Six Steps to Building a Customer Journey Map

Danny Peters is Customer Experience consultant at Conexperience, specializing in Customer Journey Mapping and Customer Experience Management. He posted 6 Steps to Build a Customer Journey on LinkedIn Pulse. He breaks down CJM in six steps:

Step 1 – Episodes: Episodes are groups of touchpoints in the customers’ journey. An episode is like a chapter in a book. There are a logical summary of every step. Examples are:

  • Look for information, contact, fill in form, receive confirmation, use service, talk to service rep, end service
  • Travel to store, look at products, try products, buy product, use product, repair product, buy new product
  • Book trip, preparation, travel to airport, check in, board, fly, arrive

Step 2 – Touchpoints: Touchpoints are all the moments when a customer touches the brand. This can be direct and indirect. In these moments, the customer has an experience which always influences his opinion about your organization. It can be positive, neutral or negative. Touchpoints are more specific than channels. For example in the channel ‘shop’ the customer can have the following touchpoints:

  • I read a brochure to get more information
  • I talk to a service representative for more information
  • I negotiate with a sales representative for a better offer
  • I sign the contract to have the service
  • I receive a bag with information before leaving the shop
  • I leave the shop to go home

Step 3 – Scenarios: A scenario is a story with a set of touchpoints that describes a customer journey over time. It’s a selection of the touchpoints and contains most of the episodes.

Step 4 – Emotions: Determine the emotion at each touchpoint. The discussion and proof for an emotion per touchpoint pushes you to understand and investigate the emotions of customers during a touchpoint. You need to validate your assumptions about the emotions with domain experts, real clients, the customer satisfaction scores and/or customer feedback.

Step 5 – Metrics: Determine the measure of each touchpoints with customer feedback metrics and parameters. With metrics per touchpoints it is possible to choose exactly where and why to improve, which is the last step.

Step 6 – Analyze and Optimize: Analyze every touchpoint, link between touchpoints, emotions, metrics, etc. and determine where to improve the experience. With prototyping you can test your improvement idea on a control group of customers, or in one small piece of the process to validate your improvements and decide if you want to keep the change.