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Here’s what you need to include for an effective, actionable, customer-focused journey map: 1.
#Customer journey map free#
If you are more of an auditory/visual learner, feel free to watch our recent webinar on these requirements. The examples we’ve peppered throughout the post show actual Heart of the Customer journey maps that incorporate these criteria. In this post, I’ll detail the criteria used to design and build customer journey maps that can accelerate your customer experience program, focusing on the 10 critical components all great customer journey maps share. Ultimately, what is going to matter most is the content, and the integrity of the process used to compile it. You can make it an engaging work of art or scribbles on a napkin. You can build a map following high-quality design principles or use smiley faces. The visual appeal of the document is extremely important, but the specific style is less so. This allows you to easily identify where to focus your resources in the future, and the most cost-effective initiatives to implement to generate the greatest return on your investment (ROI) and the largest increase in customer loyalty. The best maps are highly customized, documenting your customer’s journey, as it is today, through your customer’s eyes. But not all journey maps are created equal. Guidelines are valuable because there is no “standard” map, since there is no “standard” customer experience. Undertaking the journey mapping process carries benefits that go way beyond the creation of a singular document, but here we will focus only on the maps themselves. These visual representations show how a customer uses your product or service, or the decision-making process that turns a potential user into a customer. And the best way to find out what customers do, think, and feel while interacting with your company is to create a customer journey map.
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Understanding your customer experience is the key to improving it…and to reaping the financial rewards that go hand in hand with increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. In short, it’s an oldie, but a goodie, and I hope that regardless of whether you’re rereading it or encountering it for the first time, you will come away with something new and helpful.
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I am proud that the underlying philosophy and framework remains solid and consistent, but I’ve tweaked some terminology, techniques, guidelines, and examples. So it’s time once again to refresh the content. (And yet, somehow, none of us has aged a day – it’s uncanny!) I enjoyed revisiting and updating the post back in 2015, but in the intervening years, the world has changed, the CX industry has evolved, research methodology has gotten more nimble, and technology has advanced. But I did know that customer experience as a discipline – given its proven ability to boost customer loyalty and company results – was here to stay. It’s hard to believe it’s been seven years since I launched my customer experience consultancy, Heart of the Customer, way back when CX was still in its infancy.Īt that time, when I first wrote Customer Journey Maps – the Top 10 Requirements, I didn’t know the post would be viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and reposted around the world.
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