Building a Customer Journey that you’ll use

There are few exploratory project requests that come in as complicated to work through as a customer journey. On the surface, it seems like it should be such a straightforward ask: understanding how and when people interact with your brand on the path to ultimately, hopefully, buying something from you.

But to find the right opportunities and make the biggest impact, your customer journey can and should be something so much more than that. To build something that you’ll actually use, you need to invest the time and energy in thoughtful planning. That means…

• Knowing what a Customer Journey is
• Figuring out why you need one and how you’ll use it
• Determining the journey that matters most to what you are trying to do

And that’s all before you even get started! Thankfully, there is a method to the madness here… you just need to know where to begin.

What is a customer journey, anyway?

Trying to make sense of what a customer journey is and how to create one that is actually useful can feel pretty daunting at first. As with everything in this industry, you could drown in jargon well before you get a chance to wrap your mind around the best way to approach it.

But if mapping just the interactions with your brand is too myopic, how should you think about the concept of a customer journey? Well, through a more human lens to start.

At the risk of sounding obnoxiously cliche, a customer journey should be about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes to experience, and really contextualize, the decisions that they make along the way. A well done journey illuminates decisions people are making and how they feel as they move through something – a task, an experience, a milestone, or a phase of life.

And yes, this is a broad, sweeping definition. But it’s also the best place to start because thinking about it at this altitude allows space to consider more opportunities and make a bigger impact. After all, people don’t just fall out of the sky one day and start buying your brand in a vacuum. There is context, nuance, and the messy reality of humanity to consider in addition to awareness, conversation rates, and channel touchpoints.

Start by figuring out WHY you need a customer journey in the first place.

It’s not enough to know you need to understand the customer journey. It’s also important to know why you want to understand it. It can feel so foundational to your business that simply ‘getting it done’ is a perfectly fine outcome. But the key to a customer journey that doesn’t simply sit on the virtual shelf is a plan for what you’ll do with it.

And there’s a lot of things you can do with it – both internally and externally. Most often, we see intended outcomes that look like this.

Internally, you might want to…

• Empathize with people and ‘experience’ their journey for yourself, to understand the impact of the decisions you make on the people who buy your stuff.
• Burst your bubble and see things through the eyes of the ‘average person’, so you’re no longer looking through the lens of the expertise you’ve gained working in the category.
• Create one source of truth across business units and roles, so that everyone is working towards the same goals and with the same information.
• Foster ownership by assigning problems to solve across the journey to different teams, giving a clearer picture of responsiblities for along the way.

Externally, the goals might be to…

• Create a new or better customer experience by identifying what’s going right and what feels like a struggle today, to focus your efforts on what will make the biggest impact.
• Understand your segment(s) better by illuminating one journey, or comparing several, to create more personalized marketing, comms, or experiences.
• Add humanity and context to analytics or data that you already have, so you can decide how to best move the needle towards your goals.
• Learn something totally new by deeply researching the experience through a more human lens, and unlocking opportunities.

Once you have your why, you need to decide WHAT journey matters to you.

Most people treat a customer journey like it’s one singular thing, but the reality is: there are different types of journeys and different lenses that can be used to map them.

The hardest part of customer journey work is deciding on what the scope and parameters should be. You’ll be tempted to get things moving and figure it out along the way, but the success of the project hinges on a clear perspective and alignment around…

• The type of journey
• The lens you’ll use to frame the journey

Let’s start by considering the type of journey. You need to decide two things: who are you following (this will be the people, or multiple types of people that you are comparing) and what are they doing (this is the scenario you want to follow).

You can’t skip these decisions and still end up with something that’s actually useful. If you are starting from scratch, the prospect of picking a target and scenario can feel a little jarring – but trust us, it can’t be ‘everyone’ looking to buy ‘anything we sell’.

Luckily, you don’t have to make it up.

There are four types of journeys that most scenarios fall into.

Once you’ve decided who you are following and what they are doing, you need to decide the lens through which you’d like to understand their experience: the brand lens or the human lens. As you’ve probably gathered, we are partial to the latter because it can uncover new opportunities by providing context you wouldn’t get otherwise.

There are three common lenses that you can use to build your journey…

• Experience Lens: The broad view of a human experience within a category, not with a specific brand or company. It can still include brand and category touchpoints, but it’s delivered through the eyes of the person experiencing it.
• Path to Purchase Lens: A more narrow view, which hyper-focuses on any interactions that a person has with a company or brand – while generally ignoring anything that doesn’t directly relate to these interactions.
• Service Blueprint Lens: A nuanced view for a company or brand who wants to layer on behind-the-scenes processes that support the journey.

Let’s pretend that you work at Blue Apron (fun!), a meal kit service that delivers everything you need to make home cooked meals, and you want to uncover how a family of three chooses what to eat throughout the week.

• An experience map would include decisions that lead to solutions beyond your services – like QSRs, grocery shopping, dining out – and also meal kits.
• While a path to purchase would start the journey at some predetermined point (like logging into the app to check the menu for the week) and end with a purchase made through Blue Apron.
• A service blueprint would double-click into the latter from the perspective of your internal processes, including the support and functionality provided behind the scenes along the way.

Some journey types go hand-in-hand with one lens over another. Assume that a more broad and human perspective will take the form of an experience lens, while more defined tasks and decisions could lend themselves to a path to purchase lens.

Then, you move onto HOW you’ll explore and ‘map’ the customer journey thoughtfully.

Congratulations – you’ve put all the right effort into planning and now you can get to the fun stuff, the research and analysis. The decisions that you’ve made around your people, the scenario, and the lens you’re considering will guide who to speak to and what to ask them.

Still, there are a few fundamental pieces to crushing this part of the work while leaving no stone unturned.

1. Start by gathering and aggregating everything you know to date. This will help you see where your gaps are, and give you a few things to pressure test along the way.
2. Capture behaviors in the moment, and then have people reflect on them. Research bias is a reality we all contend with, but you’ll need to be extra mindful of it here by building an approach that views the journey with and without interference. Quant data can be used to support or validate what you are seeing in qual (read more why qual and quant work better together HERE).
3. Learn what people are thinking, feeling, and doing – every step of the way. To build a detailed and nuanced picture of what’s actually going on, try not to fall in love with any particular phases or steps until you feel absolutely positive that they reflect reality. The phases tend to coalesce naturally once you actually know what people are experiencing.
4. Decide on the best way to visualize the journey. The industry often talks about customer journey work and a journey map as if they are one in the same, but they don’t need to go hand in hand. Sure, a journey map is a common output but the goal is simply to create a structured visual narrative of what people think, feel, and do as they interact with a product, category, service, experience, or brand. How you visualize your journey should be decided by how you plan to use it and what does the best job of making the journey easy to follow.
5. Don’t forget to make it actionable. No, seriously. It sounds so obvious, but this step gets overlooked or rushed through more often than you’d think. A lot should go into this step. In fact, we could (and probably will, let’s be honest) write an entirely different post on how to do this correctly. But at the highest of levels, consider what the experience should look and feel like (hint, it’s not always ‘as easy as possible’, check out this article from HBR for more details) and then identify ways to close any gaps.

Does this all sound like a lot to juggle alongside your day job?

We can help.

At The Sound, we are super passionate about putting people at the center of everything. We love to tell a kickass, human story and create beautiful visuals (shout out to our Design Team!)… so customer journey work and journey maps are kind of our thing.

If all this talk of journeys has you inspired, but you’re already feeling maxed out and overwhelmed by undertaking something this big – we got you. Working with us means…

• We’ll help you define what type of journey delivers on your objectives
• We’ll push you to think outside the box and uncover opportunities based on human tensions
• We can meet your qualitative and quantitative research needs, thanks to our brilliant Creative Analytics team
• Coming along for the ride, collaborating with our team at key milestones (you’re always involved but never burdened)
• Design touchpoints along the way to ensure we deliver the best possible output that inspires impact
• Output that reflects not only the human perspective, but the consumer voice, using their language to help you walk a mile in their shoes

Now that you know how to create something that you’ll actually use, go forth and enjoy the journey.

And if you need help? Just ask.

Written By:

Beth Klein

Beth joined The Sound in 2021 with 12 years of experience exploring how people make decisions. Earning a degree in both Marketing and Print Journalism, she knows the value of using data to tell a good story. She is particularly fascinated by research methodologies that uncover hidden emotional truths; always looking for new ways to go beyond the obvious. She has worked across industries, but has put time and passion into food, beverage, and tech - which also incidentally mirrors how she spends a fair amount of her personal time. Outside of work, she likes to end a particularly long week with a drink and the latest book on behavioral psychology... much to the disappointment of her husband, who wishes she would talk about literally anything else.

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