28/01/2018 Customer Journey Map - the Top 10 Requirements - Heart of the Customer

Customer Journey Map – the Top 10

Requirements
March 5, 2013 / 33 Comments / in Customer Experience, Customer Journey Map,

Resources, Voice of the Customer / by Jim Tincher

[https://heartofthecustomer.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/Customer-Journey-Map.png]
It’s been two years since I originally wrote this post. See the
update here [https://heartofthecustomer.com/customer-
journey-maps-the-top-10-requirements-revisited/] .

This post has been viewed 105,826 times.

A customer journey map is an incredibly useful tool to

understand and improve your customer experience.  A great
customer journey map documents your customer experience
from your customer’s eyes, helping you to understand not
only how customers interact with you today, but also
identi es improvement opportunities.

Unfortunately, there is no standard for a customer journey

map.  You can build it following high-quality design principles,
or use smiley faces.  You can make it a work of art, or
something that looks like it belongs on a napkin.
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I have included an example on the right, as well as some

useful links at the end of this post for those unfamiliar with a
customer experience journey map.  The customer journey
map may go by a different name, such as customer experience
map, journey map, touch point map, etc.  The map provides a
visual representation of how your customer uses your
product or services, or how potential customers go through
the shopping process.

In this post, I will detail the criteria I use to design and build a
customer journey map. 

The 10 Critical Components of a Great

Customer Journey Map:
1. Represent your Customer’s perspective.  The customer
journey map needs to represent the interactions as your
customer experiences it.  It often includes interactions
that happen outside of your control, such as a social
media interaction or a web search.  When developing
educational content with a large retailer, we discovered
that most of the shopper education was complete before
they ever visited that retailer’s website.
2. Use research.  Do not use internal staff to build these –
that just makes a process ow. Depending on the scope,
the customer journey map process can involve
interviews or ethnographies, possibly combined with
surveys.  Some companies bring in customers and build
them interactively with internal staff.  Ethnographies can
create a very powerful experience, although the small
sample size can create bias.  Better to do the research
rst, then bring in your customers to build your  nal
map.
3. Represent Customer segments. Your different segments
typically have very different customer experiences.  In a
pre-sales project for a service company we found that
one segment typically spent two hours researching the
category, while another consistently spent more than six
weeks doing the same, using very different tools.
 Imagine trying to represent these very different
experiences as one.
4. Include Customer goals.  A great customer journey map
shows your customer’s goals at each stage of the
process.  Goals can change as the process unfolds.
5. Focus on emotions.  Emotions are critical to any
experience, whether B2B or B2C, and a great customer
journey map communicates these emotions.  But I’m not
an advocate of the smiley and frowny faces prevalent in
many journey maps.
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28/01/2018 Customer Journey Map - the Top 10 Requirements - Heart of the Customer

6. Represent touch points.  The customer journey map is

often built to communicate the order and type of touch
points – including those not in your control.
7. Highlight moments of truth.  Some interactions have
more impact than others. Great journey maps separate
those critical moments of truth from the rest. For
example, when visiting a hospital, a bad check-in taints
the rest of the patient experience.
8. Measure your brand promise. A critical outcome of a
great customer journey map is measuring how your
experience supports your brand promise.  If your brand
promise is to be either effortless, highly customized, or
unique, then your journey map is an excellent way to
document whether your customer feels you are meeting
that goal.
9. Include time.  Experience length provides important
context.  Does the typical call last 30 seconds or 10
minutes? Did shoppers spend 20 minutes or 40 hours
deciding on a product?
10. Ditch the PowerPoint. Most customer journey maps
are created by and for PowerPoint. But PowerPoint is
built to communicate basic information on-screen,
usually by bullet points.  Why limit yourself to such a tool
for something as important as your customer
experience?  Use a desktop publishing application to
communicate the richness of the experience.

Some optional criteria to consider:

1. Break the experience into phases.  In a longer

experience, customers are accomplishing different
things at different times. For example, early shopping
phases typically involve trying to gure out what
questions to ask, whereas later phases are more
transactional.  By understanding the customer’s mindset
at each phase, you can customize the experience around
relevant needs.
2. Bring in Customer Verbatims.  While not strictly
required, verbatims bring the customer experience to
life.
3. Include Customers and Non-Customers.  A pre-sales
customer journey map should always include non-
customers, as they may follow a different path to make a
decision.  One of our research projects showed how non-
customers were far more likely to use in-person
meetings to make a purchase decision – which our client

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28/01/2018 Customer Journey Map - the Top 10 Requirements - Heart of the Customer

did not offer. This realization was critical to their

improvement efforts.
4. Use your other Voice of the Customer
components. Rather than being a one-off project, the
journey map should incorporate components of your
Voice of the Customer program (NPS, Satisfaction, the
Customer Effort Score) to link it to your other efforts.

These 10+4 criteria will ensure you have a rich document that
can serve as the foundation for your customer experience
efforts.  In the next few posts I will be showing examples of
how we apply these principles to some of our customer
journey maps.

There are a ton of good posts out there about how a

customer journey map supports your Voice of the Customer
program.  Here are a few of my favorites:

I really like the customer journey map examples at this site

[http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/the-anatomy-of-an-
experience-map] .  Chris walks through different
examples, and provides his perspective on each.  I
particularly like how he calls out the need for both
qualitative and quantitative research for making the map.  
This site [http://nform.com/blog/2010/02/experience-
maps-cross-channel-experiences-deliverable-for-gamers]
has a great case study of a complex gamer’s map.  They
certainly follow #10 – ditch PowerPoint!
Would you believe the government of the UK created a
guide [https://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDoQFjAA&u
5_SoyZgmpgfEm9GuXujb9sIF8Q&bvm=bv.43148975,d.b2U]
to creating a customer journey maps?

By the way, I have included two detailed templates in my

follow-up post Customer Experience Journey Map: Applying
the Top 10 Requirements
[https://heartofthecustomer.com/customer-experience-
journey-map-applying-the-top-10-requirements/] .  You can
also download the white paper
[https://heartofthecustomer.com/customer-journey-map-
white-paper/] .

Related

Customer Journey Customer Journey Journey Mapping:

Maps – the Top 10 Map: Applying the Interview with
Requirements Top 10 Annette Franz
(Revisited) Requirements [https://heartofth…

https://heartofthecustomer.com/customer-experience-journey-map-the-top-10-requirements/ 4/5
28/01/2018 Customer Journey Map - the Top 10 Requirements - Heart of the Customer

[https://heartofth… [https://heartofth… mapping-

journey-maps-the- experience- interview-annette-
top-10- journey-map- franz/]
requirements- applying-the-top- January 28, 2015
revisited/] 10-requirements/] In "Customer
June 4, 2015 March 14, 2013 Experience"
In "Customer In "Customer
Experience" Experience"

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33
REPLIES

Sarath
August 22, 2014 at 2:00 am

Hi

This post is highly informative and I will

use all your tips to build my customer
journey map.

Thanks for sharing such a wonderful

information.

Rgds,
Sarath

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