Journey Maps

A journey map is a representation of how customers engage with a product or service over time. You can use journey maps to identify a customer’s thoughts, feelings, pain points and successes across a scenario, touch point or channel. This allows you to find opportunities, changes or areas in need of attention. Journey maps are developed through research, including customer interviews, surveys, use of data and other methods.

Elements of a customer journey map

While journey maps can differ depending on your needs, they generally contain many, if not all, of the following.

The Customer: The customer or audience group that is the focus of this particular journey map. This can tie in directly to your User Personas.
Scenario: The set of actions that this customer is completely on the journey.
Goals, Expectations, etc: You can optionally include further details about the customer to provide more context for the information on the map.
Phases: The primary phases of the journey, generally kept to 3-5 items that easily explain the stages.
Actions: The specific actions taken within each step of the phases.
Timeline: A timeline is essential to a journey map, displaying how actions and feelings happen over time. The timeline can be labeled with dates or periods of time.
Customer Experience: The persona's thoughts, feelings and reactions at different points on the timeline. This is often displayed as a line graph, charting the customer's change in mood or other factors.
Quotes: Optionally, include customer quotes from actual research, tied into specific actions on the timeline.
Touchpoints: Defined the channels that the customer interacts with at different points on the timeline. Example: Website, Support Desk, Phone Call
Opportunities: As a result of the information across the user journey, start to define opportunities for the organization to improve at each phase. Example: Reduce clicks for the online checkout experience.