How does one book a table on a restaurant’s website? At first glance, everything seems pretty simple: the user goes to the site, opens the reservation page, and types in the time and date. But what if they want to contact the manager to ask something about the menu? Or they’ve decided to change a reservation they had already made? Or they want to book a window table?
A customer journey map (CJM) helps you map out all possible user scenarios in advance and understand how people interact with your service at every stage, from logging in to making repeat purchases. It’s all about making the customer experience as pleasant as possible.
A CJM is needed in two cases:
- When creating a new product. It helps work out all the navigation options, predict what users will do to achieve their goals, and remove obstacles on their way. A CJM is built during the prototyping phase, before development and design.
- When improving an existing product. This is when your team wants to identify bottlenecks to improve the quality of service.
CJM development generally falls under the responsibility of your product manager, although business analysts and UX designers may also be involved.
Prep work
The first thing you need to do when mapping a customer journey is to carry out target audience research and competitive analysis. This will help you understand the motivations and needs of potential users, see how other companies are addressing them, and develop your own concept.
After that, we identify the types of people who will use your product, also known as “personas”. To understand why this is necessary, let’s look at the example below.
Two people, Mary and Peter, visit a coding bootcamp website. Mary is an experienced front-end developer who wants to learn Vue for a new project. Peter has never done programming before and wants to learn a new trade. He’s still not sure exactly what he wants to do.
Mary searches “Vue coding course” and goes straight to the course page. She examines the programme and the speakers’ profiles and then proceeds to the payment page. Peter, on the other hand, starts on the home page, checks out the courses one by one, reads their descriptions, and looks at the potential jobs and respective rates. If necessary, he will contact the manager via chat.
As you can see, Mary and Peter have markedly different user journeys. That means that we’ll need a separate scenario in the CJM for each of them.
Step-by-step scenario
Once we’ve chosen a persona, we can start constructing a customer journey map. To do this, we need to identify what the persona wants to achieve by using our service; for example, to contact the support service, register a personal account, or learn more about the company – but more often than not, the overriding goal is related to the service’s core function. For the coding bootcamp in our example, this would be buying a course.
The next step is to describe in detail each step the user takes towards that goal: which button they press, what they expect to see and what they actually get.
Let’s take a look at the ticket purchase scenario constructed by Hard Client for the Aviasales website. We’ve chosen it for our article because it’s a prime example of a good CJM.
Image from HardClient’s website
The columns of the table represent the stages of the customer lifecycle: searching for tickets, making a purchase, waiting for a flight, etc. The rows reflect the user’s actions at each stage, touchpoints, goals and expectations.
Since this CJM analyses an already existing product, it also includes the user’s emotions at each step, experiences (positive or negative), and recommendations.
The user journey starts with signing in to the app by entering login details. Then the person selects a flight and fare, checks prices on the carrier’s official website, returns to Aviasales to add services to the cart, and so on. For each of these stages, there’s a breakdown of the customer’s actions, the results, and how these results match the user’s expectations.
Image from HardClient’s website
When a CJM is ready, it’s used to create prototypes of the future service and its mock design. Sure, some things may be adjusted if it turns out that a different method works better from a development or design point of view. But the user journey itself will remain the same.
Common pitfalls
Finally, we’ll look at some of the most common mistakes people make when creating a CJM.
Confining the customer journey to the service itself. In reality, the user’s journey doesn’t end until they’ve achieved their goal. For example, in the context of marketplaces, the final step would be to collect the order at a pick-up point or return the product. And if we are talking about booking a flight, to land at the airport of arrival. A CJM cannot be built in isolation from the rest of the customer experience, because it has a direct impact on the quality of service.
Not doing the TA analysis. If you try to build a customer journey map based solely on your own perception of user needs, it’s very easy to make mistakes and miss many important details.
Overlooking the details. A CJM needs to reflect every action the user takes. In other words, when we create a scenario for finding a coffee machine on a marketplace, it’s not enough to write "Type the product name in the search box". You need to consider other details as well: How will the person use filters? What happens if they make a typo or forget to switch languages? Will the website display a drop-down list with tips? All of these things may seem insignificant, but they have a big impact on the overall customer experience.
Ignoring entry points. Users don’t always start browsing your website from the home page. For example, if we google “Moscow Bangkok tickets” and go to an aggregator’s website, we’ll see that the “from” and “to” lines are pre-filled. And when we click on a TV ad on a marketplace, we are automatically taken to its product card. All of this needs to be considered when mapping a customer journey.
By the way, CJM is a part of pre-project analytics, which is a topic we’ve already covered. If you’d like to learn about other stages too, check out this article on our blog.