What is Customer Journey? Steps for Creation and Key Points for Operation

Table of Contents

1. What is Customer Journey?
2. Steps for Creating a Customer Journey
3. Points to Utilize Customer Journey
4. Summary

1. What is Customer Journey?

Overview

"Journey" means "travel". "Customer journey" refers to the customer's journey = "process". In other words, it refers to the process of understanding and purchasing products or services, including actions and thoughts of customers or users. By always being aware of this customer journey, we can lead to customer success.

Purpose and Benefits of Creating a Customer Journey

In customer success, it is important to have a customer-centric perspective rather than just the perspective of the provider of products and services. Measures based solely on the company's subjective view are not very effective and can even lower customer satisfaction. However, by understanding the customer journey, we can implement marketing measures from the customer's perspective and provide products and services in a way that meets their needs. Furthermore, by designing the customer journey, we can share the actions of customers and users within the customer success team and smoothly handle risk avoidance. Being able to unify the perspectives of stakeholders, who tend to be dispersed, from a customer-centric perspective through the customer journey is a major advantage for customer success.
Below are the objectives and benefits of creating a customer journey.

Useful for considering CX/UX improvement measures
In the customer journey, all processes that the customer goes through are visualized, including emotions. The visualized information becomes the customer journey map. This makes it possible to clearly identify which points have issues from the customer's perspective, and by improving these issues, it is possible to improve the quality of CX (Customer Experience) and UX (User Experience) of products and services.

Have a common understanding among stakeholders
In order to achieve customer success, cooperation among all departments is necessary. However, without a common understanding, cooperation may not progress and there is a risk of providing irrelevant customer support. To prevent this, it is important to utilize customer journey maps. By creating customer journey maps in cooperation, it is possible to align the understanding of the underlying customer profile and customer experience. In addition, having a common understanding of the issues will enable us to consider and implement appropriate measures.

Understand the priority of problem solving and make decisions on measures smoothly
When there are multiple issues, it is often the case that despite taking various measures, the results are all mediocre. With a customer journey map, the overall image of the customer can be visualized in chronological order by phase, making it possible to clearly prioritize issues. For example, if an issue is found in the initial phase of the timeline, it becomes clear that it should be addressed with higher priority than issues in later phases.

Customer Journey Examples

2. Steps for Creating a Customer Journey

①Before starting to create, set your objectives and goals.

First, we consider the purpose of creating a customer journey map and the users who will use the services and products offered. To effectively utilize the customer journey map, we clarify the purpose and goals. By setting the purpose based on the goals of the business and deciding on indicators to measure the degree of achievement of the purpose in advance, it becomes easier to look back. Indicators such as contract renewal rate and NPS® score, which indicates the level of customer loyalty, may be used as indicators.

② Define customer personas

It is also important to have a concrete image of the ideal customer (persona).
For that purpose, the following framework may be useful.

• STP Analysis
• 3C Analysis
• 5P Analysis

By understanding the strengths and position of the services we provide, we define personas that can fully utilize the value of the service and create high-quality customer experiences and results. After defining the personas, we can imagine a higher resolution by considering information such as the "state," "issues," and "goals" that the customer feels before introducing the product. By specifically envisioning the customer, it becomes easier to imagine what actions they will take and how they will think during the post-contract process.

③ Phase (Horizontal Axis) Settings

The horizontal axis sets each phase that the customer experiences in the process.
The phases vary depending on the products or services provided. For SaaS services, the following examples can be considered.
Example 1: "Using the free version" → "Initial implementation/education" → "Implementation/operation" → "Utilization/establishment" → "Contract renewal"
Example 2: "Contract" → "Introduction" → "Onboarding" → "Utilization" → "Contract renewal"

④ Setting Required Information (Vertical Axis)

The vertical axis (items) generally includes "phase definition (usage period and utilization status)", "goal (achievement status)", "customer behavior (including possibilities of customer behavior)", and "issues (points where customers feel anxiety, dissatisfaction, or lack)". There may also be an emotional curve included.

Fill in the content for each item for each phase.

We will create specific content while imagining the initial set persona and existing customers.

Consider prioritizing and implementing solutions for the 6th issue to be resolved.

After completing the customer journey map, we will determine the priority of the set tasks. We will return to the set objectives and identify the tasks that have the most impact on achieving those objectives. Furthermore, we will thoroughly examine the priority from multiple angles, such as cost-effectiveness and relevance to other tasks, and clearly define measures for solving the tasks.

3. Points for Utilizing Customer Journey

Created by multiple people

By creating with multiple people, you can design from various perspectives, and create a more balanced and accurate customer journey map.
It is said to be effective to gather members from different departments and ages and conduct it in a workshop format. Not only the customer success team, but also members from marketing, sales, development, customer support, etc. can work together and have discussions.

Think from the customer's perspective

It is necessary to constantly check whether the customer journey map is from the customer's perspective. This is because there is a possibility that the desires of the user will be included. We will create it while reviewing the set persona information and factual information. For this purpose, we will check past performance data of products and services, and conduct surveys and interviews with customers. Although some hypotheses are necessary, we always base them on facts. It is important to always check "How does it look from the customer's perspective? Are there any biases?"

Regularly updated

The market situation and user needs are constantly changing. It is also important to respond to these changes in the customer journey. Therefore, in order to use maps to improve the customer experience, it is necessary to regularly update them and reflect the latest customer experience. It is necessary to be mindful of information gathering and obtain more customer information, while also paying attention to the market situation and updating the customer journey map.

4. Summary

In order to achieve customer success, it is important to provide products and services in a customer-oriented manner. By incorporating the customer journey, it is possible to implement marketing strategies from the customer's perspective. Additionally, it is necessary for customer success to unify the perspectives of related departments, which tend to be dispersed, from the customer's perspective through the customer journey.

Many BtoB companies (especially SaaS companies) have a high priority for customer success. In order to efficiently share information on how to achieve customer success or increase customer satisfaction, it is important to maintain documentation. It is also necessary to secure resources for this purpose. However, creating manuals and developing/enhancing training content to improve customer satisfaction requires a large number of personnel and time, making it a high priority but demanding task.

At Human Science, there are many services available for customers in the Customer Success department. In particular, we believe that the quality of the content provided by the Customer Success department is the key to success. Therefore, it is necessary to improve and create manuals, enhance FAQs, and create training content. All of these require costs if done in-house. Additionally, the quality must be easy to understand. At Human Science, we have a proven track record of creating easy-to-understand manuals and e-learning content. We offer the following services:

•Improvement of manual and training text quality
We propose the most suitable instruction manuals, technical documents, help, and FAQs for your environment. We provide consulting services from evaluating current manuals to creating a multilingual support system and building and operating a CMS. We can also handle the production of video manuals.

•Support for creating educational content and introducing LMS (Learning Management System)
Just like manuals, we will propose the most suitable educational content for your environment. Starting with evaluating your current content, we can also optimize LMS and provide multilingual support.

•Chatbot Implementation and Construction Support
To improve the efficiency of customer support, many companies are adopting chatbots. We will propose the most suitable chatbot for your environment. We can provide one-stop support from chatbot system implementation to content creation.

The following are achievements for the Customer Success Department.

WingArc1st Inc.: Consulting and content creation services for the Customer Success department, including content evaluation and improvement consulting.
https://hs-learning.jp/case/wingarc1st/

We also offer services that can handle the creation of easy-to-understand "manuals" and "video manuals", as well as e-learning content, which are necessary for customer success, all in one stop. Please take advantage of them.