Consumer Journey Maps

​A central part of consumer centric design is constructing consumer journey maps – the journey of a consumer to purchase a product-service as experienced by them. Agnostic of a brand imposed division of its experience into departments, offline-online, applications, enquiries, help-desks, customer service, sales, after-sales etc..
 
When building a consumer journey map its easy to fall into the trap of isolating the touch-points the consumer interacts with the brand and begin to reconstruct the experience within each touch-point. This leaves the organisation with blind-spots as its ignoring the intermission periods when the customer is still engaged in the purchase process but invisible to the brand. Research (search, reviews, retail visits, browsing, subscriptions to newsletters), information gathering (for technical expertise, customer service calls), deal hunting (comparison shopping on specialist sites, financing, opting in for alerts to discounts) are all part of the purchase process – each taking a different duration and having a unique weightage on the final decision. This customer reality requires the organization to expand its thinking to include their entire journey and map it based on ‘needs, motivations, assumptions and expectations’ of the customer at every phase.
 
How do you construct customer journeys using the design principle of empathy?
 
Step 1 : Discover

1. Representative : Capture high traffic points. Use customer data to understand the high density in visits, pass-throughs, used utilities and services on your website-retail location-apps. High traffic represents high customer need and could unearth organisational bottle-necks.
2. High-Value: Its likely that the top 2-3 segments are more desirable to plan towards Vs all. Choose segments that are robust (value/ volume that helps meet the organisational goal) and differentiated in behaviors (high Vs low usage, bulk Vs piece-meal buy, discount Vs premium quality seekers etc).
3. Insightful: Actual observation of the segments journey with attention to tasks, barriers and completion time-ease should be supplemented by qualitative customer research in the form of focus groups and 1x1 interviews. This will help identify the list of needs-motivations-barriers in the journey. 
4. Actionable : For the high value segments, its important to develop a hierarchy of needs (importance to customer) x current state (satisfaction). Classifying the needs based on simplicity (skill required), ease (time + effort investment), control (personalization, customization), speed (response time), transparency (information sharing), trust (safety in transactions, guarantees, privacy) will also help in actionability. 

 
Step 2 : Define
1. Segment Journey by Episodes : Each segment of customers follows a unique series of steps towards purchase. Every step is an ‘episode’ within the entire journey having unique actions that start-stop to link towards the next episode (Search by itself is an episode in the consumer journey but might begin in social media-reviews and stop at brand website). Identify the steps using various data points available to the brand – search, web visits, service centre calls, CRM database, social media. Understand that their start/ pause points will vary. Also, segment behaviors will converge at critical steps (booking, coupon downloads) and diverge based on their specific needs (e-commerce purchase Vs offline). Remember – the context (time / geography / event) plays an important role in understanding journeys. Certain journeys repeat at consistent times of the year (a Christmas journey) while others are live for a specific event and repeat only of that event repeats (hurricane related purchases).
 
2. Identify Channels per Episode  : Each episode will be connected to a few channels (in-store, customer service, eCommerce site, website etc). List and weight each channel based on its importance in the consumers goal for that episode. Don’t ignore the multiplicity of channels in each episode.
 
3. Episode Trigger : Every segment moves a step closer to purchase because of invisible/ visible ‘triggers’ that motivate them to do so within each episode. Its important to identify the trigger and understand its role. Example: when a customer is searching for specific solutions and the brand appears top of the search results with relevant content the search result is a trigger for the consumer to move to the next episode in their journey. This understanding will ensure that the trigger is robustly created – the absence of the search result will only create an undesirable pause in the consumer journey.
 
4. Duration + Context : Every episode has a duration that could vary between segments. Example : for laptops, the discovery duration for technophiles could be very short while for others could last weeks. Duration and context of the duration is an important step to understand in-depth because it contains opportunities for brands to leverage and add utility. If we understand that the post discovery episode of ‘browsing-comparison-reviews’ is taking longer for a certain segment Vs others shortening the duration could significantly impact the conversion – simplification of user experience, enabling easier discovery, quick and helpful customer call backs, chatbots etc could help improve the user experience and motivate quicker conversion.
 
End note : Consumer journeys and segments are in a constant state of flux because of the introduction of new technologies, change in the environment and new expectations in experiences. Constantly R&D new segments, identifying new niche segments, discover new behaviors and therefore create new triggers.