CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP

- A visual representation or diagram that illustrates the process your customer/s go through
to achieve a goal.
- Represents a series of stages, touchpoints, experience and feelings/emotions that
customers have in engaging with your company, overtime and across channels.
(whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or
any combination.)
(experience and emotions are very important as it sets upon it’s essence being
“journey” rather than being a mere “process”)
- A “cradle to grave” process (from start to end of “life” - looking at the entire arc of
engagement).
- Observes specific customer-company interactions.

Characteristics
A journey is often non-linear.
Someone may jump straight from awareness to purchase if they are not inclined to do
research and have a strong recommendation from a friend. Or they may spend a long time
spinning through iterations of the research process for an expensive purchase. 
Treating the journey as a storyboard, complete with photos or sketches of each stage, is a nice
way to add more flavor, but is not necessary to get started.
There is no single right way to create a customer journey, and your own organization will need to
find what works best for your particular situation. 

Layers
 Customer Personas
 Customer Experience
o Stages – a chronological timeline of the phases customers undergo before, during
and after the process
o Activities and Situations – what a customer does
o Emotions or Feelings – how the customer feels
 Front Stage
o Touchpoints or Channels – how the customer is interacting with your product or
service (to be discussed later)
-------- the first two layers are fundamental in a customer journey map. The next two layers, are
below the line of visibility – these are the things that happen internally to make the engagement
happen.
 Backstage – management and employee activities. In a theater, they are the production
team. They connect the different channels and stages. They ensure that the process flows
smoothly.
 Systems and Processes – use of machines, equipment, processes and systems.
 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
However, in order to create an effective customer journey map, you must first understand the
whole customer experience.
“Experience is what we can remember, what we learn, experience is meaning.” – what does this
mean?
Customer experience cannot be easily defined, much like experience in general, because it
encompasses a huge scope of forces/factors and people have different perspectives in what they
might view as an experience or not.
However, many businesses see improving their customer experience as a competitive
differentiator.
Customer Experience

- refers to the sum-totality of how customers engage with your company and brand, not just
in a snapshot in time, but throughout the entire arc of being a customer.

Experiencing Customer Experience

The very fact that you have customers and you interact with those customers in some manner,
provide them products and services, means that they have an experience with you and your brand,
no matter how small the engagement may seem.
Or if you as a customer buy a product or avail a service from a firm, you experience and engage
with the business first-hand. Through that experience, you are now able to formulate a feedback or
an opinion upon using that product. You are someone who ‘experienced’ a product.

Controlling Customer Experience

You cannot fully control experience.
Experiences inevitably involve unpredictable perception, invisible emotion, and unexpected
behaviors on the parts of customers.
No matter how well we craft an experience, customers will not perceive exactly as we anticipate or
hope. 
A company needs to plan for the worst and aim for the ideal when considering the experiences,
they want their customers to create.

Creating Customer Experience

It does not require knowledge of magical incantations.
Instead, customer experiences spring from concrete, controllable elements — the touchpoints. 
It requires enormous amounts of collaboration across groups in a company that often work
independently and at different stages of product development.
In many cases marketing, product design, customer services, sales, advertising agency, retail
partners must all be working in concert to create even a single touchpoint.
Layers of Customer Experience
Customer Journey: The fundamental piece of knowledge you need to start with is a thorough
understanding of the journey that your customers take with your company. 
Touchpoints: Channels that support the customer through their journey, such as products, web
sites, advertising, call center, etc.
Ecosystems: How integrated ecosystems of products and services open up new possibilities for
customer journeys and experiences in ways that more isolated touchpoints cannot.

TOUCHPOINTS
Touchpoint

- Any interaction point between the customer and your brand.

- A framework for understanding how your organization supports the customer throughout
that journey.
Touchpoints fall into Four General Categories:
Products: Includes the hardware, software, and services themselves. A product is anything central
to every aspect of the business.
Interactions: Two-way interactions that can be in-person (such as in a store), on the phone, or
virtual (web sites, blogs, social network and user forum presences, and so on).
Virtual interactions minimizes in-person interactions to reduce costs and tries to have
customers self-serve on the website.
CEO Tony Hsieh says, “We believe that forming personal, emotional connections with our
customers is the best way to provide great service.”
Messages: One-way communications that include brand, collateral, manuals, advertising,
packaging, and the like. 
Out-of-box-experience stage of the customer journey falls into the Messages category as it
focuses on establishing the brand voice and explaining a complex product to first-time
users.
Settings: anywhere that the product is seen or used: a retail store, a friend’s house, TV product
placement, events, or shows. 
The key is coordinating and integrating the touchpoints so that they seamlessly meld together —
throughout the customer journey, and with each touchpoint type supporting the others for each
stage of the journey.
Taking the time and effort to look at your touchpoints not just as isolated mini-experiences, but as a
collective whole, will help you shape them for a better customer experience, and perhaps even
point to opportunities to invent new types of touchpoints. But the more touchpoints you have, the
complicated the journey.
The obvious outcome of taking an integrated look at touchpoints is that it requires multiple parts of
a company, and often outside partners, to work together to improve the experience. 
Competitive durability and customer enthusiasm and loyalty.
HOW TO MAKE A CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP
Customer Research
In-depth ethnographic-style interviews and in-context observations.
Surveys and focus groups tend to gloss over too many details that are critical to really
understanding the experience. Ask customers to map out their journeys for you, while you are
visiting them for the research.
Customer interviews, contextual inquiries, surveys, customer support logs, web analytics, Social
media and competitive intelligence.

Following a Framework

- Consider and determine the layers and elements needed and create a timeline.
Brainstorming

- Generate and integrate the ideas, key concepts, attributes and mindsets with your team
to review, discuss and address goals and problems. Use the customer research and
gathered data for basis.
Affinity Diagram

- Mock diagram
- Where ideas are organized and find cohesion in the team’s concepts as a whole. It will
help them focus on the right solution.
Sketching the Journey

- Where you lay out all the key concepts and details in creating/revising the customer
journey.
- There is no distinct way of creating the map. Do what works best for you.
Refine and Digitize

- Polish and finalize the map then share and display for reference.

Oral Activity: Creating your own customer journey map.

Question: As a customer, how do you go about buying a certain product or service,
can you guide us through the process you undergo before purchasing?
Consider the LAYERS of a customer journey map:
 Customer Personas
 Customer Experience
o Timeline or Stages
o Activities and Situations
o Emotions or Feelings
 Front Stage
o Touchpoints or Channels
 Backstage
 Systems and Processes
The Timeline can be based around the conventional sales funnel; awareness, research, purchase
and OOBE, or out-of-box-experience. (Scripting it well helps guide the customer through the first
steps of using their new purchase and minimizes expensive calls into help lines.)
A customer journey looks at things entirely from the customers’ point of view, elements such as;
their actions, goals, questions, and barriers over time.
Actions: What is the customer doing at each stage? What actions are they taking to move
themselves on to the next stage? (Don’t list what your company or partners such as retailers are
doing here. That will come later when we look at touchpoints)
Motivations: Why is the customer motivated to keep going to the next stage? What emotions are
they feeling? Why do they care?
Questions: What are the uncertainties, jargon, or other issues preventing the customer from
moving to the next stage? As you can from the diagram above, home theater has a larger
proportion of questions than almost anything else at each stage, which indicates this is an area
that manufacturers and retailers should be attacking aggressively.
Barriers: What structural, process, cost, implementation, or other barriers stand in the way of
moving on to the next stage?
As they undergo stages such as awareness, research, purchase, OOBE or out-of-box-experience
(scripting it well helps guide the customer through the first steps of using their new purchase and
minimizes expensive calls into help lines).