What is CJM and what are its goals?
First, we need to understand the concept of CJM (Customer Journey Map). This is a literal translation of CJM referring to the customer journey map, but in technical terms, CJM is a whole methodology based on a detailed analysis of the target audience's needs and behaviors.
The ultimate goal of CJM is always to improve the customer-company interaction, and as a result, increase customer satisfaction and loyalty to your product.
CJM is a pretty comprehensive study that focuses not only on the customer experience with your site/application/system, but on all possible touch points from when the customer is interested in your product through to when they reach their ultimate goal.
So this methodology helps businesses measure customer satisfaction at all points along the journey and predicts their likelihood of returning (asking again).
Who can use CJM?
This method is quite universal, it is suitable for any business, and it does not matter whether you have a startup, a young business, or you already have many years of experience. You can still use CJM.
Startup benefits:
- can assess the viability of your idea and understand whether your product/service is likely to be in demand, or if you should reconsider your business goals;
- idenitfy the interests of your potential audience and determine opportunities for scaling your business by researching the demand for other related services.
Benefits for companies with experience:
- will give you the opportunity to review yourself and your service from the other side (for a more independent assessment is better to involve outside experts);
- will help to understand in which points the audience is in touch with product/service and how different audience segments interact with it;
- assess how easily users move from one stage of interaction to another and what emotions they experience in the process;
- one of the most important factors will help to find out the barriers that prevent clients from reaching their ultimate goals;
- find alternative ways of development and business increasing.
How to make a CJM to be useful?
To avoid wasting time and effort and to make sure your CJM really benefits the business, it is necessary to properly emphasize its creation and to actively engage with decision-makers, representatives of the company for which the map is made, throughout the entire process of CJM creation.
Procedure for creating any CJM:
- Find out the key points between the client and your company as they pursue their end goal;
- Describe in each of these points: the user goal, the process, the challenges (if there are), emotions and impressions, ideas and suggestions for solving problems or just improving their experience at that specific point.
Tips for making useful CJM:
- Analize your target audience and make the portrait of the most frequent user of your product/service/service.
- Work up a basic CJM about this particular characte
- Use only verified data, fewer assumptions, more facts, and statistics. In the case of an online business, a good source of data for CJM would be web analytics
- Try to put yourself in your customer's shoes and go all the way from the beginning to the end. And «pass the way» literally: make a purchase of your product, order a service, talk to the call center, etc. Try to put yourself in your customer's shoes and go all the way from the beginning to the end. And «pass the way» literally: make a purchase of your product, order a service, talk to the call center, etc. See how much time each step takes and what difficulties arise in the process. This will help you not only identify all the touchpoints but also understand the client's emotions at different stages of interaction with your company, identify problematic moments and understand how you can solve them.
- Hire specialists to help you map it out. People with that experience can help you identify the real touchpoints and, most importantly, help you understand how to address user issues and barriers in the most optimal way possible.
When should you use it?
The user journey map can and should be used when:
- When you see that customers are struggling with the system, but you can't pinpoint the exact cause of that dissatisfaction
- When you want to find ways to improve system efficiency
- If you are ready to scale and want to understand what direction to take
- In business process automation projects. Here you can use CJM to visually compare the problems that users face without a system, and outline the ways in which these problems will be solved after automation
Results of usage CJM
Recently, our Fresh Design Agency team has increasingly begun to apply this methodology to solve various business problems.
For example, at Botkin.pro (an online doctor's video consultation service) we used CJM to identify service conversion issues and find solutions for different types of users - doctors and patients.
CJM doctor
We paid special attention to working out the user path on mobile devices because according to the results of Google Analytics the percentage of users of the service from mobile devices was 68.9%. Thus, we were able to determine the need to refine some of the system's functionality and improve the project's UX.
CJM patient
Here are some of the conclusions we came to as a result of our own experience:
- Users who reach their goals with your product bring profit to the business, thus helping you grow in the future
- Users who are satisfied with the interaction with your service are sure to come back to you again. This increases retention rates, which is one of the goals of any forward-thinking business.
- CJM allows you to use the project budget in the most rational way because you will know exactly what areas need to be refined, and where everything is fine
- The right user path map can have a significant impact on determining how to scale your business and planning directions for its future development
Conclusion
In fact, there is no canon or standard for making CJM, everything is very individual and depends on many factors. Don't be afraid to experiment, pick the most appropriate ways for your project, audience, and based on the goals you want to achieve as a result.
Based on our experience of using CJM on various projects, we would like to note that this is not a one-time procedure, but a periodically recurring process. Business goals are adjusted, the market develops, the interests of the audience change, all this makes the business always be in a state of flux and react quickly to the slightest fluctuations in the environment. If you use CJM methodology regularly, it will not only increase the conversion rate but will also make the company more client-oriented, thereby increasing customer loyalty and thus its profits.
