In eTip 230, we discussed utilizing personas to visualize your business’ current and potential customer segmentation. Now we look toward customer journey as a way of mapping out the emotional path those personas take when engaging with your company.
The customer journey map helps visually relate the emotional attitude customers have with your company as they progress through the decision making process. It helps clarify everything from why a customer bought a product to why they selected your business.
Some journey maps include customer requirements, opportunities and challenges faced when making these decisions. Most maps include storyboards, which visually represent the sequence of steps through icons providing insight into the context of each situation and allowing you to see the big picture.
Channels are often used in journey maps to visualize how a customer reacts to each step and helps to identify cross-channel experiences and potential gaps. Dramatic arcs show moments of excitement and disappointment and are used to analyze an existing experience as well as to plan a future concept along a desired dramatic arc.
Extremely sophisticated customer journey maps include backstage lanes, which show what happens internally within a company as the customer moves through the decision process. Showing backstage helps a company prepare resources needed to invest in order to maintain the right level of service.
Regardless of how sophisticated your customer journey map is, it will always uncover critical elements of your customer’s decision process thereby making it easy for you to predict the outcome of gaining new customers.
