A presentation on the topic of Customer Journey Map, its application and effectiveness was conducted. In this article, we want to share with you the key conclusions and insights that were obtained during the presentation.

What is user experience and why is it critical for brand success?

User experience is not just a line in a business strategy. It is the foundation on which any successful product or service is built. The modern world is extremely saturated with information and offers, so customer attention is easy to lose. This is where the need arises for a detailed understanding of user interaction at every stage of their journey — from the first acquaintance with the brand to completing a purchase and further service.

The task of a product designer is to focus on maximum comfort and satisfaction of customer needs, creating a continuous positive experience. In this context, the Customer Journey Map is a tool that allows you to see the entire customer journey, understanding their emotions, behavior, motivations, and pain points.

Which UX (User Experience) methods allow a designer to build excellent user interaction with a product?

First of all, it is necessary to clearly understand the existence of different types of methods and how to apply them in the process of research and building a truly high-quality product.

Methods are structured approaches that help teams of designers and developers create products focused on delivering an exceptional user experience.

Among the fundamentally most important methods, the following should be highlighted:

1. Information Architecture: The main purpose is to organize the structure of the product, ensuring a logical relationship between all internal pages.

2. User Personas: Helps us gain a deeper understanding of the characteristics of the target audience in order to create a product that accurately meets its needs.

3. User Flows: Makes it possible to track the user’s path through the product, identifying how they interact with it and achieve their goals.

4. Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD): Focuses on real user tasks and needs, encouraging the creation of more functional solutions.

5. Customer Journey Map (CJM): Analyzes each stage of interaction with the product to identify strengths and weaknesses and increase user satisfaction.

6. Wireframing & Prototyping: Development of the basic structure and element placement to conduct tests and collect feedback in order to improve the design.

Why is Customer Journey Map the key to building a deep connection with the customer?

Customer Journey Map not only helps improve the customer experience, but also allows you to understand the customer on an emotional level. In an era where competition intensifies every day, it is no longer enough for businesses to simply offer a high-quality product. It is necessary to provide a unique, pleasant, and flawless brand interaction experience.

And this is exactly what CJM enables, because thanks to it we can:

What is Customer Journey Map: a deeper look at structure and elements?

Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of every interaction a user has with your product or service. But it should be much more than just a diagram. It should immerse you in the details of the user’s emotional states, motivations, pain points, and opportunities for improvement. Every touchpoint is important, as it affects the overall perception of the brand.

The main goal of CJM is to understand how users interact with the product at each stage, starting from the initial contact and ending with achieving their goals, which helps identify opportunities to improve the user experience.

CJM contains several key components:

When to create a Customer Journey Map: at which stages of business does it bring maximum value?

Customer Journey Map is a universal tool that can be applied at any stage of your business life cycle. However, there are key moments when its use brings the greatest value.

When should this be done?

1. Launching a new product or service: when you bring a new product to market, it is important to have a clear understanding of how customers will interact with it. Creating a CJM will allow you to anticipate customer expectations, identify potential problems, and avoid fatal mistakes.
2. Decline in conversion or increase in customer churn: if you notice that users stop staying with you or conversion rates fall, CJM will help identify the stage at which they leave the journey and the factors contributing to this.
3. Changes in audience behavior: the market and customer needs are constantly changing. CJM makes it possible to quickly adapt to these changes and maintain competitiveness.
4. Analysis and optimization of existing processes: if you have been operating in the market for a long time, CJM will allow you to more deeply analyze how effectively you interact with customers. Are they satisfied with your service? Are there opportunities to improve the quality of services or products?

When should this stage be avoided?

1. If the project does not include a service: CJM should not be used if the project does not include a service or an end customer.
2. Lack of objective assessments: the map will be inappropriate if it is based solely on subjective opinions of the team or stakeholders.
3. If the only task is a nice visual: CJM is also not needed if the task is only to visualize user interaction with the interface.

Which metrics should be considered when building a high-quality CJM?

1. Conversion at each stage: each stage should be analyzed in detail, considering the percentage of users who successfully move from one interaction stage to the next.
2. Time spent by users: it is also important to carefully consider the average time users spend at each stage of the journey, as users often leave a stage for specific reasons that must be identified.
3. User satisfaction: should be measured through user surveys, encouraging feedback, or conducting questionnaires to determine satisfaction levels.
4. Number of negative experience cases: the number of negative interactions or complaints received at each stage should be taken into account.
5. Net Promoter Score (NPS): be sure to consider this metric, which reflects users’ willingness to recommend the product or service to others. The better the product, the higher the likelihood it will be recommended.
6. Problem resolution time: time is the greatest value in a person’s life, and the time required to resolve problems or requests that arise during interaction is even more valuable.

Method of creating a CJM

Before starting to build a CJM, it is necessary to understand the purpose for which it will be used. This directly affects the research and construction methodology. As a result, you will have two fundamentally different categories.

For analyzing an existing product:

First, conduct interviews. During interviews with users, it is important to simply ask how they learned about your service and how they receive services. You can use different interview formats — from one-on-one meetings or calls to surveys in Google Forms.

Analyzing the obtained responses will help you identify key touchpoints and improve the user journey overall.

For analyzing a new product:

First of all, clearly define business goals and user needs.

Only after conducting multi-level research, and only after that, will it be possible to describe the desired user journey that you plan to guide customers through so that they achieve their goals and satisfy their needs.

Stages of creating a CJM: step by step toward the ideal user experience

Creating a Customer Journey Map may seem like a complex process, but it can be broken down into several clear stages. By completing them sequentially, the result will be an effective tool that helps increase customer satisfaction and product profitability.

1. Define the User Persona

The first and most important thing is to clearly understand who your customers are.

A persona is a conditional image of your typical customer based on real data. It is important to create several different personas to cover all audience segments. For example, for an electronics store, you may have different personas for young tech enthusiasts looking for innovations and for older people seeking reliability.

The goal of this step is to reflect the user experience in a specific context of using a particular service in order to better understand their needs, motivations, and behavior. This helps teams create more targeted solutions by adapting the product to user expectations and requirements.

2. Define key touchpoints (Touchpoints)

At each stage, the customer interacts with your brand through various touchpoints: advertising, website, social media, email newsletters, customer support, and more.

This step will help you understand when exactly contact occurs between the customer and the service, in order to identify key interaction moments and, of course, the problems that may arise.

3. Study user actions

The actions a customer takes during each interaction with your brand can be both physical (for example, visiting a store) and digital (browsing products on a website). Understanding these actions will help you better understand where the process can be simplified or improved.

4. Start creating Stages & Customer Journey

The goal of this step is to begin implementing the user interaction scenario with our service by studying the different stages of the journey that the user goes through. This allows you to identify key touchpoints, improve the experience, and create a holistic picture of how customers perceive our product or service.

5. Analyze interaction channels and processes

Map the environments in which touchpoints occur to understand through which platforms or channels customers interact with the service. By identifying environments, you will be able to clearly understand where exactly touchpoints occur and what processes accompany these interactions.

6. Conduct an analysis of user actions

The purpose of this step should be to gather information about the actions that the customer must perform (or performs) to achieve their goals. This will greatly help you understand the path to successful interaction.

7. Be sure to consider user goals and needs, as well as the result they expect to receive

By identifying the user’s goals and needs, you will understand what they are trying to obtain from the service. And by understanding what the user expects to achieve after performing an action, you will be able to properly configure the service to meet these expectations at the wireframe and prototype stages.

Also, note the questions that arise for customers at each step to understand their doubts and needs during the interaction process. But remember, for each action, be sure to record the real thoughts and emotions of users that arise during the performance of actions in order to better understand their experience and feedback.

8. Analyze emotions and pain points

Each interaction evokes certain emotions in the customer. Do they feel frustration due to a long process of finding the required feature? Or perhaps they are delighted by the speed of problem resolution?

You must describe all obstacles, barriers, problems, and limitations that may prevent the user from achieving the desired result, in order to later eliminate them and create a truly user-friendly product.

Mark both positive and negative emotions, as they determine the overall perception of the brand.

9. Draw conclusions and think logically

Based on the collected information, you will obtain an overall map, but this is not yet the solution to all your problems. Now you need to think through and propose specific strategies to improve each touchpoint. By identifying barriers, problems, and limitations, you will have ideas for possible solutions and their elimination to increase user satisfaction. These may include recommendations for improving the interface, reducing the time of the entire interaction process, or personalizing content for different customer segments.

Example of CJM: a typical customer journey in an online clothing store

Let’s consider a real example of a CJM for an online clothing store that sells youth streetwear:

1. Awareness — the customer first sees an advertisement for your store on Instagram. They are interested in the clothing style and navigate to the store page.
2. Consideration — while browsing the website, the customer views product photos, reads reviews, and checks the page with new arrivals. They begin to weigh their options: should they buy now or wait for a sale?
3. Decision — the customer adds several items to the cart but stops due to an overly complex checkout process or unclear delivery policy.
4. Purchase — after improving the checkout process, the customer completes the purchase. Their emotions during this process are an important factor of loyalty.
5. Post-purchase — a week later, the customer receives the package. Were they satisfied with the packaging? Did they contact customer support, and how quickly was the issue resolved?

Key benefits of Customer Journey Map: why it is a must-have tool for modern businesses

CJM not only helps understand what the customer does at each stage of their journey. It allows you to dive into the thoughts, emotions, and motivations of the user, which makes it possible to:

• Create personalized offers: understanding customer actions and emotions allows you to adapt offers to their needs and desires.
• Improve conversion: by identifying pain points, you can eliminate barriers that prevent customers from completing a purchase.
• Increase loyalty: consistent positive experience at every stage of the journey leads to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Improve internal processes: CJM can help identify problems in internal business processes that affect customer service quality.
• Increase communication effectiveness: knowing at which stage and with which problems customers face, you can better understand them and offer effective solutions.



Conclusion: creating a product with the customer in mind through CJM

Customer Journey Map allows you to see the entire user journey and create a product that meets real user needs. It is a way not only to understand how customers interact with a company, but also to learn what they think and feel at every stage. Thanks to CJM, we have the opportunity to create products and services that make customers want to return again and again.

We hope that our presentation interested you and helped you better understand the importance of CJM in the modern design world.

If you have any further questions or need a consultation, feel free to contact us.

We strive to be not only a source of information, but also your reliable partner in the world of design and technology. Our team is ready to help you implement your ideas, develop your projects, and achieve great success together.

Thank you for your attention, and see you again!