Mapping the customer journey from evidence
A journey map drawn in a workshop usually shows how the organisation is arranged, because that's what the people in the room know best.
Picture the usual journey mapping workshop. A dozen people, a long wall, a lot of sticky notes. Marketing covers awareness, ecommerce covers the website, customer service covers what happens after. By the end of the afternoon there’s a neat row of stages with a smiley face at the top and a frown in the middle, and everyone agrees it’s a fair picture. It gets photographed, tidied up by a designer and pinned to the wall, and for the next two years it’s referred to as “the customer journey”.
The problem is where the content came from. Each team described its own stretch, so the stages line up with departments. The bits nobody owns, the hours between ordering and the first delivery update, the moment someone rings because the email didn’t arrive, end up thin or missing, because nobody in the room watches them. The emotions are what the team imagines customers feel. It’s a useful record of what the organisation believes, and a poor record of what customers go through.
NN/g describes a journey map as a visualisation of the process someone goes through to reach a goal, built around an actor, a scenario, the phases of the journey, what the person does, thinks and feels at each phase, and the opportunities that come out of it. The components are simple. The value depends entirely on whether the actions, thoughts and feelings came from customers. NN/g’s guidance is that actions should be rooted in data and that mindsets should ideally be customers’ own words from research.
NN/g also describes two ways to start. You can begin with research and build the map from it, or begin with a workshop that drafts a hypothesis map and then check it against research. The second is cheaper and makes use of what people already know, which is fair enough. NN/g warns that the process often stops before anyone validates it, and a hypothesis map ends up being used to make important decisions. That’s the workshop on the wall. Starting from assumptions is fine as long as you label them that way and go and check.
Building from evidence mostly means using what you already have before commissioning anything new, and putting the channels together. Customers don’t experience your website, your emails, your call centre and your delivery partner as separate things. They experience one attempt to get something done. So the evidence has to come from several places.
- Analytics shows the steps on your own site and where people leave. The funnels lesson covers how to make sure it reflects the real route.
- Recordings show what people do at the steps where they leave, as covered in the recordings lesson.
- Support contacts, chat logs and reviews show where people got stuck badly enough to tell you, and in their own words. The lesson on mining them covers how.
- Interviews, especially switch interviews from the jobs to be done lesson, cover everything that happens off your site: the first thought, the comparison shopping, the conversation with a partner, the wait after ordering.
No single one of these gives you the whole journey. Analytics can’t see the phone call, and the call centre can’t see the twenty minutes someone spent on the delivery page first. NN/g calls the practice of combining methods triangulation, and the more a decision costs, the more it deserves. When two sources agree about a moment, you can rely on it. When they disagree, that’s often the most interesting part of the map.
Once the map is built, its job is to help you find the moments that matter, which are usually few. Look for three things. The first is the step where a lot of people drop out of the journey altogether, which analytics usually shows you. The second is the step that generates a disproportionate number of contacts, complaints or anxious questions, which support data shows you. The third is the step where the emotion line falls lowest, which only interviews and support verbatims can tell you about. When all three point at the same moment, you’ve found where to spend your next tests. When the low point sits off your site, say in the wait between order and dispatch, the fix might be an email or a status page rather than anything on the checkout, and that’s still a perfectly good thing to test.
A map built this way tends to look less polished than the workshop version. Some stages have lots of evidence and some have very little, and a good map shows that plainly, for instance by marking each step as observed, reported or assumed. That marking is the useful bit. It tells you where your knowledge is solid and where the next research money should go.
When an agency offers to build you a journey map, the useful questions are about where the content comes from. What research will it be built on, and how many customers does that represent? Which channels does it cover, and who owns the data for each? How will assumed steps be marked? Who is the actor, and which scenario does the map describe, given that a first-time buyer and a returning one take quite different journeys? And what happens to the map afterwards, because a map that isn’t tied to a list of opportunities with owners tends to end up as decoration.
The workshop still has a place. It’s a good way to get every team looking at the same journey, and a good way to surface what the organisation thinks it knows, so that you can test it. It works as the first draft. The danger is in treating the first draft as the finding, and the tell is usually a map with no gaps in it, because real evidence always leaves some.
Put it to work
Take an existing journey map, or sketch the main journey for your highest-value customer. For each step, write down what evidence supports it, then circle every step where the answer is "we think so".
There is no right answer. Write yours first, then compare.
Sources
Shoshin is written by Another Web is Possible. Lessons are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.Our promise.