Understanding your customers through traditional personas and Customer Journey Mapping: A CXl Review
How do Businesses know their customers 100% of the time?
For years, the answer has been really clear: They don't.
Since we understand that consumers are stochastic and work emotionally most of the times, we use different means to know who they are, their pain points and what they're doing.
A persona is often used to know who our targeted audience are and what they look like. These information helps businesses to know how to best structure their marketing effort in order to get them.
A persona is a concocted representative of an ideal customer. It is not a real description of existing customers but shows a description of what a typical customer would look like in terms of demographic attributes, or shopping habits.
The persona has been used for years to know how best to serve the users but it seems not to be bringing enough information about users.
Just like digital technologies like robotics, cloud computing and Artificial intelligence has disrupted traditional marketing and businesses in general so is the usual persona being disrupted by higher marketing practices. The need to know the customers more has fuelled the development of customer journey mapping.
Traditional personas are a snapshot in time and will only capture the information of users once, and not as they go through an acquisition phase.
Customer journey mapping gives a real time overview of customers because it has much more characteristics it gets from customers.
A customer journey map is certainly a research-based tool that examines the story of how a customer relates to the business, brand or product over time.
As expectsd– no two customer journeys are identical. However, they can be generalized to give an insight into the “typical journey” for a customer as well as providing insight into current interactions and the potential for future interactions with customers.
Simply put, it is the visualization of how the customers thinks at every point of the funnel.
It is very useful even before the design of touch points. It helps to facilitate a common business understanding of how every customer should be treated across all sales, logistics, distribution, care, etc. channels.
This in turn can help break down “organizational silos” and start a process of wider customer-focused communication in a business.
Where to apply a customer journey map
Every user will travel in slightly varying journeys and an accurate one is impossible. However, it can be used in many situations.
1. Budget Investment: A customer journey can act as a analytical tool to know where your point of weakness exist and also know how to channel resources to thay end.
Where are we letting the customers down?
Where needs to be improved?
2. Channel tools: Since customer journey mapping helps to know the points that need help, we can easily know what channel to be placed at each point. Some channels are better left in other places.
It will show the gap in channel placement and readjustment that needs to be done. Ads on social media can be good at the initial stage and not later. It is important to think of how the campaign can fit into the journey and overall experience of the customer.
3. Meetings : Taking them to meetings reminds the team to work in line with it. For example, Amazon keeps an empty seat at every meeting to remind everyone that the customers also matter. This is a very good practice for every firm that wants to be user centric.
Running a customer journey mapping workshop
A workshop will be important because it’ll be an avenue to meet with appropriate stakeholders in order to create an excellent journey.
Before thinking about this stage, it is important to know who to invite for the workshop. People who should be at the workshop should not be the traditional board members. It is important to consider those who have first hand experience with the customers at the various touch points in the map. People who should be invited are;
A. The data guys: people who work with user’s data on a daily basis have a high probability of knowing more about the users than others.
B. Users: This is the most important person to invite but realistically, they might not be available at the moment. Even when. They are available, they may form a biase about their opinion just to sound good for the interview. Involving the users in this process makes them endeared to the brand because it is like a co creation process.
However we need their opinions nonetheless. If they are not available, then use anybody outside the first to act as a typical user. The intention is to get an outside opinion of your brand.
C. People who work with user’s on a daily basis: They may include the sales person’s, the social media managers, the front desk,etc. Anyone who represents the firm at any touch point.
D. Someone from the senior management room: This is just to get empathy after your research.
After considering the above people, you should do the following;
1. Definition of scope: The workshop scope should be clearly stated out. What areas of the users are we breaking down? Will it be a complex tear down or a summary?
Break the scope into groups that people came along with.
Decide whose journey (the persona) and what journey (the scenario) you’ll be mapping ahead of time. You should focus on one persona and one scenario per map, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have more than one scenario or journey map per workshop.
For effectiveness you can split everyone into groups to each work on different personas or you all can do it together.
2. Go through each step with it's questions, challenges and brainstorm. Remember to map out the whole journey and add sticky notes to each stage. Vote on the most important challenge and narrow down to get real indications.
3. Do this step by step and get work done. Remember to review each step for the final time. Even if you consolidated and shared existing research with the team before the workshop, it’s possible that not everyone took the time to ponder over it like you did.
You should dedicate some time within the workshop to review the key findings. And even if the team is familiar with the research, it’s still better for everyone to be aligned on the takeaways as a group and for those information to be fresh in everyone’s mind.
The research review could take the form of one or two people simply presenting recent research findings, or it could be something more interactive.
4. Photograph everything on the wall to create the customer journey map:
After the workshop, it is important to do visualization. Make it nice and simple!
Visualize with a time frame too and let it show beautiful customer journey map with images, data, map, objections, etc. Get a designer to this job to make for easy interpretation.
This article provides help on a specific set of activities; however, there are different ways to run a journey-mapping workshop. Use this as a starting place and adapt it based on your needs, scope, and limitations.
Creating customer journeys doesn’t have to be a massively time-consuming process – most journeys can be mapped in less than a day. The effort is eventually worthwhile because it enables a shared understanding of the customer experience and offers each stakeholder and team member the chance to contribute to improving that experience.
Thanks to CXL INSTITUTE for the the opportunity to write this as part of my scholarship for the mini degree program in growth marketing.
