas. If not, there’s no better time to start than today!
User personas tell the story of who your customers are, what problems they have, and how your product fits into their lives.
Step 3: Identify the user phases
These are the potential or common actions that a user will take, depending on their motivations and the scope of your journey map.
For example, if you’re trying to identify the user experience of someone who wants to upgrade their account, what is the user flow of that process? What information do they seek out before they make that decision? Who do they talk to? What conversations are they having with customer service teams? Do they check out content on social media?
For new products or recently launched startups, creating a customer journey map is helpful for working out how to reach potential customers. If you’re seeing a high drop out rate early on in the journey, having a map might help you to understand where the problem lies. There might be a phase missing, or the users might be getting lost in the onboarding process.
Step 4: Hypothesize and gather quantitative data
Once you have identified your user phases, you can begin working on what the customer journeys will look like, depending on the user persona.
Even though you know how everything should work, and the journeys that users?should?be taking, how a customer interacts with your product or service is entirely down to them! Thorough enough?user research?can help you to come up with an educated guess, but be sure to verify your predicted journeys with data.
If you're testing a product that's been around a while, you'll probably have a lot of user behavior data already available that you can use to create your journey map. Alternatively, with a pre-launch product, hypothesize what you expect the journey to look like, then gather both quantitative data afterwards.
Step 5: Consolidate your findings and gather your qualitative data
Once you have a data-driven journey map, and evidence of the user flows your customers are following, it’s time to?add in that all-important qualitative data. This is what’s going to add flavour and personality to your journey maps.
After all, if this is the ‘guidebook’ to your product, you’ll need things like user reviews, social media comments, and transcripts of conversations with customer support. Bring in your colorful and personality-filled user personas which humanize your users.