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Getting Off The Beaten Path With Your Customer Journey Mapping
How to use a collaborative approach to map the less obvious areas of your customer journey: awareness and advocacy
Customer journey mapping is a pretty standard process for product-oriented or service-oriented companies and it’s usually expected from a UX team to be involved and even lead these processes from time to time. The idea of customer journey mapping is simple, you talk to real customers who correspond to one of your personas and you let them lead you by the hand while explaining to you where they face moments of frustration and moments of delight. Ideally, you’ll prepare questions for them that will help you understand their experience along the journey of interacting with your product or service across multiple touchpoints so you can map the experience visually and understand what needs to be improved in order to give your customers the best experience. In general, the steps of a typical customer journey include (but not limited to):
1. Awareness — when a customer learns about the existence of your product
2. Consideration — when a customer researches your product
3. Decision — when a customer decides to buy (or not) your product
4. Service — when a customer officially becomes your customer
5. Loyalty — when a customer is loyal to your product over time
6. Advocacy — when a customer recommends the product to other people
While mapping some parts of the journey can be relatively easy (e.g. anything that happens once your customers have already started using your product or service) some other areas such as awareness and advocacy can be a bit more challenging to map and in this article I would like to discuss potential methods you could use to work around these two areas.
Awareness
Awareness usually falls under the responsibility of the marketing teams so it could be a bit hard to dig into it if you work in a UX team outside of the marketing…
