[Principle 1] To transform marketing starting from customer touchpoints, begin by understanding the customer journey.

 

Visualizing the Gap Between Ideal and Reality with Customer Journey Maps

Even without using the term "experience design," some companies have established departments responsible for UX (user experience) or UI (user interface), leveraging big data to understand customers as individuals and implement strategies.

However, experience design focuses on the customer's perspective. It considers the journey starting from their first touchpoint with the brand, guiding them to form a positive impression of the product or service, leading them to purchase and use it, and ultimately steering their subsequent actions in a positive direction (such as repeat purchases or recommendations).

In other words, it involves capturing customer actions (including their perceptions) as sequential changes over time and viewing them connected along a single timeline.

The core tool for this is the "Customer Journey Map" (Figure 1). Plotting the customer experience onto a map visualizes it, making it easier to identify issues. It also helps build consensus within the company and share that consensus.

For example, the figure below shows a customer journey map for the scenario of buying a house. The customer journey map provides an overview of the customer's actions and feelings as a continuous flow.

Figure 1: Customer Journey Map

In reality, it is extremely difficult to accurately capture the exact path a customer takes, where they hesitate, and whether they ultimately purchase your company's products or services or drop out at some stage. If various departments only conduct fragmented surveys and analyses as needed, the uncovered parts can only be imagined.

However, creating and examining a customer journey map allows us to understand customer actions and feelings as a continuous flow. Furthermore, it enables us to evaluate everything on the same playing field: customer actions alongside market trends, physical store (offline) conditions, and even back-office operations that consolidate various information. This is the groundbreaking aspect of this tool. As you describe what you want customers to do, where, and how they should feel, while adding your company's challenges and necessary actions, it will take on the form of a "strategic guideline document."

The essence of the customer journey map lies in understanding your own customers. Once you understand your customers, you can then discuss where and what countermeasures to implement. It also provides clues to determine whether past countermeasures were effective or, if not, where the problems lay. In other words, creating a customer journey map allows you to visually confirm the gap between your company's ideal and reality.

Viewed this way, the customer journey map should achieve two goals: "optimizing customer flow" and "maximizing customer value."

Optimizing customer flow means structuring the purchasing process to align with the customer's goals. Maximizing customer value means supporting the customer in achieving their goals, solving their problems, and ensuring their satisfaction.

You may notice this is identical to what we already analyze using the "marketing funnel." (Figure 2) That's right. The customer journey map can be seen as an evolved form of funnel analysis.

Figure 2: Marketing Funnel

 

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