Why evidence-based journey mapping is essential for great customer experiences

It's a combination of the practical and the emotional.

The practical is the touchpoints: the online forms, the content, the user interface, the emails and the mobile apps. These are important but the emotional determines the overall experience:

• How do the design and the content make customers feel?

• Is the task flow delightful or frustrating?

Every task creates an experience and is your opportunity to delight your customers. Delighted customers repeat purchases, don't need as much support and drive your word-of-mouth marketing.

The only way to identify those opportunities is to research your users, map their journeys and track their emotions.

Buying t-shirts is the "Hello World!" example of digital experience. But there are many other non-commercial tasks, for example:

• applying for a driver licence or a passport

• choosing a university course

• booking a vaccination appointment

• searching for a rental apartment

• learning about local planning laws

• requesting annual leave (yes, this applies to intranets too!)

Identify all the tasks in your organisation (don't forget your employees, they are "customers" too) and for each task ask yourself:

• What are the emotions for each step of the journey?

• How can I turn negative emotions into positive emotions?

• What are the reasonable expectations for the journey?

To answer those 3 questions, you need to create a journey map.

The insights into the journey, what drives the opportunities, can only be gained by talking to real customers.

Analytics are great but without qualitative user research such as user interviews, you're guessing. And the chances are you're wrong. Quantitative research (analytics, multi-choice surveys) will tell you what is happening. Qualitative research (user interviews) will tell you why.

Here's a journey map for applying for a scholarship to study in Australia.

The automatic response to improving any task is SEO: we need to make sure that customers can find the task's starting point.

But look at this journey map. The customers (in this case, students) are having no trouble finding the starting point. And when they find it they are happy with the initial content. For this journey, time spent on SEO is not where effort should be focused.

We can clearly see that it's after this point that the experience degrades. Analytics might indicate something's amiss if customers are exiting the funnel. But they can't tell us why. Only the customers can (and as a bonus they'll often suggest a fix)

Now we have these insights we can confidently identify actionable and targeted opportunities for converting those red emoticons to green and improving the customer experience.

Emotions and opportunities are key components of any journey map. By mapping the journey and understanding your customers' emotions – good and bad – you will find opportunities to exceed your their expectations:

• Which existing features can you enhance?

• What new features are required?

Great experiences need little to no intervention. They minimise support costs and maximise your reputation.

This is just as important for applying for a scholarship as it is for buying a t-shirt in the ultra-competitive world of online retailing.

Get in touch for a free consultation if you’re ready to take your customer experience up a notch.