You need to understand your customer’s experience with your brand so you can be proactive and deliberate in how you interact with your customers. One tool to help with that is a customer journey map, or diagram. But if you don’t follow these steps below, you might end up with a vision with no substance.
The strategic view vs. the details
I read a description of a customer journey that says it’s a map to understand how the customer experiences all touch points with your brand. That sort of document is a very high-level, strategic view of the customer journey designed for the C-suite.
And in my opinion, it’s useless unless you’ve first reviewed some marketing and operational issues. You can’t confidently or accurately say “here’s how the customer will experience our brand” until you compare that wish list with what your systems can actually do. Otherwise, it’s just pie in the sky.
Three necessary vantage points
The customer journeys I’ve seen focus on one or more of these goals.
- Understand how the customer experiences touch points with your brand,
- Map out the steps you would like the customer to take at each touch point, or
- Document the operational requirements of each step in the journey.
Someone might object that a customer journey is only about the customer’s experience, not that marketing and operational stuff.
Point taken, but the marketing and operational stuff still needs to be documented, and if you don’t do that, your customer journey will be incomplete or wrong. You absolutely have to focus on the customer’s needs and the customer’s perspective, but in order to deliver on your vision, you need to focus on the back-end details and know what you can do.
Start small
You may eventually be able to map out how customer’s experience every touchpoint with your brand, but you should start with something very simple, like “how do people sign up for my free e-newsletter?”
Learn how to look at the issue from each vantage point — the customer’s perspective, marketing’s perspective, and the operational details — and slowly build out a library of customer journeys.
Don’t start with a design or a template
If you do an image search on “customer journey map,” you can see some interesting ways to format one of these documents, and that can give you some good ideas. But after reviewing several of them, I’m of the opinion that we should follow the Queen’s advice to Polonius: “more matter with less art.”
The problem with the designs and templates is that detail suffers for the sake of making it look pretty, make things fit in the columns, etc.
If you want to be able to deliver on your vision, you have to get the technical people involved early so you can find out how your systems actually work. Write it all out, and don’t worry about the design.
I created a brief video to illustrate what this might look like, but don’t follow my design either! A narrative that includes all the details will suit you much better than a pretty chart that doesn’t mean anything practical.
Once you’ve done the technical work, and you know what your systems can and can’t do each step of the way, maybe then you can step back and make the pretty chart for the VPs. Fortunately, having gone through the process I’ve explained here, when they ask “Why don’t we do it this way instead?” you’ll have a real answer, because you’ll have done the hard part.
