Definition
Customer journey maps are visual representations that illustrate the steps or stages that customers go through when interacting with a product, service, or organization. They are commonly used in design thinking and innovation to help teams understand the needs, emotions, and pain points of customers at each touchpoint along the journey.
By creating a customer journey map, teams can identify opportunities to improve the customer experience and develop solutions that address customer needs and pain points.
Benefits
Journey maps help teams gain a deep understanding of how customers perceive their experience, including their emotional states, motivations, and pain points. This understanding can help teams design solutions that address customer needs and create a more satisfying experience.
Journey maps can facilitate collaboration among team members and stakeholders, helping to align everyone around a shared understanding of the customer experience. They can also be used to communicate findings and insights to others, such as executives or external partners.
Journey maps can help teams identify specific areas where the customer experience could be improved. By focusing on these areas, teams can develop solutions that have the greatest impact on the customer experience.
Journey maps can help teams prioritize design opportunities and focus on those that have the greatest potential to improve the customer experience.
Customer Journey Map
- Focus: Tracks the specific steps a customer goes through when interacting with a product, service, or brand.
- Objective: Visualizes the customer's interaction over time with a focus on touchpoints, pain points, and emotions during the engagement with a particular service or product.
- Elements: Typically includes stages (awareness, consideration, purchase, retention), channels (online, in-person), and customer actions or emotions at each touchpoint.
- When Used: Ideal for understanding the user's experience with a specific product or service to improve usability, customer satisfaction, and engagement.
- Example Use Case: A company maps out the journey of a customer booking a flight, from researching flights to checking in at the airport.
Experience Map
- Focus: Provides a broader and more holistic view of the overall experience a person has, beyond just interactions with a specific product or service.
- Objective: Illustrates how a person experiences their life or a certain aspect of it, taking into account personal context, goals, and behaviors that may or may not directly relate to your service or product.
- Elements: It maps out activities, thoughts, emotions, goals, and touchpoints across multiple channels and over time.
- When Used: Helpful for understanding user behavior and needs on a broader level, often used to inspire innovation by seeing the bigger picture of how various aspects of life connect.
- Example Use Case: Mapping out the overall experience of someone going through an educational program, from applying to graduating and job-hunting, capturing their needs, emotions, and struggles along the way.
User Map
- Focus: Focuses on identifying and categorizing different types of users based on demographics, behaviors, needs, and motivations.
- Objective: To create user personas that can help teams understand different segments of their audience, and how each type of user may have different goals or interact with the product in different ways.
- Elements: Typically includes user demographics, behaviors, goals, pain points, and the tasks they aim to accomplish with a product or service.
- When Used: Used in the early design or development phase to define target users and ensure the product is tailored to meet the specific needs of different user types.
- Example Use Case: A software company creates a user map to distinguish between different personas—such as tech-savvy users vs. first-time users—to tailor their product and communication strategy accordingly.