How to Prep for a Customer Journey Mapping Session

Customer journey mapping can help to identify strengths and weaknesses with your sales, marketing, and customer support tactics so that you can improve the experience your customers have with your brand from the first interaction all the way through to the post-purchase journey.

The benefits of customer journey mapping are clear. However, the path to creating a customer journey map can be more onerous. Where do you start? Who do you involve? What does the final product need to look like?

There are various ways to create customer journey maps. One way is through coupling research with a series of working sessions with key stakeholders for customer insights.

Getting Started with a Customer Journey Workshop

If you go the workshop route, here are some activities to help you and your teams prep for an efficient exercise.

• Decide who to invite.
  • Bring together everyone who helps shape the customer journey. You want input from experts in what customers go through when engaging with your brand, such as members of the following teams:
    • Marketing
    • Sales
    • Customer support
    • Analytics/Research
  • A group discussion leader and a note taker for the session should be identified too.
• Define the journey’s focus.
  • Select a single persona and identify the goal driving their journey. A customer’s journey may look very different depending on the lead source, first interaction and personalization strategies during lead nurturing or customer support phases. Rather than mapping out every customer and interaction, choose to map out the journey of the most valuable customer or the most common customer journey. Additional versions can be created later that show variations by audience segments or lead sources.
• Gather data.
  • Gather data from multiple channels into one place to help document customer actions and touchpoints. Data may include:
    • Media mix and targeting strategies
    • Conversion points and actions – what customer actions are you measuring leading up to purchase?
    • Conversion rates
    • SQL and MQL Industry Breakdown
    • Top engaged content on the website
      • Traffic sources
      • Reverse goal paths
    • New vs. Returning Traffic Breakdown
    • Website visits and Inbound traffic sources to website (branded vs. non-branded)
    • Brand recognition
    • Market share and industry surveys
    • Engagement on social platforms
    • Customer satisfaction ratings
    • Customer service inquiries
    • Net promoter score
• Gather initial customer insights.
  • Before coming together, get the team in the right mindset by asking a few preliminary questions. This could be a series of interviews or a simple survey. We recently sent a survey to a client’s marketing team to help us document trackable touchpoints before and after conversion in the customer journey. Any prep work that can be done in advance to organize data and customer insights in a way that can be referenced and acted on during the working session will help the session go smoother.
  • Afterward, you should have enough information plotted to review where the biggest pain points are, where customers may be getting confused or stuck, where there is the most drop-off, where any unmet needs are and thus touchpoint opportunities, and brainstorm ways to improve the experience.
• Decide on the session timing and format.
  • The visual representation of these journey maps can vary based on the phases you want to focus on before and after the point of conversion, and the level of detail you want to include (ex: actions, channels, KPIs, customer sentiment, brand touchpoints, etc.). Decide on what elements you want to plot during the working session and how each stakeholder will be participating.
  • Based on the session format, the number of stakeholders involved, and the prep work completed, decide how much time you’ll need to plot all the desired information. If you’re unsure, start with 1.5 to 2 hours and fewer than 10 stakeholders.

After your working session, you may walk away with content ideas, new onboarding strategies, or perhaps more questions. Now it’s time to decide next steps. Are there any uncertainties or data gaps that would provide needed clarification? Were there areas of disagreement during the exercise that necessitate further research or interviews? If needed, pool together more resources to make final revisions. From there, think about transforming your map into an infographic that tells the customer experience story. Enough detail should be included so that information can be shared with outside team members and digested without referencing other supporting documents.

Want help getting started with your own customer journey map? Let’s talk! Send us an email at expert@emfluence.com or fill in the form below.