Developing a Customer Journey Map for Experience Strategy

Great journey maps start from the intersection of user touchpoints. A customer journey map shows a customer's experiences with your organization, from when they identify a need to whether that need is met. Journey maps are often shown as straight lines with touchpoints explaining a user's challenges. start •—------------>• finish At the heart of this approach is the user, assuming that your product or service is the one they choose to use in their journey. While journey maps help explain the conceptual journey, they often give the wrong impression of how users are trying to solve their problems. In reality, users start from different places, have unique ways of understanding their problems, and often have expectations that your service can't fully meet. Our testing and user research over the years has shown how varied these problem-solving approaches can be. Building a great journey map involves identifying a constellation of touchpoints rather than a single, linear path. Users start from different points and follow various paths, making their journeys complex and varied. These paths intersect to form signals, indicating valuable touchpoints. Users interact with your product or service in many different ways. User journeys are not straightforward and involve multiple touchpoints and interactions…many of which have nothing to do with your company. Here’s how you can create valuable journeys: → Using open-ended questions and a product like Helio, identify key touchpoints, pain points, and decision-making moments within each journey. → Determine the most valuable touchpoints based on the intersection frequency and user feedback. → Create structured lists with closed answer sets and retest with multiple-choice questions to get stronger signals. → Represent these intersections as key touchpoints that indicate where users commonly interact with your product or service. → Focus on these touchpoints for further testing and optimization. Generalizing the linear flow can be practical once you have gone through this process. It helps tell the story of where users need the most support or attention, making it a helpful tool for stakeholders. Using these techniques, we’ve seen engagement nearly double on websites we support. #productdesign #productdiscovery #userresearch #uxresearch

Are you generating enough value for users net of the value to your company? Business value can only be created when you create so much value for users, that you can “tax” that value and take some for yourself as a business. If you don’t create any value for your users, then you can’t create value for your business. Ed Biden explains how to solve this in this week's guest post: Whilst there are many ways to understand what your users will value, two techniques in particular are incredibly valuable, especially if you’re working on a tight timeframe: 1. Jobs To Be Done 2. Customer Journey Mapping 𝟭. 𝗝𝗼𝗯𝘀 𝗧𝗼 𝗕𝗲 𝗗𝗼𝗻𝗲 (𝗝𝗧𝗕𝗗) “People don’t simply buy products or services, they ‘hire’ them to make progress in specific circumstances.”  – Clayton Christensen The core JTBD concept is that rather than buying a product for its features, customers “hire” a product to get a job done for them … and will ”fire” it for a better solution just as quickly. In practice, JTBD provides a series of lenses for understanding what your customers want, what progress looks like, and what they’ll pay for. This is a powerful way of understanding your users, because their needs are stable and it forces you to think from a user-centric point of view. This allows you to think about more radical solutions, and really focus on where you’re creating value. To use Jobs To Be Done to understand your customers, think through five key steps: 1. Use case – what is the outcome that people want? 2. Alternatives – what solutions are people using now? 3. Progress – where are people blocked? What does a better solution look like? 4. Value Proposition – why would they use your product over the alternatives? 5. Price – what would a customer pay for progress against this problem? 𝟮. 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝗠𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 Customer journey mapping is an effective way to visualize your customer’s experience as they try to reach one of their goals. In basic terms, a customer journey map breaks the user journey down into steps, and then for each step describes what touchpoints the customer has with your product, and how this makes them feel. The touch points are any interaction that the customer has with your company as they go through this flow: • Website and app screens • Notifications and emails • Customer service calls • Account management / sales touch points • Physically interacting with goods (e.g. Amazon), services (e.g. Airbnb) or hardware (e.g. Lime) Users’ feelings can be visualized by noting down: • What they like or feel good about at this step • What they dislike, find frustrating or confusing at this step • How they feel overall By mapping the customer’s subjective experience to the nuts and bolts of what’s going on, and then laying this out in a visual way, you can easily see where you can have the most impact, and align stakeholders on the critical problems to solve.

"We need these reports ASAP". If you've heard this before, you know those reports are only as good as the data they're built on. And in most situations, that data sucks. Your HubSpot instance probably has the following: • Inconsistent lifecycle stages • Unclear deal definitions • Mixed-up customer status • Properties nobody uses • Reports nobody trusts The root cause? Building without blueprints. Before touching HubSpot, we align on four core documents: 1. 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝗠𝗮𝗽 Defines exactly how leads move through: • Marketing stages • MQL/SQL criteria • Sales handoffs • Post-sale markers • Revenue taxonomy 2. 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗠𝗮𝗽 Maps your unique: • Deal stages • Exit criteria • Required fields • Probability markers • Closed/lost reasons 3. 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘁-𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝗠𝗮𝗽 Standardizes: • Onboarding stages and pipelines • Health scores (via HubSpot) • Expansion signals • Churn indicators 4.  𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗗𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 & 𝗖𝗥𝗠 𝘁𝗮𝘅𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗺𝘆 Aligns teams on: • Property & Field definitions • Required properties • Reporting standards • Naming conventions inside your CRM    Then We Build: The 90-Day Implementation – with definitions clear, we implement in phases: 𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗲 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 (𝗗𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝟭-𝟭𝟱) • Configure lifecycle stages and automation (includes lead object) • Create custom properties (UTMs + hidden fields) • Basic Account/Lead scoring (with new Beta) • Core integrations 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 (𝗗𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝟭𝟱-𝟯𝟬) • Configure deal stages (and the lead object) • Forecasting and goals • Routing and lead assignments (territory) • Individual and team dashboards (v1) 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 (𝗗𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝟯𝟬-𝟰𝟱) • Set up ticket pipelines. • Build customer health score. • Automation of renewals • Clear definition of upsell/renewal triggers 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗤𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 (𝗗𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝟰𝟱-𝟲𝟬) Using Data Dictionary & Taxonomy : • Setup data hygiene dashboards • Deduplication via Koalify • Standardized naming and folder structure • Error reporting and notifications    𝗘𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗩𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 (𝗗𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝟲𝟬-𝟵𝟬) Tell the story clearly through: • 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰𝘀: Track time at each stage to find and remove roadblocks, improving the overall customer experience. • 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰𝘀: Identify drop-off points across the journey to refine engagement strategies. • 𝗩𝗼𝗹𝘂𝗺𝗲 𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰𝘀: Monitor volume at each stage to ensure a steady flow from lead to loyal customer.    There is a better way to get where you're going, but it takes the right foundation. #hubspot #crm #data