Journey maps are created to facilitate a common business understanding of how every customer should be treated across all sales, logistics, distribution, care, etc. channels. This in turn can help break down “organizational silos” and start a process of wider customer-focused communication in a business.

A customer journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. It’s used for understanding and addressing customer needs and pain points. No two customer journeys are identical. However, they can be generalized to give an insight into the “typical journey” for a customer as well as providing insight into current interactions and the potential for future interactions with customers. They empowers the company to make value-driven decisions based on a customer experience model of performance. 

They may also be employed to educate stakeholders as to what customers perceive when they interact with the business. They help them explore what customers think, feel, see, hear and do and also raise some interesting “what ifs” and the possible answers to them.

My role

I led the user research and design of the customer journey map. I partnered with 2 product managers, the CEO, Customer Support team, and team representatives to get insights.

What can a customer journey map answer?

Shift a company’s perspective from inside-out to outside-in

If an organization lets internal processes and systems drive decisions that affect customer experience, a journey map helps shift the organization’s culture by refocusing on the thoughts, actions and emotions of customers. Journey mapping sheds light on real human experiences that often organizations know very little about.

Break down silos to create one shared, organization-wide vision.

Because journey maps create a vision of the entire customer journey, they become a tool for creating cross-department conversation and collaboration. Journey mapping could be the first step in building an organization-wide plan of action to invest in customer experience, as it helps answer the question, “Where do we start?” by highlighting areas of friction.

Assign ownership of key touchpoints to internal departments

Often, areas of inconsistencies and glitches in customer journeys exist simply because no internal team has been tasked with ownership of that element. Journey maps can create clarity around alignment of departments or groups with different stages or key touchpoints in the journey that need addressing.

Target specific customers

Journey maps can help teams focus in on specific personas or customers, whether that means understanding differences or similarities across the journeys of multiple personas, prioritizing a high-value persona or exploring ways to target a new type of customer.

Understand quantitative data

If through analytics or other quantitative data that something specific is happening—journey mapping can help you find out why.

Examples of Customer Journey Maps

Adaptive Path

Wealth Management

Health Insurance Purchase

Emissary Customer Journey Map

I conducted a series of user interviews from cohorts of the personas and partnered with the customer support team to gain as much insights into where people were experiencing pain and joy. This provided the data to inform the customer journey map.

The data consisted of overarching themes of any given person’s experience on the platform: Onboarding and Engagement. I further segmented them into a series of digestible themes to highlight to different teams what role they play in the product experience.

After looking at how companies were designing journey maps, I iterated on 3 versions to land on the most simplest that conveys what the person’s thinking, feeling, and doing in the product experience to start the first step in supporting the company towards an experience led vision. And most importantly, give others the ability to replicate this themselves for various use cases.

Compiled from persona interviews, customer support tickets, and workshop findings.