Unlock ROI: A Complete Guide to Customer Journey Mapping

The conundrum of driving year-on-year ROI increases can often feel like a black box.

Do you focus on adding value to your existing customer relationships, or do you put all your effort into testing new growth channels for maximum reach? The secret to unlocking hidden ROI might be easier than we think. In fact, it’s very often staring us in the face – in the guise of the customer journey!  And the key to tapping into this treasure trove of profitability? Customer journey mapping.

It’s not difficult to find definitions of customer journey mapping. Our favourite comes from global CRM software provider, Salesforce – ‘Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a visual story of your customers’ interactions with your brand.’

Why is customer journey mapping important?

There are two main reasons for which customer journey mapping is so important – first and foremost, there’s the emphasis it places on your customer, and second, there are the internal benefits it also reaps for your business.

Customer journey mapping and your customer

We’ll get into how to map customer journey in a second. Before that, it’s important to bear in mind the following principles so that you do indeed unlock that hidden ROI.

• See it from their perspective – as you map the customer journey, it’s important to understand what the customer is experiencing rather than how you are seeing it as the business team (digital, marketing, sales, etc.). This requires a bit of a mindset shift so be prepared to leave a lot of your business hang-ups at the door!

• Understand the emotions, not just the actions – when you see it from the customer’s perspective, you should then understand much better what emotions are being triggered during the journey and how those play into the overall experience. This is important for those famous lightbulb moments relating to any new opportunities…

• Identify unmet needs and new opportunities – customer journey mapping is one of the most effective ways of taking a step back from the day-to-day and seeing that bigger picture. It’s the perfect chance to remove yourself from the daily grind and tap into any unmet needs that your customers are crying out for.

• Minimise friction and obstacles – customer journey mapping is, by its very nature, a process optimisation exercise as it highlights where obstacles may be occurring and where process improvements can be made. For more on why this is important and why ‘friction’ may be killing your customer journey, read this article.

Customer journey mapping and your business

• Improve ROI – identifying opportunities for improvement, minimising roadblocks and tapping into unmet needs – these all lead to improved ROI for your business, and even new avenues for additional revenue income.

• Gain a competitive edge –  customer journey mapping doesn’t have to be limited to your own customer experience. Savvy digital teams know to do the same exercise for their competitors too in order to take advantage of opportunities they aren’t leveraging.

• Align your internal business departments – customer journey mapping also yields great benefits for your business too. As we’ll see in the next section, the mapping exercise brings together often siloed and disparate departments, thus helping with overall business alignment and internal process efficiencies.

The customer journey mapping process

A word of warning here!

The process of creating customer journey maps is not a theoretical one that you do just for the sake of it. You need to enter the process knowing that it’s a highly useful exercise intended to identify opportunities and highlight areas of improvement. What’s more, when coupled with digital product design, it’s the perfect precursor to establishing where your product needs to sit in the journey and how it needs to function in order to meet a burning customer need.

One of the best ways to tackle the customer journey mapping process is via the medium of workshops.

Customer journey mapping workshops

Customer journey mapping can be a lengthy and labour-intensive process so one of the best ways to fast track it is by leveraging a ‘workshop’ environment.

Customer journey mapping workshops are great for:

• Bringing everyone together in the one room to establish business alignment and buy-in.

• Visualising the actual customer journey map on a whiteboard and having the whole team interact with it to understand the customer’s perspective better.

• Creating those ‘aha’ moments when the hivemind of creative brains collaborate together to spot new ideas!

Customer journey mapping workshops are even better when you take advantage of a workshop facilitator, i.e. a 3rd party individual who is able to facilitate proceedings, keep the workshop on track and prompt participants into seeing things from a different angle.

How do you map the customer journey: a step-by-step guide

Step 1 – Prework

• To make sure the actual journey mapping session goes as smoothly as possible, there’s a bit of prework you’ll want to do in advance. This includes:
  Identifying your target customer and being clear on the audience you’re looking to focus on in the map itself. If you do identify more than one target customer or group, then be sure to run separate workshops for these or you’ll end up trying to tackle too many disparate journeys in the one session!

• Leveraging research to inform your journey mapping and customer insights. This can be from first party quantitative research you have to hand (e.g. Google Analytics data), or third-party qualitative research that’s available from reports, surveys, focus groups or interviews.

• Agreeing on a model to follow for the journey. This could be the traditional ‘Consumer decision making process’ as below, or it could be the model that User Testing recommend which is similar to the AIDA model: the four stages of Awareness, Consideration, Decision and Retention. Whichever you choose, you’ll probably want to adapt it slightly to fit your own business model, but it’s important not to overcomplicate it or add too many stages in!

• Making use of available templates. Luckily, you don’t need to start from scratch with your customer journey mapping as there are many great tools and resources you can find online to help. Just access a customer journey map template, such as these ones from HubSpot or this one from Miro.

Step 2 – The workshop

When it comes to the workshop itself, this is when you’ll be brainstorming with your group what it is that the customer is doing at each of the customer journey stages.  You’ll want to have your customer journey map template blown up in size and fixed to a wall or whiteboard. This is so you can interact with it, adding post-it notes or writing on it as you brainstorm. Then, you can take a more basic approach to the mapping process, or a more advanced one, depending on the make-up of your group and what you’re trying to achieve.

A basic approach to customer journey mapping

As you work through each customer journey stage, you’ll want to ask the group the following questions:

• What is the customer doing at this point?

• What are their biggest pain points and frustrations?

• What are they hoping to solve for or achieve (their goals)?

• What touchpoints might they be interacting with here?

Then, taking a step back on all of the above, you’ll then want to ask the following question:

• What do we, as a business, want to change about this stage – either in terms of the activities we can be doing to engage with the customer, or the touchpoints we can be optimising, or the product features we can be highlighting?

An advanced approach to customer journey mapping

With a more advanced approach, you can also look to answer the following additional questions:

• How do our business goals align with the customer’s at each stage?

• What business KPI are we looking to achieve?

• What systems and tools do we have (or are we missing) to support all of  this activity?

The do’s and don’ts of customer journey mapping

As with any workshop activity, there are a number of best practices to follow. From years of running these sessions with our own clients, here are our top dos and don’ts.

• Do set clear objectives – why are you doing this mapping in the first place?  What goals are you looking to hit?  How do these fit into your overall digital product strategy?

• Do focus on your customer persona – be clear about the customer you’re focusing on in the journey mapping exercise and do the pre-work involved to establish team buy-in to this beforehand. This is especially important if your product or service addresses multiple different personas, in which case you should prioritise these and, if necessary, run separate workshops.

• Do ensure you have the right people in the room – you may be making some important decisions in this workshop so it’s crucial to have good representation from all the important teams. You may want to treat it like a Design Sprint in terms of the job roles you select.

• Don’t get too hung up on finding solutions – the purpose of this exercise is to map the customer journey and highlight any areas for improvement. It’s not – yet! – to design fully fledged solutions. For that, you can follow our Design Sprint process.

•  Don’t forget the data – where possible, try and gather data points to support the mapping you’re doing. For example, if you’re looking at your customer onboarding process, can you pinpoint the numbers to show how many customers are using your demo videos or reviewing your FAQ? Tools such as hotjar can be very useful here.

Essential tools for remote customer journey mapping

We’ve already covered a few of the great tools and resources available to support with your customer journey mapping. Now here are a few specifically aimed at teams that can’t all be in the same room together!

• Lucidchart – this is a great online whiteboarding tool that easily lets you make connections between different parts of the customer journey.

• Miro – this one is a virtual tool perfect for brainstorming and, like Lucidchart, for connecting the dots.

• Whiteboards – this tool is particularly useful for teams that already work in Jira.

Customer journey mapping can take many different forms in terms of if you’re running it in-person or remotely, what the specific product focus is that you’re looking into, and the segmented customer group you want to concentrate on. However, what is common across all forms of customer journey mapping is that it’s a crucial exercise for gaining insights into customer experiences, identifying opportunities for enhancement, driving innovation, and ultimately delivering better digital products. Armed with the step-by-step guide we’ve laid out above, and an energetic team eager to collaborate and innovate, it’s easy to see how customer journey mapping is the key to unlocking hidden ROI for your business!

Adrenalin is a leading digital product and technology agency for Australia’s top brands and organisations. Stay informed about the latest digital product trends, strategies, and tactics by subscribing to the Adrenalin newsletter below.