Transcript: Creating a Customer Journey Map

Video 1: Understanding the Customer Journey

By placing customers at the center of your flywheel, you’re committing to becoming a customer-first company.
You’re ensuring that your customers will have a great experience with you. By designing a great customer
experience, you’re keeping your customers delighted and helping your business grow. According to McKinsey &
Company, companies that offer first-class customer experiences tend to grow faster and more profitably. These
companies are also 80% more likely to retain customers.

Now, many people rely on singular touchpoints to tell them about the customer experience: How was the
customer’s call with their sales rep? Did the customer chat with support at all? While these touchpoints do impact
the overall customer experience, the customer’s journey consists of a series of touchpoints that together add up
to an end-to-end experience. Folks can have a few great touchpoints but a bad overall experience and vice
versa. For this reason, designing a great customer experience doesn’t fall on a single person or team; instead, all
folks who interact with customers—marketing, sales, and customer service—need to band together to create a
great customer experience.

Traditionally, marketing teams generate content, capture leads, and nurture leads until they’ve qualified and are
sales ready. Sales teams engage with potential buyers, demonstrate the value of the offering, and close deals.
Finally, customer service and success teams educate customers on how to use the service or product and resolve
customer issues. When these teams work at peak efficiency, they’re supporting the buyer’s journey in a seamless
way; the customer feels supported at each stage. The customer knows who their main point of contact is, how to
get in touch with them, and the customer doesn’t have to repeat any information they may have told someone
else in the company. Sounds ideal, right?

Unfortunately, reality may look different. The most common points of friction within the flywheel are the customer
handoffs between teams. Does your sales team know what expectations your marketing team is setting through
content? Does your customer service or success team know what your sales team is telling their prospects? Does
your customer service team keep your sales team in the loop for future opportunities? If there’s any disconnect
between these teams, opportunities can be missed and customers may not feel as supported, leading to a less-
than-ideal customer experience. Yikes.

To understand and improve the customer experience, create a customer journey map. A customer journey map
is a visual representation of the process a customer or prospect goes through to achieve a goal with your
company. A customer journey map is important for 3 reasons:

1. It aligns your company around a customer narrative. One of the goals of a customer journey map is to
ensure everyone understands the customer journey from a customer’s perspective. Marketers can use a
customer journey map to know what happens post marketing. Sales can use it to know what happens
before and after they interact with customers. And service folks can use it to understand what happens
prior to purchasing.
2. It highlights points of force and friction in the customer experience. What’s working well and what needs
to be improved? What’s the impact of your customers’ actions?
3. It brings your customer-facing teams together to make critical decisions on what needs to be improved.
 Transcript: Creating a Customer Journey Map

So, if you feel a disconnect between your customer-facing teams, or a disconnect between your internal teams
and your customers, create a customer journey map. Use this map to form a unified front, identify points of force
and friction, and work to create an even better customer experience.

Video 2: Creating a Customer Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map takes some effort, but the results are worth it. You unify departments across
the company, identify points of force and friction in your customer’s journey, and figure out ways to improve
aspects of the customer experience.

Here’s what a sample customer journey map looks like. We used an online software to create our customer
journey map, but you can use whatever you find most useful—whiteboards, sticky notes, even pen and paper.
Whatever you use, make sure to document your customer journey map in a safe place so that you can come back
to it every few months.

Pro tip: Before creating a customer journey map, make sure you’ve created at least one buyer persona. That way,
you can connect to the mindset of your customer.

Here are 4 best practices for creating a customer journey map:

1. Set the stage.

2. Document what your buyer persona is thinking, feeling, and doing.
3. Pay close attention to points of force and friction.
4. Analyze the big picture.

Let’s start from the beginning: Set the stage.

By setting the stage before mapping, you’re making sure you have the right people in the room and that all
those people are on the same page. Because designing a great customer experience doesn’t solely fall on one
person, people from all customer-facing departments need to be involved in this exercise. Also, make sure these
folks know exactly what the expectations of this exercise are: Does everyone know the importance of a customer
journey map? Or which buyer persona your team is focusing on? Make sure you’re attributing one customer
journey map per buyer persona. Also, set some guidelines in the very beginning, as customer journey mapping
can get messy quickly. When HubSpot did this exercise, leadership explicitly told contributors the exercise was
to give folks a deeper understanding of what the customer experience looked like to help inform next year’s
planning. We also only focused on a certain subset of customers. Finally, make sure everyone in the room knows
what a successful customer looks like. Afterall, it’s hard to know where points of force and friction lie if there’s not
a clear definition of success.

Now it’s time to get mapping: Document what your buyer persona is thinking, feeling, and doing. By mapping
out what your customer is thinking, feeling, and doing, you’re building empathy throughout each stage and
forming a deep understanding of your customer’s journey. How does what your customers think and feel dictate
what type of marketing content you should publish? What point-solutions should your sales team focus on for
certain customers? Pro tip: In addition to mapping the thinking, feeling, and doing on the X-axis, either use the
inbound methodology—attract, engage, delight—or the buyer’s journey—awareness, consideration, decision—on
the Y-axis to keep yourselves organized.
 Transcript: Creating a Customer Journey Map

Once you’ve started mapping out the journey, pay close attention to points of force and friction; in other words,
what’s slowing your customers down, and what’s speeding them up? There will likely be some room for
discussion here, as you’ll have multiple perspectives in the room. Remember to not only discuss the points of
force and friction, but also the impact these points have on the customer journey itself. In our sample gym
customer journey map, we mark holidays as a point of friction, as folks generally decide not to go to the gym
during vacation.

A customer journey map is only useful if you take the time to analyze your findings. Are there places you didn’t
know what the customer was thinking, feeling, or doing? Maybe that’s an opportunity to collect customer
feedback. When you look at points of friction, what’s causing them, and how can they be alleviated? Let’s take
the gym example again: If people aren’t coming back to the gym after vacation, what are ways to incentivize
people to come back in January? A free class? A free guest pass? Similarly, find your points of force—what’s
causing them, and how can you replicate them throughout other parts of the journey?

To recap, the four best practices you should follow when creating a customer journey map are:
1. Set the stage—make sure you have the right people in the room and they know why they’re there.
2. Document what your buyer persona is thinking, feeling, and doing.
3. Pay close attention to points of force and friction.
4. Analyze the big picture.

Keep in mind, the customer journey mapping exercise is long and can get messy. Set aside a couple hours or
even half a day to complete this exercise with your team. Customer journey maps are a great way to help you
make decisions to improve the customer experience and build empathy throughout your organization. By
following these best practices, you’re off to a great start with customer journey mapping.