Customer journey maps and the rise of the 'careful consumer'

It's no secret that people are more selective about purchases than they were 15 years ago. Learn how your business can use customer journey mapping to adapt to this new reality.

You may have heard the term 'customer journey mapping.' This is a tool that companies use to visualize a customer's path through a product or service.

The reasoning behind customer journey maps might seem obvious. Of course we want to understand customers better as they interact with our company or service.

The sudden appearance of journey mapping points to an underlying shift in how people are approaching purchases. Call it the rise of the 'careful consumer.'

People in 2019 increasingly vet the brands, products and service that they bring into their lives and into their homes.

Customers now have six contacts with a brand before making a purchase. Compare that with two contacts just 15 years ago. What has changed?

One reason is simple competition. There's more venture capital available ($100B in 2018, according to TechCrunch) to start companies. There's more choices, and people want to make sure that they're getting value for their money.

In the past, companies might have only differentiated by price point, demographic, style. But because of this new competition, companies now need to differentiate themselves on production, ethics and ingredients, to name a few examples. Entrepreneurs too are more conscious about the kinds of business they start.

'Careful consumers' weight their personal values when making purchases

Tom's Shoes is a great study on a business that weaves charity and values into its core business. And there are others.Whole Foods for organic goods, Etsy/Renegade Craft Fair for handmade gifts. These are examples of brands and products that have captured people's interest by appealing to their personal and moral values.

Gone are the days of automatic trust and same-day brand discovery and purchase. In this new world, brands need to cater to consumers who are more considered, thoughtful and careful about their purchases. This consideration and care during the pre-purchase phase creates more opportunities for engagement – and more ways to get it wrong. Companies need new ways to understand a customer's purchase journey in order to make sure they are consistent throughout this process.

Enter the customer journey map

A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. It’s used for understanding customer needs and pain points.

Nielsen Norman Group

Customer journey map basics

The customer journey map charts a person's journey across time through a product, service or brand touchpoints. Visually, it allows us to see opportunities for improvements. Places where we've found a dip in a customer's experience are areas we can potentially make our service, product or brand better.

In the above example, we can see areas of opportunity outlined in red. The emotional journey dips. This is a place where a customer's experience is disappointing to them. Looking vertically within the customer journey map gives us additional context. This will help our team make decisions about where to prioritize our resources in order to get the best ROI on an improved customer touchpoint.

Create a solid foundation of research

Before tackling your own customer journey map, I have one major recommendation: do your research. Realize that a successful journey map isn't just a nice visual based on vague assumptions. Visualizations are powerful, and have the potential to lead teams astray. Every useful journey map is based on a strong collaboration between researchers and designers. Spend - invest - the time and money to talk to your customers. Synthesize and vet your results. Be skeptical, especially if your findings validate a hypothesis that you yourself came up with.

I find that icebergs are excellent metaphors for customer journey maps. The tip of the iceberg is just that - a small piece of a much larger whole. For the customer journey map, it is the last work you'll do on the project. The true work of a journey map happens in the first, crucial part of the process - the research phase.

Invest the time and money to do the necessary research

Vet your process and your findings. In fact, I would argue that if you aren't fully committed to the research, then I would not waste your time building the customer journey map visualization. A journey map with incomplete research will look nice, but it will also be full of factual holes. It's also a dangerous artifact.

Visuals are strong rhetorical tools - we as designers and business leaders need to use them carefully. They can ruin our credibility if found to be inaccurate.

Poorly-executed customer journey maps can send the business spiraling off in the wrong direction, solving customer problems that don't actually exist. This creates peril in the form of 'opportunity cost' and waste.

Invest in the research phase and you're much more likely to achieve a significant win for your customers and your business.

Learn more about customer journey mapping

To learn more about customer journey mapping, please check out my upcoming SXSW talk on Saturday March 9th at 9:30am in the Palmer Events Center – it's free to the public, no badge or wristband required, but you will need to register to secure a seat.

I also teach an upcoming customer journey mapping workshop at General Assembly on March 23rd. We'll learn how to navigate the process and you'll spend nearly 90 minutes completing your own journey map. You'll walk out of the class armed with the skills you need to tackle journey mapping at your company.