The 9 Key Steps of Customer Experience (CX) Journey Mapping
A CX journey map can be created by predicting the respective behaviours of different personas, based on data collected by research, across the different channels and touchpoints determined by emerging ideas that come about through comprehensive and swift teamwork.
Now, we are going to analyse the CX journey mapping process in 9 steps by using basic concepts.
While mapping customers’ relationships with a brand or its products and services, it is first necessary to slot the milestones of the CX journey – that is, to identify some specific constants.
These milestones can be scaled up to accommodate various needs, but any and every CX journey map must include these five assessment criteria as a base:
● Timeline: Important turning points that map the changes in customer relations with the brand over time.
● Personas: Half-imaginary characters, typifying basic personal features of a wider customer group, based on data collected from user research, combined with web analytics.
● Emotion: Symbolic representation on the mood line of a customer’s emotional landscape at the moment of interaction.
● Channels: Entire vehicles of customer interaction and touchpoints with the brand.
● Touchpoints: Any and every moment of customer actions and interactions with the organisation or its products.
Now, after determining these basics, it’s time to observe the customer experience flow and illustrate it as a roadmap.
Megan Grocki, Experience Strategy Director at Mad*Pow, explains the 9 key steps of designing a CX journey map in a video she prepared for UX Mastery:
In summary, here’s how we can repeat these 9 steps, which visually form the crest of a wave:
1. Review the goals.
● Consider the goals of the CX journey mapping process, as well as the goals of the organisation and its product or service.
2. Gather research.
● Conduct research based on relevant resources, including both qualitative and quantitative findings, and gather the results together.
3. Generate channels and touchpoints.
● Work on determining channels and touchpoints where your customer will interact with your organisation, product or service.
4. Create an empathy map.
● To understand your customer’s emotional landscape, focus on what s/he is thinking, feeling,
seeing, hearing, saying and doing.
5. Look at it from different perspectives.
● Practise generating ideas quickly by looking at problems and scenarios from different perspectives.
6. Create an affinity diagram.
● Organise your ideas visually, and classify and categorise them cohesively.
7. Sketch the customer journey.
● Draw a sketch of the CX journey map to make it comprehensible for your team.
8. Refine and digitalise.
● Create a digital map to help clarify any confusing details from the sketch.
9. Share and use.
● Now you are ready to take a journey through the eyes of your customer.
CX journey maps need to be updated as conditions change, since they are based on current data and personal experiences. For this reason, no CX journey map can be accurate and applied in different instances.
In other words, each CX journey map is as unique as each customer of an organisation.
Therefore, you should –not only today, but always– keep your data and data processing up-to-date in order to know your customers better.
