The magic of listening

Many hours of time, a lot of money and a lot of stress have gone into your website and online shop. The added value of your product is clear. You use countless channels to draw attention to yourself. But instead of flashing incoming orders and ringing tills: Chirping crickets.

‘Customers don't buy a product, they buy a good feeling.’ This marketing adage has been passed down from generation to generation, and yet many companies have yet to find the right pitch to give their target group goosebumps. Let's just throw it out there: the magic word is customer journey mapping.

Curiosity, joy, satisfaction - the ideal customer journey is when (potential) customers realise that your offering is the holy grail they've been looking for for so long. But how do you transfer your enthusiasm to the target group? The best way is to ask them yourself!

The customer journey map puts your target group at the centre. You use storytelling and visualisation to visualise customer needs based on in-depth research and make the emotional journey to your offering tangible. And it solves another problem: the map gives your interdisciplinary project team a concise and memorable vision for the user experience that everyone can work towards together.

Think of the customer journey map as a timeline showing the feelings that certain points of contact with your company or product trigger in customers. From discovering your product range on the website and comparing it with alternative offers, to the purchasing experience and use, to customer service afterwards. How do the interactions with your product have a positive or negative impact on your customers' emotional state? The customer journey map reveals this and uncovers potential for improvement that your team can address.

The Customer Journey Map is based on 5 points:

The persona that sets off on the journey
The scenario in which they find themselves
The stops the person makes on their journey
The exploration of feelings or: time for interviews!
Translating the findings into concrete tasks

Whose shoes do you want to start the journey in? The journey begins by taking the perspective of the target group and defining a persona for it. In the next step, you build the initial scenario that your team will deal with. This involves defining a business objective for which you want to gain new insights for an improved user experience. Possible goals could be, for example, to experience your product from the customer's perspective. Or you want to find out how you can make a problem easier to understand across departments and disciplines. Or perhaps you are looking for the reason for stagnating sales figures. Your goal determines the itinerary.

The map becomes particularly effective and versatile when interdisciplinary teams work together on the customer journey map. It becomes even more exciting when the target group itself has its say. For example, through quantitative surveys or target group interviews, which we highly recommend. After all, where can we get better feedback and more valuable insights than from the customers themselves? It helps to create an interview guide, in which different professionals are welcome to participate in order to ask questions from different perspectives.

The interviews are then all about one thing: Listening. Taking notes. Even the unpleasant truths. The aim of your team is now to find out where there are still pain points in the user experience for your target group(s). Where are there opportunities to make the journey through your world even more pleasant? Why does a certain process cause annoyance? What does a person need to get out of an ordering process satisfied, for example? Which click is too much for your users? Once these points have been identified, the next step is to formulate concrete work tasks based on the findings and at the same time define responsibilities for these tasks.

Now to the fun part! Visualising the results is fun and looks chic, but it has to be the very last step in order to present the collected findings in an understandable and memorable way for all stakeholders. At the top is your persona and the initial situation, below which the individual steps on your users' journey are displayed. This can either be the journey from prospect to loyal customer or, on a smaller scale, a specific process, such as a purchase via your app or the use of one of your services.

Below these hard facts, the user's emotional state then unfolds in an eye-opening emotional curve along the various stages of the journey, as well as the insights you were able to draw from it for your overarching goal. The derived tasks and responsibilities are also written down on the map to complete the map from the initial situation to the next work steps.

The customer journey map is an effective tool for placing small fragments from a company's specialist departments in a larger context and viewing processes from a bird's eye view. The in-depth research highlights customer pain points that require special attention, making them easier to understand for everyone. The customer journey map forms a common basis for discussion for interdisciplinary teams to initiate improvements and enable suggestions from different perspectives.

Although the creation of the map is time-consuming and research-intensive, it ultimately saves resources, as companies can make well-founded and user-centred decisions for the future. In our opinion: If you have a conscientiously created map, you will get yourself and your customers to their destination faster.