Customer or user journey mapping

What is customer or user journey mapping?

A way of mapping a customer or a user’s experience of using a product or service across its end-to-end lifecycle, visually representing the customer experience at each touchpoint or interaction.

The aim of customer or user journey mapping is to understand the experience of the process from the user or customer’s perspective. It is different to process mapping (but may be conducted alongside it) in that process mapping maps the process steps without considering the experience during it while journey mapping puts the experience element first.

Knowledge

• Understanding ethical user research and design best practice.
• Knowledge of visualisation techniques and tools including flowcharts, diagrams and maps.
• Awareness of user experience (UX) design principles.
• Understanding of technological capabilities to support the identification of opportunities.
• Basic project management skills.

Skills

Able to:

• Map stakeholders, including users: To understand who needs to be involved in customer journey mapping and their relative roles, to ensure diversity of perspective is represented across the user / customer base.
• Map customer or user journeys: Visually document key stages of the customer / user journey, noting key touchpoints and related feelings and reactions, ensuring variations in the journey are captured and not just the ‘happy path’.
• Triangulate data from multiple sources: Including feedback from mapping with users, surveys, drop off / process abandonment metrics, satisfaction and complaints data and analytics to validate the experience holistically.
• Create a visual representation of the end-to-end experience: In an understandable format with each touchpoint clearly identified and the connections between each interaction clearly mapped, ensuring the user/customer experience is clear at each stage.
• Identify pain points and opportunities: In the context of organisational goals, analyse the journey/s to identify opportunities for improvement aligned to desired outcomes.
• Recognise constraints: Including technological, financial, political, structural in the assessment of opportunities.
• Collaborate and communicate: Work as part of cross functional teams to ensure that pain points and opportunities are factored into the future state design.
• Manage risk: Identity, assess and manage the risks associated with customer / user journey mapping.
• Manage work: Organising and co-ordinating activities effectively to agreed timelines.
• Be emotionally intelligent: Recognise, understand, and use emotional responses effectively in the achievement of outcomes when working with stakeholders impacted by and leading change.