6 Tips for setting up Customer Journeys
Learn how to make a journey you can manage.
Creating customer journeys is quite intuitive, but there’s always room to improve. In this guide we cover 6 tips that will help you to make journeys more quickly, insightful, and usable. We cover:
#1: Use a Journey Template
#2: Choose your scope wisely
#3: Make your Journeys come alive using visuals (for free)
#4: Tag your Journeys well
#5: Add your Journeys to a Journey Framework
#6: Co-create Journeys
#1: Use a journey template
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TheyDo comes with a range of pre-built templates, and you can also build your own.
Using journey templates not only helps you set up a journey much more quickly, it also ensures that all journeys in your organization are built up according to the same structure. This helps collaboration a lot, because once you understand the buildup of one journey, you understand all of them – even the ones created by different people.
#2: Choose your scope wisely
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TheyDo supports both macro and micro-journeys.
Customer journeys can have various scales and scopes. Before you start mapping, it is worthwhile to consider where your journey should start and end, and how ‘detailed’ it should be.
If you want to focus on a high-level overview of a process, macro journeys are what you need. They provide a high-level overview of an end-to-end experience or even a full customer life cycle. Every step in a macro journey often includes multiple interactions. More on Macro Journeys.
If you want to focus on one step of a higher-level journey, you can build a more detailed journey map. These are often referred to as micro journeys. They provide a detailed overview of a step-by-step process. They are quite detailed and often only describe one interaction per step. More on Micro Journeys.
Tip: If you’re unsure how detailed a journey map should be and how many steps it should include, start with a high-level journey map to get an overview of the entire journey.
#3: Make your journeys come alive using visuals (for free)
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Visuals help to make your journeys easier to understand.
To make your journeys come alive, visuals go a long way. They provide context for each step in your journey and help to make your journey maps easier to navigate. Adding visuals can be done in under a minute when you use one of the following free resources:
Each of these resources provides you with searchable and license-free databases of visuals, free for you to download. Alternatively, you can represent your journey steps using your own icons, photos, or screenshots of interfaces.
#4: Tag your journeys well
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Tags help you to filter, compare, and search for journeys.
Tagging your journeys makes sure it’s easier to understand, find, and compare with others. So with every journey, make sure you at least do the following things:
Distinguish between assumption-based and research-based journeys. The reliability of a journey map depends on the data used to create it. The status of the insights in your journey (factual or interpreted insights) can help you determine if your journey is based on assumptions, or on proper research data. You can use journey status tags to do tag the status in TheyDo. As an example, use a ‘assumption-based’ tag to indicate a journey is based on assumptions, and use a ‘validated’ tag to indicate a journey has been validated with customer research.
Distinguish between current and future journeys. Help distinguish if a journey provides an overview of a current experience, or if it pictures a future ‘prototype’ journey that does not exist yet.
Delegate ownership. Add yourself or a teammate as an owner so everyone knows who is responsible for what parts of the customer experience. This also prevents ‘orphaned journeys’ from appearing.
Tag any other tags relevant for your journey. Using global tags, you can tag your journey on a whole range of other topics. If your organization uses global tags, make sure you have a look and choose the ones that apply to your journey! This will help you and your teammates find your journey.
“What makes a useful and good customer journey?“
“A good one takes into account all the steps necessary your customer does. What you want to know is a customer can go through this journey almost in one go, so, back to my earlier point about getting a mortgage, there’s a lot of different journeys I need to go through to get a mortgage. I don’t do that in one go. But onboarding to your software or product, I can do that in one go, so there you have your journey. So defining the beginning and the ends is useful. So once you have that you’ll also know what success means, how many people start, how many people get to the end, and if they succeed in reaching the end what do you want them to achieve/accomplish/feel?”
#5: Add your journey to a journey framework
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The beauty of a journey framework is that it gives an overview of all the journeys that have been created in your organization. If your organization has set up a journey framework, make sure you add your journey to it once it’s ready. This will ensure that others are aware that your part of the customer experience has been mapped, which prevents double work and improves collaboration.
#6: Co-create journeys
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When you create a journey, make sure to involve others! First of all, invite your colleagues to help you set up the first draft of a journey map. Ask the customer service team and sales representatives about their opinion, since they’re often the closest to the customers in question. Then do your research: Talk to customers and ask them about their experience of a journey. You’d be surprised to learn how different their experience can be from what you imagine. Lastly, don’t forget to involve a broader range of perspectives in your company as well, especially when you start mapping supporting processes. It, Legal, and other experts are invaluable when mapping these types of insights to your journeys.
Journey Management Stories: What role does the customer journey play for you?
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