How to Improve Your Customer Relationships with a Customer Journey Map

User Centricity, customer orientation, user orientation - these buzzwords are well known to everyone in marketing and consulting. However, they point to a central principle that should serve as a kind of supreme commandment: To align our actions as responsible for brands and companies entirely to customers.

Sounds sensible - but how does one succeed in doing so, actually? How can the complete brand communication - from the choice of channels, the definition of tone, to the actual contents - fully oriented to the needs of the customers? The answer: Customer Journey Mapping.

What is meant by Customer Journey Mapping?

As the name suggests, a customer journey map shows a path. This path gives insight into how (potential) customers come across your brand or your offers and how they interact with them - from initial contact to achieving a self-defined goal and beyond. The most common actions defined as goals include purchases, contact requests, orders, or registrations.

Since Customer Journey Maps holistically illuminate the customer experience and gradate the interaction points of customers with your brand, they are often also referred to as the customer journey. To remain with the image of the customer journey, you can think of Journey Mapping as a sort of travel guide. It summarizes and plans out all the stages of this journey in detail: from the initial booking to the actual travel route to the arrival at the travel destination and the individual activities at the destination itself.

Customer Journey vs. User vs. Consumer vs. Buyer Journey: What are the differences?

Whenever it comes to journeys, you will probably (or have even already) encounter terms such as User Journey or Consumer Journey. This often causes confusion because, originally, each of the different terms indicates a different focus in the Journey Mappings. However, today they are largely used synonymously - not least due to the increasing complexity of user behavior and the diverse range of content, services, or products of individual brands.

Focus of different Journey Mappings in their original definition:

• User Journey: The user journeys focus on the interaction of customers with the different contents of websites or apps. They have a strong online focus and show the user flow within your offer.
• Consumer or Buyers Journey: Consumer journeys cover all touchpoints that a prospect goes through until he becomes a genuine customer. They map the path until the conclusion of a defined goal, for example, a product purchase and are also referred to as a buyer's journey.
• Customer Journey: Originally, Customer Journeys depict the journey of existing customers and thus visualize the process after the purchase. They focus on the phases of bonding, attitude, and reactivation of customers.

Why should brands develop Customer Journey Mappings?

Customer Journey Maps are an approach to comprehensively understand behavioral patterns of customers and their touchpoints with brands. In addition to touchpoints, they also provide information about motivation, feelings or situations that influence purchasing and decision-making processes and thus contribute to a better understanding of the customer experience.

This alone makes them - correctly structured and implemented - a powerful tool in strategic planning and consulting. Everyone is probably familiar with statements like ‘We always need to be close to the customer’ from their daily work – and often this is exactly what turns out to be a continuous feat. Requirements and behaviors of customers change about as quickly as the communication options in the digital age expand.

The challenge of being ‘close to the customers’ thus also includes the reason for taking a closer look at the interactions between them and your brand using Customer Journey Maps. Insights are hidden in each phase and every step of the Journey, from which valuable conclusions and optimization opportunities in your own offer result.

There are virtually no limits to the use cases for creating Customer Journey Maps. Any process or measure in which your customers participate and about which you want to gain in-depth insights is suitable for Journey Mapping.

Use cases for the development of Customer Journey Maps:

• Optimization of purchasing and sales processes
• Determination of relevant contents & services
• Planning of (online) campaigns, media planning
• Customer retention measures
• Winning new customers and reactivating existing customers

How is a Customer Journey Map structured?

The question of how Customer Journey Maps are structured cannot be answered generally. As usual in marketing, there are many different approaches and models for creating and visualizing Customer Journeys.

The most common and probably also most well-known model to map the customer journey is the classic Customer-Journey-Model.

It subdivides the path of your customers into 5 main phases:

• Awareness: Attention, interest is aroused
• Consideration: Interest is concretized, further information is obtained
• Conversion (Purchase): Purchase intention, weighing up various offers and bringing about the conversion
• Retention: Customer retention, building and intensifying the customer relationship
• Advocacy: Advocacy, customers share their experiences with your brand and their experiences with others

These five main phases and the respective steps that customers take in the phases are depicted on a horizontal plane in the classic model (Source: Concept Draw)

The Awareness Phase focuses on initial contact and thus the question of how customers become aware of your brand or your offer. Do they have a specific need and find the suitable information offer on your site via the Google search? Or are there actions in push marketing, such as banner advertising, that open up the first touchpoints and thus create interaction points with customers?

In the Consideration Phase, you can identify the steps that your customers follow in order to be able to make decisions with good conscience. This can be gathering more in-depth information, reading reviews and recommendations, or comparing with other brands and providers.

In the Conversion Phase things are getting serious: the conclusion of your defined objective. This can be a product purchase, registration, a contact request, or similar. Consider how you can communicate the advantages of your offer clearly and unambiguously in order to trigger the completion. The process of decision making and actual buying itself should also be examined carefully to avoid bounces or abandonment.

Although the Retention and Advocacy Phases take place after completing the actual goal, customers should not be lost sight of at this point. In the Retention Phase, i.e., the phase of customer retention, your customers might need operating aids & tutorials or come into contact with your brand again through customer service. You should also think about how to keep customers and intensify the relationship with them – such as through a newsletter with regular updates on products or services. The following Advocacy Phase is the supreme discipline in marketing: Customers are to evolve into brand ambassadors, give recommendations, and share experiences with others, such as by writing reviews, sharing via social media channels, posting in forums & much more.

The phases and their individual steps can then be supplemented by various parameters. They support you in understanding customers even better and illuminate the customer journey from different perspectives.

Popular parameters that are used to supplement the actual journey:

• Needs: What do customers need in this phase? What is their expectation of the brand and its contents. Examples: Decision aids and -options, detailed information on products, desire for personalization, possibilities for selection, …
• Emotions: How do customers feel in the various phases of the journey? Which emotions determine their expectations or influence their behavior? Examples: Curiosity, determination, insecurity, helplessness, satisfaction, variety, …
• Touchpoints: What touchpoints are there between customers and your brand? On which channels and through which contents or formats does the interaction take place? Examples: Facebook ad, Instagram post, banner ad, newsletter, product page on your own website, and many more.
• KPIs: How can the actions and behavior of customers be tracked in the individual phases? Which key metrics are relevant? Examples: Impressions, reach, page views, average interaction duration, conversion rate, and many more.

Incidentally, you can find some examples of a classic Customer Journey Map Model and templates for PowerPoint and Google Slides at SlidesGo.

As already mentioned, in addition to the classic Customer Journey Model, there are other models to depict the journeys of customers and users:

• Consumer Decision Journey, McKinsey: This model puts the Consideration and Conversion Phase at the center and therefore only depicts a section of the complete Customer Journey. The purchasing process is limited to essential sections: detection of a problem, weighing up of different brands or offers, solution of the problem through product purchase
• Moments of Truth, Procter & Gamble: Another very well-known model subdivides the customer journey into the stimulus and (several) Moments of Truth. After attention has been gained with the stimulus, follows the first Moment of Truth, the product purchase, and then the second Moment of Truth, for example, the experiences that are made with the product after the purchase.

Source: P&C

• A-Day-In-The-Life-Journey: They depict a typical daily routine of your customers and draw a more detailed picture of them by including activities that are not directly connected to your brand. Once the complete daily routine is known, communication approaches can be strategically aligned so that customers can be picked up exactly where they normally are.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Your Brand

Usually, the creation of Customer Journey Maps is associated with high research and time expenditure. Therefore, it is all the more important to approach the matter in a structured manner. These 6 steps show you a way to get from a blank sheet of paper to the Customer Journey Map:

1. Briefing & create context

First of all, it should be clarified for which process or which (defined as the goal) action the Customer Journey Map should be created.

Objectives and requirements influence all further steps in the creation of relevant and helpful Customer Journey Maps. They provide the first indications about the data needed, visualizations and the future use of the journeys within your corporate structure.

2. Collect & analyze data

By now, you have a good idea that Customer Journey Maps help to empathize with customers and realistically depict their behavior. To do this, it is essential to understand who they are, what they value, and how they ultimately behave online and offline.

To gain insight into the interaction with your own offer, it is advisable to first revert to your own collected data on the target group. Your website tracking, for example with Google Analytics, provides good indications for this. If the GA-Tracking is set up correctly, it provides you with plenty of information about the previous user behavior, traffic sources and contents that are of particular interest to your customers. Demographic data and information about interests can also be included in the data and be helpful in putting yourself even more deeply into the target groups.

However, you should not limit yourself to the tracking. Sound data about customers also provide:

• Customer surveys and interviews
• Information from the customer service or sales team, as they often interact directly with customers.
• Studies, particularly consumer studies or studies on user and media behavior
• Buying of data sets, e.g., at best4planning

3. Select Persona

Personas, or also Buyer Personas & Consumer Personas, are developed to understand target groups and thus (potential) customers on a deeper, more individual level. The fictional personas provide more detailed information on age, occupation, marital status, media usage, and personal demands on brands or products. They represent the diversity of the different personalities, behaviors, and individual needs of the target group.

Customer Journeys are ideally their extension and relate to their characteristics and behavior patterns. The concrete reference to individual customers allows for the realistic depiction of the customer experience in a Journey Map. To depict a comprehensible customer experience, you should therefore select one Persona per Customer Journey Map, referred to. You get a fuller picture of customers and all possible touchpoints if you create a Customer Journey Map for several – preferably very different - personas.

4. Choose Visualization & Framework

At this point, you already have a good overview of the typical behavior and the requirements and expectations of your customers. Now you have to consider which visualization suits your requirements for the Customer Journey Map best. Some models are better suited than others, depending on which actions or which touchpoints should be focused.

A-Day-In-The-Life models depict a complete daily routine of your customers. These are particularly suitable to understand behavior or media usage of customers in everyday life better as well as product purchases without long decision-making processes or spontaneous purchases.

Funnel models, such as the classic Customer Journey Model, are on the other hand clearer and strongly orient themselves to the abstract phases of purchasing and decision-making processes. However, they often fall short when behaviors of customers or their motivations are to be analyzed more deeply.

5. Synthesis of Data & Definition of Journey Steps

In this step, the task is to bring together the goals of the journey, the collected data about customers, and the visualization. The individual phases of the chosen framework should gradually be filled with contents that result from the overall picture of the data collection.

Helpful questions for the definition of the individual steps:

• What do my customers need?
• How do they become aware of my brand?
• What are the various touchpoints for the individual phases of the Journey?
• Where are there possibly interruptions in the Journey? Where do we lose users and how do we win them back?
• What is the typical media and purchasing behavior of my customers or my Persona in particular?
• Which contents or services does my Persona attach particular importance to?

Especially in the classic Customer Journey Model, the individual steps can then be supplemented precisely by the parameters that are most relevant to your brand.

6. Testing & Optimizations

Once your first draft of the Customer Journey is complete, take the time to review everything carefully again. Imagine you are the Persona or the customer. Are all steps of the Journey realistic? Do the individual touchpoints make sense and match the data you have gathered about your customers?

Depending on the use case of the Journey, it can also be helpful to have the Journey gone through by colleagues from the individual subareas. The development of a Customer Journey Map is always a dynamic process. So do not shy away from adjusting them regularly or reconsidering conceived steps again. No Customer Journey lasts forever.

But the work is far from over with the final map. Based on the created journeys, you and your team should now discuss possible pain points in the status quo of your communication, optimize purchasing and decision-making processes accordingly and thus sustainably improve the customer experience of your brand.

Solutions for Creating Customer Journey Maps

The good news: In principle, you do not need a particular tool to create a Customer Journey Map. Whether you draw it on a whiteboard, create it for presentations in Microsoft PowerPoint or use more professional tools - the most important thing is that they are used and continuously optimized. Depending on company structure and internal processes, you can prepare your Journey Mappings in such a way that they can be easily adapted after gaining new insights and easily employed for developing strategies, concepts or marketing measures.

Solutions for visualizing Customer Journey Maps:

• Microsoft PowerPoint or Keynote
• Miro
• Smaply
• Microsoft Visio (Software to create diagrams and sequences)
• InVision
• Wireframing-/Protoytyping software, like Axure or Justinmind

Solutions for tracking and analyzing relevant data:

• Website Analytics: Google Analytics or Matomo
• Hotjar
• Funnel
• ContentSquare
• Albacross
• kissmetrics
• Salesviewer

You can find even more tools for developing Customer Journey Maps or the individual partial steps in the creation at OMR Reviews – with verified recommendations and user ratings.