Journey Map Software

[Rashawn Devegowda]

Acustomer journey map is a visual representation of the customer's experience with a company. It also provides insight into the needs of potential customers at every stage of this journey and the factors that directly or indirectly motivate or inhibit their progress.

The customer is also exposed to multiple external factors (competitor ads, reviews, etc.) and touchpoints with the company (conversations with sales reps, interacting with content, viewing product demos, etc.).

What better way to find out how customers think than to ask them? Customer surveys and interviews will provide first-hand information about the stage of the customer journey, their pain points, and how they use your products to solve their problems.

Unsolicited data refers to all the data you collect from customers without specifically prompting them. Data points like purchase history, time spent on page, email clicks, page views, feedback from your support team, call/chat transcripts, and much more will fill in the gaps in your customer journey mapping strategy.

Unsolicited data is instrumental and much more plentiful than solicited data. While only a small number of customers will respond to surveys and questionnaires, you can collect valuable data on every customer who interacts with your brand to bolster the effectiveness and accuracy of your customer journey map.

Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.

In any case, you still have to be prepared to handle large volumes of customer inquiries. This is where customer service software can come in handy. You can use it to empower agents to work more productively with omnichannel messaging and AI-enhanced responses, for instance.

One way to overcome this data silo is to share a clear customer journey map with your entire organization. The great thing about these maps is that they map every step of the customer journey, from initial attraction to post-purchase support. And, yes, this concerns marketing, sales, and service.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands should deliver educational content to help customers diagnose problems and offer potential solutions. Your aim should be to help customers alleviate their pain points, not encourage a purchase.

During this stage, brands should deliver product marketing content to help customers compare different offerings and, eventually, choose their product or service. The aim is to help customers navigate a crowded marketplace and move them toward a purchase decision.

As the final element in your customer journey map, solutions are where you and your team will brainstorm potential ways to improve your buying process so that customers encounter fewer pain points as they journey.

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business. You can find touchpoints in places where your business comes in direct contact with a potential or existing customer.

Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so you must consider the different types of touchpoints in your customer journey map. These touchpoints can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

One common obstacle is cost. For example, I could love your product but would definitely abandon my cart if I discovered you had unexpectedly high shipping rates. Of course, there are also other factors that are not so easy to spot.

You need to zoom in on the details and see where the bulk of your customers drop as they move through the sales cycle. Dedicated sales software is a good idea here. It lets you examine your sales pipelines and pinpoint what might cause prospects to turn away.

The whole exercise of mapping the customer journey remains hypothetical until you try it out yourself. This will show you first-hand where customers may be falling off or hitting roadblocks in your customer journey.

Day-in-the-life maps are best used for addressing unmet customer needs before customers even know they exist. Your company may use this type of customer journey map when exploring new market development strategies.

These customer journey maps begin with a simplified version of one of the above map styles. Then, they layer on the factors responsible for delivering that experience, including people, policies, technologies, and processes.

If you want a look at an actual customer journey map that HubSpot has recently used, check out this interview we conducted with Sarah Flint, Director of System Operations at HubSpot. We asked her how her team put together their map (below) and what advice she would give to businesses starting from scratch.

Icons, symbols, and artistic elements make the reading experience more digestible. You can communicate different touch points, actions, and outcomes that are a part of your customer journey. Beyond that, symbols can communicate emotion without any words.

Color is a powerful design element that can help you group like ideas. You can assign different hues to the stages of your customer journey or to certain touchpoints. This helps you organize information visually and draw attention to the most important parts of your map.

To reiterate, everyone skims. And just like you want to avoid too much text, you want to avoid a page filled with color, icons, words, and other elements. Adequate whitespace will help keep your document organized.

Your customer journey map should be consistent throughout. Pick a font family, color palette, and font sizes. Then, make sure you follow these guidelines throughout your journey map. Bonus points if your elements align with your company branding.

This customer journey map, designed for Carnegie Mellon University, exemplifies the usefulness of a future state customer journey map. It outlines the thoughts, feelings, and actions the university wants its students to have.

For instance, with our fictitious restaurant example above, the physical evidence includes all the staff, tables, decorations, cutlery, menus, food, and anything else a customer comes into contact with.

For example, when the physical evidence is plates, cutlery, napkins, and pans, the customer gives their order, the front-of-stage employee (waiter) takes the order, the back-of-stage employee (receptionist) processes the order, and the support processes (chefs) prepare the food.

Journey maps are a common UX tool. They come in all shapes, sizes, and formats. Depending on the context, they can be used in a variety of ways. This article covers the basics: what a journey map is (and is not), related terminology, common variations, and how we can use journey maps.

In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user actions into a timeline. Next, the timeline is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative. This narrative is condensed and polished, ultimately leading to a visualization.

Journey maps are best for scenarios that involve a sequence of events (such as shopping or taking a trip), describe a process (thus involve a set of transitions over time), or might involve multiple channels.

Journey phases are the different high-level stages in the journey. They provide organization for the rest of the information in the journey map (actions, thoughts, and emotions). The stages will vary from scenario to scenario; each organization will usually have data to help it determine what these phases are for a given scenario.

Opportunities (along with additional context such as ownership and metrics) are insights gained from mapping; they speak to how the user experience can be optimized. Insights and opportunities help the team draw knowledge from the map:

For example, imagine the world before the ridesharing market existed (Uber, Lyft, Bird, or Limebike, to name a few). If we were to create an experience map of how a person gets from one place to another, the map would likely include walking, biking, driving, riding with a friend, public transportation, or calling a taxi. Using that experience map we could then isolate pain points: unknown fares, bad weather, unpredictable timing, paying in cash, and so on. Using these pain points, we would then create a future journey map for specific product: how does a particular type of user call a car using the Lyft app?

If journey maps are the children to experience maps, then service blueprints are the grandchildren. They visualize the relationships between different service components (such as people or processes) at various touchpoints in a specific customer journey.

For the Lyft scenario above, we would take the journey map and expand it with what Lyft does internally to support that customer journey. The blueprint could include matching the user to a driver, contacting the driver, calculating fares, and so on.

While, at a glance, a user story map may look like a journey map, journey maps are meant for discovery and understanding (think big picture), while user story maps are for planning and implementation (think little picture).

Although a journey map and user story map may contain some of the same pieces, they are used at different points of the process. For example, imagine our journey map for Lyft indicated that a pain point appeared when the user was in a large group. To address it, the team may introduce a multicar-call option. We could create a user story map to break this feature (multicar call) into smaller pieces, so a product-development team could plan release cycles and corresponding tasks.

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