Improve Customer Experience with Journey Map Optimization

Once you fully understand your target customer you can start mapping out their journey. Through this process you outline how you can guide the customer when they’re interacting with your product or service.

Before you set out on a customer-focused project, you need to clearly define the boundaries to explore. This allows you to structure your team’s thinking so that your customers are driven to the desired action, eliminating superfluous assumptions along the line.

In order to set up a customer initiative, you need to spend time understanding the challenges of your customers. Focusing on the consumer challenges will help you to define a vision and accurately communicate the intent across all business operations. Generally, think in the lines of: (Who) can (do what) so that (why: the action or outcome).

The Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map is a tool that offers an outline of the end-to-end experience of your customers. This highlights the processes that customers go through as they interact with your business, as well as a detailed view of the customers’ needs, wants and perceptions.

The customer journey map connects these customer needs and pain points to the different interaction points of the customer with your brand. To generate a customer journey map, pick a customer persona and write down each step along the buying journey. Once you have a step-by-step map of the customer experience, determine relevant challenges at each step and use the 5 A’s model below to determine the root cause.

Mapping Framework

The 5 A’s framework is an easy way to structure key interactions throughout the customer journey. It maps every stage a customer goes through from when they become aware of your organization to exiting or extending the relationship.

This approach to customer journey mapping helps organize critical topics for analysis through the eyes of the customer and your business — discovering touch points, systems, processes, pain points and opportunities.

The 5 A’s are:

• Attract — How are customers attracted to and informed of the service or product?
• Accept — How and where does the customer enter into contact with your business?
• Adopt — How does the customer interact throughout the entire journey?
• Amplify — How is the customer’s brand perception at the end of the interaction?
• Advance — How do you follow up with customers and build out the existing relationship?