How to Create a Simple Customer Journey Map

- Hi everyone. Okay confession time. For a long time when someone used the words, Customer Journey or Customer Journey Map, I was always a bit confused. And when you Google for customer journey the endless examples don't really help either. But after mapping more than a 100 customer journeys I know I'm not the only one.

So what's the most effective way to map a customer journey? In this video I will show you a simple way to map a customer journey in 15 minutes, which will help you to make better decisions for your customers and therefore for your business. Because in the end that's why you make a customer journey map to make better business decisions.

That's why at the end of the video I will also show you next steps which you can take after creating this simple customer journey map. Are you ready? Let's go. (upbeat music) By the way I'm Arthur founder of Workshop Wednesday an online community that helps you to run high energy and result driven workshops.

If you don't know what a customer journey map is it's a way to visualize how people get to know you and your product and how they then transform into prospects, into subscribers and eventually into raving fans. There are a lot of customer journey frameworks out there which can be a little bit confusing, but they all have the same basic steps in them.

I'm going to give you my approach which I use with clients in design sprints and this will help you to create a customer journey map in 50 minutes. You can use pen and paper for this or a whiteboard. In this case I'm gonna make use of Miro because then it's easier to show it to you, but you can use anything you want for it.

This is what we're gonna create a simple customer journey map with Actors on the left, Goal on the right and then some steps in between in how to get there. So that's how you approach it. You start with the Actors on the left, then with the Goal on the right and then you create the steps in between.

Let's take an example. So in this case we have an online marketplace and we're gonna create a map for that. So on the left we have our Actors. So on a marketplace you have people want to buy you have people who are selling and then it needs to be delivered. And our goal in this case is that our buyer receives the item that they have bought.

For products and services like this there's a common pattern for the steps in between. That's why you see the colored Post-its in the top of the screen. But before we're gonna fill in the steps, we first have to make three small decisions. And these three decisions are are we gonna make a current or a future state map?

Are we gonna build on hypothesis or are we gonna do research? Or are we gonna do a low-fidelity versus a high-fidelity map? When creating your first customer journey map, I would go for a future state map, hypothesis and low fidelity because then you can easily spot opportunities, you can also decide then if you want to do more research and based on that research you can also decide to make your map more high fidelity.

So for the steps in between you see that everyone uses different labels for that but they all come down to the same concept. And that is that in the beginning somebody starts and doesn't know about you and your company and your product yet, they follow along in the journey and then at the end hopefully they turn out to be raving fans and they tell others about your product and your services.

So that's how you can use the colored Post-Its, Aware, Engage, Subscribe, Convert, Excite and Promote. Lets fill in the example of the online marketplace so it becomes more clear what those steps actually mean. In this case let's say that people become aware of our company, of our product via word of mouth, via Google search, or via ads.

So that's the first time they learn about that product. And then if they like what they've heard or maybe what they've seen, then they go to our homepage or maybe directly to a product page. And in this way they are engaging with our product. Let's add some arrows to this to give it more of a journey feel.

The point is not to have a perfect map, but it's to identify the most important steps to get to the end goal. So in this case receiving the item is the most important goal. And that means that we're not zooming in on the steps in engaging. Once people are on the product page we hope we can subscribe them or maybe already convert them.

So let's add some steps for that. In this case they may be directly buy the item from the product page which would be fantastic, but a lot of times they first want to think about it so maybe they put it on a wishlist, get an email reminder and then hopefully they buy the item. And of course when they have bought the item they would like to receive the item.

But what steps are in between? What is happening in between before they actually receive the item? In this case there are three steps. It's a marketplace so someone is selling. They are gonna prepare the package, then the deliverer is gonna pick up the package and then deliver it and in this case hopefully you have a happy customer.

The benefit of creating a simple customer journey map like this is to align your team around a common goal. It forces conversations and it makes your ideas more visual. And in this way it's easier to make decisions based out of this artifact. And this artifact can also be the basis for your team when making decisions, because you can really easily see the bottlenecks or the pain points, the riskiest points in your customer journey.

Focus on that part first, try to improve that area, make it really really good for your customer and then you can move to next parts in the customer journey. This is also a great way to align with other people maybe partners you want to work with or new members who are joining your team. They can really easily see what flow there is within your company.

Last week I talked about product strategy and how a User Story Map can help you to create a roadmap. A Customer Journey Map is a step before a User Story Map. So a Customer Journey map is the overview you're zooming out and then a User Story Map is the part where you're gonna zoom in on the product and the features you want to build for that product.

I would talk about more of that in next week's video, how you can do that. But for now let's have a look at three other next steps you could take after creating this simple Customer Journey. The first next step could be to create a more advanced Customer Journey because a buyer which we had as an actor in our first simple customer journey.

A buyer is pretty generic and the problem with describing your customers at such a high level is that one buyer is not the same as the other one. Because a design student at school of course has completely different needs than a person in their thirties running their business. The Customer Journey convert is one way to make a more advanced Customer Journey.

I will leave a link down below and I'll also create a future video on how to make use of this customer journey convert. So that's one possible next step. The other one is to make use of How Might We questions. I've created the video of that before. How Might We questions our way to reframe your problems your company is facing into challenges and into opportunities to solve.

So in this case maybe we have six How Might We questions regarding our business. And what we can do is we can map them on a map and then easily spot the opportunities to improve. So in this case you can see that there are four How Might We questions at the end of the customer journey, around the excitement part but especially around the promotion part.

So it would make sense to focus on this part first and maybe add things where it would be easier for customers to promote your product. And now the next steps could be to create solutions. Crazy Eights are a great way to come up with solutions. I've also created a lot of video of that. the link is there and also in description down below.

But why Crazy Eights can be helpful is that once you have focused on a specific part of your customer journey map, the Crazy Eights will help you to come up with solutions to solve that part of the challenge. That's it for now, thank you for watching. And also a special thank you to you the first 100 subscribers of this YouTube channel.

It means the world to me that you are following along on this journey. The feedback you give me both positive and negative helps a lot because it still feels a bit strange to talking to the camera like this. So to show my appreciation in next week's video there is a small surprise in it for you. For now thank you for watching and see you in the next one.

Peace. (upbeat music)