Creating Customer Journey Maps that Inform Change

1. Course Introduction: Hi, I'm Tom little. I've been in digital marketing for several years. Most of this was working in agencies across clients, over about 30 different industries. These same practices that I'm gonna be teaching you today hold true for so many people in the industry. Before my digital marketing work as the hint shooter of international business and marketing at Victoria University of wealth. Now, I went freelance around digital marketing campaigns and customer journey mapping is actually in the central part of what I use to onboard all of my nucleus. In this course, you're gonna be learning to shift your perspective. To stop looking from an internal view of how you deal with your customers to an external view of how your business actually operates from a customer perspective. Now ideally, this is supported by research and we'll be covering as much of that as we can. We're going to be conducting creative brainstorming to find solutions to the problems that come up through this process. And we'll be covering how to take action on a customer journey map. The project for this course is actually to create your own journey map. To develop a full customer lifecycle with an avatar for your actual company. I want you to come away with actionable outcomes. So come along and join me in part one. 2. The What and Why of CJMs: In this lesson, we're actually going to answer a couple with the first question is that you might have about this person. What is a customer journey map? And why shouldn't you create one? Well, it's a really simple question to start with. A customer journey map is a visual diagramming tool. It's used to display key information about your customer, their thoughts, actions. There are motions, understand their pain points, and how they interact with your business. So why create one? Well, simply hood, it's actually a fantastic tool to help you visualize and convey information in a format that's really easily digestible. Everybody loons and absorbs information in different planes. Some people who learn by doing, some people learn by seeing. Some people learn by hearing. But actually most people learn and a combination of different ways. And one learning style is going to send everyone. So adding in a visualization element actually really helps you convey action to other members of your team, will share it with the relevant stakeholders. You can convey concepts or key information to clients will make sure that everyone is working towards. What's more a customer journey map is actually a great tool to discover ways to improve your existing service, will find additional services that might be called re-entry to you. How you feel supportive customers helps you figure out what's the best way to improve their experience. It's really important to note that a customer journey map should actually be considered a living document. It should be updated regularly as your customers or your service changes. And the exercise of creating a customer journey map in very largely in complexity, depending on the kind of research you're generating, you know, your customer assignments, we'll get to it and actually generating new input and we're going to use some tools to help us. So stick around through the next video while we sit you up for success. 3. Choosing the right tool: Now we know what a customer journey map is and why we shouldn't make one. So let's pick a tool that will help us make this as easy as possible. There are several options. If you're like a pen and paper type of person, feel free to use them. Just make sure you have enough space to work with. Things will often shift around while you're going through this process. So it's suggest using posted notes, multiple different pieces of paper, sticking them on the wall using a whiteboard or something like that. From my personal experience, I actually can enjoy creating seat giants, customer journey maps, using software programs like you express, you will loosen up. You express it. The one I'm going to be using in this video is actually specifically designed for this. Lucidchart is more of a general diagramming tool and so can be useful for any of the others diagramming projects that you might have. In this course, we're only going to need to create a single customer journey map. And you can do that on either a you express or elusive shot free account. Now, we're going to start off using a template. So follow along with this video or follow along with the states in the project files to get yourself set up with a tuple. So this step is pretty straightforward. I just open up the project files in the course description. Scroll on down once you've decided on your method of choice. So if you're using you express here, you can go through either this link or this link here. Or if you're using live chat, you can use this link or the one a little further below. I'm gonna be running through you express HEA here. And I recommend you guys do as well because it is specifically made for customer journey maps. But if you want to do stuff for, for general diagramming as well, and definitely take a look at Lucid shop. For now. Click on through to you express here, and you're going to receive a sign-up request. Once you're logged in, you'll get a workspace that looks a little something like this. And you're going to click the Add Project button here. That's going to create an untitled blank project. So I'm just going to rename this one customer journey mapping course. Then we're going to add a new product and you can choose from a variety, sorry, add a new journey map, and you can choose from a variety of templates here. The one I'm going to be using, which I think is very easy to understand and nice lay applicable across a lot of businesses is actually just a commerce customer journey here. We're going to take this and we're going to tweak it a bit for a particular audience. So we're going to click, select that one and select Add. And then we're going to get a few nice things here you'll see we've got a nice pre-populated customer journey map for a bicycle store that I'm gonna be customizing. And we've also got a customer persona which we'll go into in a minute called Julius back. If you wanting to look, use Lucidchart, just come through and click on Lucidchart there. And that's going to take you through to a sign-up section for Lucidchart where you can use your Google account details or whichever you preferred sign-in method is. The free plan is gonna be enough for us. He is. So I'm going to click on this one. And I'm going to sign in with my Google accounts and we'll be right back with you once we send it. So now we're into, into the Lucid software systems. We're actually going to go under a new lucid Spock. And we're going to create this from a template. And if we go back to our project files here, we can borrow this, copy this out of here. So Control C or right-click copy. And use our EV box customer journey, which I think is a fantastic template for our study. We can then select this one and just click on Use Template. And that's gonna give us almost all of the information we need to be running through. The same information as the expressions. Now, we're almost ready to stop. But first we really need to understand who's journey already actually mapping. Who is the persona, that avatar that we are going to be talking to when you go through as pharmacists. We call this process and marketing, creating a customer avatar. And that's actually going to be the focus of part three in the series. So the next spot at vowels here yet. 4. Creating a customer Avatar: So now we're all set up with a basic system. Let's make sure we know who's journey we're actually mapping because this is going to look drastically different depending on who the customer avatar is. A simple persona that identifies the core target audience for product or service. In this stage, just focus on your most valley below your largest target customer. You'll often actually find ways previous product or your service via other customers to. Well, we want to focus on the largest opportunities, particularly for this course. To do this, we're actually going to use a thing called Sigma notation to build a profile for that customer. To seek mutation. It's basically a way for us to get an increasingly specific amount of detail about one individual customer. Focusing on specific segments that allows us to go to really good customer profile with a much better understanding of this difficult to measure information about people's personalities, likes or dislikes. It also gives us much more detail than just using categorical data and segmenting people into different. To do this, we actually ask ourselves a variety of pushing your inoculant you use to sigma T into categories. E.g. your target audience might be similar between the age of 25, 25. But to build an avatar, we actually need to be very specific about your age ranges 25 to 35. Make your persona. You believe a tool you use it, try to answer the question. Why most valuable customer? Excuse? They have a certain amount of income. They are to this living digit. What's the price? What's the marital status? How many units do they have? Are they employed? These are called demographic for this course, since I'm using a bicycle shop is my company. And your customers are gonna be somebody who would be Julius. Going to be using. You express your implant and expanding on it. Sorry. I'll take you through and explain to you some of the details and some decisions that made about humans. We have Julius might some basic demographic assumptions about them at this stage, again, this is for a fictional workshop. So we're gonna be making some assumptions. Julius, male, 40 years old. He's married. His job title. Look, he's a he's a developer. He could be a Chief Software Developer and you could be a good engineer. For us. Our key target audience here in Sydney works in some sort of belt the zoning around about 130,000 Australian yet decided that he's married with two kids. And there would be a typical profile for this type of customer. Now that we know some basic information, we're actually going to look at how we're jealous is located. So we'll see, wants to move this to play, he would actually travel time. If we look at the geographic information we just put in Sydney in hand, but we could provide any more contextual information that's given out. A bike shop we're gonna be working with cells bikes both online and in a physical location. But we could be looking at Sydney based. We've developed a habit. We could also have our store located and other parts. We could narrow it down significantly more money targeting just with me or just in the suburbs. But in this case, I think someone who lives in Sydney is going to be in a typical target audience because they're going to be able to purchase our product online, receive it in a relatively short time frame and don't have to wait a significant amount of time for delivery. And they're also know that we are local enough that if they have any issues, they have troubles with the products. They can come and returns or customer service. And very easily and effectively. So now we know where they live, who they are. But this is actually mostly from a purely statistical view. It's the type of stuff that you'd be able to find a census and assume some research. For the more intangible stuff. The stuff that makes us, stuff that makes me choose which brand to go when we need to look at a thing called psychographics. You think about when you buy from a brand, what makes you choose one over the other? Or do you buy from Apple as opposed to Microsoft, hotel or any of the other hardware components. And I suspect you'll find that it's because the company you choose aligns with your values, your beliefs, your ambition. So that's what we're actually doing. We want to narrow down the avatar based on the intangible things like what gives you the try asking yourself, goals, what are they strive to really striving to be? What are their ambitions? What do they desire? Who do they want to emulate? Who do they look up to? Try to answer these types of questions and get an actual understanding. Customer. More than just as I'm defining, Julius is quite a family and it's quite family-oriented. And he wants his gut kids to grow up happy and healthy to do this. He knows that something that they need as part of that, a really good physical exercise, given the skills and given the opportunities to learn those fine motor skills, but also to their muscles are happy and healthy. These are aiming to find a method of exercise that it's family-oriented, allows to take it outside. The kids, keep them fed, and also give them to understand the importance of getting outside and harmfully cultivates some passion for the outdoors. And you might say something along the lines of, maybe I can get it. Maybe I can encourage the kids to get outside this exercise if we get some answer is background look, he's married with a couple of kids, see works in IT. He doesn't like to spend his time shopping. He prefers to actually buy everything online, so it doesn't have to go out. A little bit. Anti-social. Several credit cards issued by different banks. And his main information channels, the Internet and social media channels that you follow up. What he's really aiming for is a quick and efficient shopping experience, primarily to solve a pump that he's facing. And he gets really frustrated by lengthy processes, delivery times, products that don't work, ties. So we can see quite clearly that for Julius, it's important to have a simple process where the information is provided up front and he's not looking for anything too complex and its interactions with our company. Once you've got that all sorted out, we're going to be organizing information to turn customer peripherally. And then we're going to take that and use that to build up fill out to see you for the next time. 5. Creating the Customer Journey Map: So by now we should have a pretty good idea of who our actual customer at the tirades, we're starting to get to really fun. You'll notice on your journey map, depending on which system that you're using is actually several columns across the top. These are representing individual stages of your customer's journey. So looking at the stages here, we start with problem recognition, where your customer, your avatar's actually realizing the mediocre product. In this example, Julie says, starting to think that maybe he'd love to take us kids out from my mountain bike ride. That's sort of brings us through to the awareness stage where he's maybe heard about your product, who heard about your brand and is thinking about it in the back of his mind. Then we sort of run through to a consideration stage. He's doing his own research. He's looking and comparing different products to understand how he did this solve his problem. Then we go through to a, a purchase stage where the customer has decided on what they want to buy. The remainder that this is about a journey, it's not about an individual transaction. So we need to actually look at after that journey. Well, after that purchase, that initial purchases made. How do we interact with the customer from them? How are we continuing to solve their problems while continuing to support them in their journey? Remember, when you're going through this price illness, that you need to be thinking from your customer's perspective, what is it that they would be doing? Not necessarily what is it that your business does to interact with them. Because by going through this process, you'll actually find that you often figure out holes in your business process. And it's really actually a difficult thing for business owners to do, even for marketers to do. Because they'll often think, right, this is the need we have. We need to communicate with the customer. And so we do that in this way. But you'll actually find that that customer might not be looking to communicate in that way. In fact, they wanted to do their own research. You can support them in that journey. You can't expect them to move directly from one stage to the next based on one communication from you, you might find that that needs more support at different points of the Ginny will list support and you're actually giving, you might be getting in urine. So go through this process for urine business. They typically loosely follow the prices of a marketing funnel, but they may be added in steps or move steps. I'll briefly run through the map and give you guys an understanding of how I'm setting this up for Julius big. So I'll set up julius is basically going to take the CJ of e-commerce. And we're going to make this a little bit more manageable by removing some of the stuff we don't need to start. So to start off, we're going to take out this, you express your column. We're going to remove our upgrade and repair support and complaint sections by clicking the little x's up here. And then we're going to consolidate some columns by hitting the Settings and individual columns, going to sub-stages. Increasing this number here and adding that afterwards. You see now we have overarching stage with various sub-stages attached to it. Here I'm going to move our awareness into our head section. I'm going to rename this awareness and bring in both ads can, under this stage. Then I'll remove out this third sub-stage. We should have one section. For the next phase, we're going to name it the consideration phase. Loosely following a marketing funnel. And we're going to again add sub-stages. So we're going to increase the number of stoves sub-stages here to three. And include the research and the pricing sub-stages in because these are all balanced pods of the consideration phase of a mocking. And then we're going to remove out those last two sub-stages. Now this is not super visible, so I'm gonna take these two here and I'm actually going to rename this pitches stage. First. Sorry, green color was for this purchase stage. Will take the color from the next section, since we'll be re-coloring that as well. And now we have this nice invisible, so we have awareness, consideration and purchase or conversion depending on what terminology you use. Typically, this section is where the actual money is transected or the contract is signed. Now we have a validation and delivering and Use stage, which we're actually going to combine together into a post purchase process. This is really old with all the various stages that come off the money is actually transact. And so how your customers dealt with after the fact. And we're going to move the validation into the sub-stage. We're going to bring delivery across and we're actually going to use as well. Then remove these extra sub-stages here. And now we have a much more manageable journey map where we only look at the marketing funnel. We're using this one as a basic example, but it may look slightly different depending on what your company needs and what you all your processes. So make sure that this makes sense to you. Before we get going. Try to map out the stages. And then we're going to be filling in the information. We're going to be putting on our customer hat and getting right into it. I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next part, we will think about what are your customers feeling, what they're doing, and what they're thinking. 6. Thoughts, Actions, and Feelings: So you've got a gradient map, outline, a fantastic customer avatar, and you're ready to go. So let's start filling out our map and let's add some detail. It's really a simple process. What are you going to do is to every single column on your map, what each stage in the customer journey you're going to want to start to fill out what actually covers the stage. In a perfect world, you'd actually be interviewing and you'd be surveying your customers to understand insights to how and why they love your business and how they find you at edge. But I know the time is a resource and most of us don't actually have enough. But I'm going to start simple. We're getting in a basic map up and running. And remember that it's a living document. So we can always come back. We can add, we can tweet equal, we can change it at a later date. So for each stage in your journey map, in the rows that we've mapped out for it, I need you to put yourself into the shoes of your customer and start to understand what they're thinking and feeling. It's very difficult sometimes to actually think about it. But ask yourself, what are you thinking? What are the actual full processes that are going on in your brain? What are you doing? What physical actions, so they taking it each stage of the journey. And what are they feeling? What's that underlying mental state or the judge that's driving the thoughts, driving the feelings. I'm going to run you through a little overview now using our example of Julia spec. So now we're looking at creating the thoughts, feelings, and actions for Julius, which is relatively straightforward for this example, I'm not too much actually needs to be changed just for the e-commerce example. But this is going to be very different depending on who your customer avatar is and what your businesses and while your business processes. So take this section here and rename it as your thoughts and desires. And this is what you want they do for your actions, sorry, single a. So this is your action section. And then I'm actually going to come down and take this experience. And I'm gonna bring this up here. So the purpose of us. So now we have thoughts, actions, and our experiences or our feelings from the interactions. If we look right at the start of the process at the pre awareness stage, Julie says, only just recognized a problem that he had that's actually motivated, motivated by his underlying feelings. You might be feeling lonely. You might be feeling disconnected from his kids, or he might be excited that they finally getting big enough. They can do more adventurous outdoor activity that can go on more intense at adventures and bike rides. It could be thinking, man, I would spend time with my son at maybe I can get him interested in some outdoor activity with me. Or you might be on the other side and thinking. And my sons are growing his bike a little bit. Maybe I need to maybe I need to get them an upgrade, give them a bigger bike, we can do cool things. In either case, the actions might actually be the same. You got to be talking to his partner around potentially looking for new bike, would chat into his son to understand if he's interested already. But in either case, despite the fact that his actions are different, the thoughts and the emotions that are driving the actions of vastly different. And you can start to see how important segmentation is if we communicated with Julius, the first example, the same way that we communicated with Julius and that second example, you're gonna get a drastically different action reaction. And so I need you to try and get into your customers here and actually understand what it is that they are thinking, feeling, and doing at each of these stages. Once you're ready with the thoughts and the feelings, you start to actually notice a trend. At each point in your map, your customers trying to solve a problem. They are taking action to reach the solution to an issue that they're facing. These issues of what we call pain points. It's going to be actually the subject of the next video. So stick around for that one. We should be creating some interesting solutions to the problems that we've been having. The problems that our customers are having. And then we're going to finally start to figure out and take action on these problems and on these solutions. 7. Pain Points and Creative Brainstorming: So I hope you're as excited as I am. Your journey maps should be starting to take shape. You have a mostly filled out map by now. This next step is actually the one that's going to start to give us real insights. You've probably heard of people talk about pain points for this simply a distilled version of a problem. Think of them as, as the barriers to the desired progress of your customer. Well, the things that distract or detract from the experience when they happen. Continuing on with our example from the last video, trying to get some more time with his kids. And he decided that he wants to try mountain biking. But if we look at as re-substitute my findings, actually doing prices make comparisons between different supplies. We can easily find the information he's looking for policing, he's likely to go elsewhere. And at this point, that likeliness to sort of change is dependent on how involved he is the person, someone researching which contracted to build a new home. It's going to spend much more time and energy researching the different options that they have, somewhat choosing which shop to buy a bike. In the case of Julius, since the bicyclists kids, he's probably I'm really interested in a few key pieces of information. The safety rating, the price, what's included? Does it include a helmet? Is the flexibility or the size range correct. With his child? So we need to make sure that those pieces of information clearly presented to mitigate this pain point, that he has. Pain points actually really good at stopping someone and their journey. So understanding the thoughts, the feelings, the actions that your customer takes helps you understand their pain points and how to progress them data through these stages. Qualitative research. So then people, sorry, interviewing people is actually the best way to uncover pinpoints. Of all we will be making a few assumptions today. While you're figuring out the pain points, start brainstorming some ideas for solutions that you can have to these pain points. I encourage you to take a, a viewpoint or a different approach to this. I get on a whiteboard, start asking other members of your team chat to family or friends. Ideally, you'll be interviewing your customers. Whatever you can do to change your mindset for this process and not sit down and do it in a single session is going to really help you. Yeah, How do you get a bit more perspective? So I'm gonna be running through a few examples with good old Julia SBIC to give you an idea on how we might actually go through this person. When we're done, we'll be moving on to taking action and measuring impact. And to be honest, that is the most important video to watch out for this entire series. So make sure that you stick around for that one. So back in now, I'm here with Julius. We're going to scroll down to the bottom and you see that there are pain points and ideas sections. The pain points are obviously any negative or detracting interactions that your customer appetite actually has with your business. And this can be really helpful to help you understand what it is that's turning them off from getting through to the next stage of the journey. So here under this Add section, we actually have a couple of different pain points. The ad banner may have been too late. We might be showing these ads far too frequently to several individual uses and everything which is gonna make them. I want to turn to that company lights. We also can see without, with analytics that many people are coming from ads and dropping off quickly and not actually re-engaging with the website. So we need to understand how to bring people back multiple times through to the website to make sure that they actually want to interact and continue along your journey. You might not have something like your store is not being displayed on a Google map in the search results. So your avatar, Julius, doesn't actually know where you're located. You have few reviews compared to your competition. That makes you less likely to be trustworthy. In the best-case scenario, you're actually asking your customers and trying to understand their pain points here. But you can use data and information that you have through your analytics platforms or three-year silos numbers or anything like that, to give you an understanding of where people are dropping off and what's causing those problems. Then make sure to brainstorm your creative solutions to the problem. So if the Google ad banners to avoid fantastic, even switch to other types of advertising or bring in additional platforms or spread out your budget across different mediums. Try to reach the users in a different way as opposed to we just spent it through. If you're struggling with reviews and you don't have enough trustworthiness and your online presence. Well that's fantastic. Add yourself to do maps, set up a Google business profile, and start collecting reviews to help solve this problem. You can ask existing customers to leave you review. And that's really going to help solve this simple type. If you're an e-commerce business and the problem is with reviews about the products rather than individual company. And then you can integrate a review system to try and maximize the amount of feedback you can get from to understand which products work and which product stuff. So go through for each stage in this journey. Your awareness, consideration, purchased, post purchase persist, and your loyalties section. When you buy a good section and doing your best to understand where their pain points are, what's causing drop-off can come up with some solutions to those problems. Not all sections will have a major pain point. But most ****. And I'll see you soon. 8. Taking Action and Measuring Impact: Our journey map is actually complete. Congrats, at least in its current state. If you remember back to the start of the course, the intro video, I talked about finding actionable insights and measuring success. And there's a famous quote by a man called Peter Drucker. What gets measured gets improved. If we planning to make changes to our journey, we need to be able to see if they have a positive or a negative impact on our customers. It's important to figure out the metrics you'll be using and measure each stage of the journey. It can be simple e-commerce metrics such as the number of ad impressions, website visitors, product views at two carts and purchases. Or they might be a little more complex, including meetings booked, leads generated leads, qualified, or demos started. Differ depending on your business model. But the important thing is to make sure that you're recording and reporting on your key metrics for your business. Something that tells you whether or not you've successfully moved a customer from one stage of the journey to the next. That's why using a digital tool and integrating your data into a customer journey map is helpful. It enables you to keep the document alive and updated as your journey. So at each stage here, make sure to choose a metric or a set of metrics that are most correlated to success in this stage will give you a really strong indication of the likelihood to move people into the mix stage. So for our ads section, we might be looking at the total number of ad impressions or the unique number of people that we've shown impressions to show ads, to outreach for this, all we might be looking at a number of clicks or interaction rate. We could also be looking at our website fittings in the awareness stage, trying to see how many users are on our side. How often are they coming back? It's time. Are they spending on the website? What are the engagement metrics? Consideration for e-commerce is nice and straightforward. This would typically involve individual product page views, add to cart or checkout initiations. We might see often at this stage in one form or another, people are at angle reviewing products and totaling up a cup and then comparing with various different websites. So it's important to understand what are abandonment rights are at this point and how we capturing those uses. They're just numbers, should be relatively straightforward. That would be our actual dollar value in sales. But post-purchase prices might be a little bit harder to actually actually measure. Would want to know how many people are coming back with feedback. How many people are repeat purchases once they get down to here. But it's still actually engaging with us on deliveries on time. Products being used for the recommended amount of time. Now we having products come back in six months as opposed to 12th. So there's a whole bunch of different metrics that we might use to understand whether or not our customers are having success. Depending on how your business model looks, that is going to change significantly for every single person and for every single company. Most likely for a lot of your avatar. So make sure to use a platform like this and regularly review the data to understand whether or not you're making improvements to your job. When you implement the idea of section down here, use that to test. So if you are right of movement for success right from this stage to this next stage, normally is about handled 20 per cent. And you've made a change. Use that as a baseline to understand whether or not your change has been successful. Whether or not your change actually improves the journey for the customers. If it's obviously increasing to 15 or 25%. And that's a fantastic indicator that, that those were positive changes. If it's decreasing or you might want to review your changes and consider other options to better support your customers. If you want to keep learning digital marketing, I suggest giving me a follow-up. I'll be uploading more consonant or let me know what you'd like to learn next.