Building Successful Customer Journeys: A Guide to Happy Flows
Are you aware of how customers are interacting with your product, service or experience at every touchpoint? Why is this important and what role does it have within the larger Behavioural Design umbrella?
Behavioural Design is about first understanding how people think, react, and make decisions based on their needs, then figuring out how a design can either steer user behaviour in a positive way or elicit a particular user reaction.
The end goal of designing for human behaviour is curating how the final user will flow through and experience a product. To accomplish this successfully, right about every strategic design agency would swear by creating a customer journey.
Building a customer journey is a tremendous task, so how do we tackle it at TPA?
Choose a stakeholder and explore their needs
In our previous article, we talked about mapping stakeholders correctly so that you can build the right product for their needs or steer their behaviour towards using a product. Once you know who your stakeholder is, the next question is to define what product to build.
To begin building a customer journey, select the stakeholder that you want to build a customer journey for. At this point, it's essential to ensure that you've completed an in-depth exploration of the stakeholder and their needs.
The next step is to extract the stakeholder's most important pains and gains, and figure out what the core jobs to be done for the stakeholder are. All other information about the stakeholder, such as knowledge at hand or assumptions you've made, is necessary to make founded decisions.
Find answers with the product map
Once the stakeholder has been properly defined, it's time to answer these main product questions:
- What will the user discover with/about the product the first time they use it?
- What does the user learn after using the product/platform for the first time?
- How will the user use the product?
- What is the end goal for the user of the product?
Although these are the main questions to ask yourself as you create a product map, they can be adapted depending on how much you know about the final product. If you already know the answers to some of these questions, add on to them or rephrase them.
As you can tell, there's a small customer journey hidden in the product map, which becomes the prologue to a proper customer journey.
Discover the value proposition
The main goal of the value proposition is to translate the product map, pains and gains, jobs to be done, and other aspects into the final product concept. You'll find that you've already discovered a bit more about the value proposition through the product map as it touches on very similar questions via different phrasing.
The aforementioned other aspects include pain relievers, gain creators, and products and services.
- Pain relievers focus on how the product can remove pains from the customer and what current customer pains are solved by the product.
- Gain creators are about identifying what parts of the idea/product can create extra gains or enhance existing ones.
- Products and services are about finding out how all the previously collected information can be translated into relevant products and services for the concept.
- By the end, you'll have a full 360° value proposition of the service offering you are trying to create, which is the ideal kickstart for the customer journey.
Building the customer journey
Although building a customer journey is an exercise that deserves an entire article dedicated solely to it, we will summarise it as concisely as possible.
Start by defining what steps the user has to take to get to the end goal, keeping a happy flow in mind. At TPA, we like to start the customer journey a few steps before users interact with the product or service and end a few steps after said interaction.
There are multiple ways to tackle this:
- Plant a flag in the journey and see how you can get to that point in reverse.
- Start at the very beginning and then think about the next step.
- Plant a vague flag along the journey and try to steer from there – our favourite and recommended approach.
Once the steps have been defined, it's time to evolve the customer journey by delving deep into and considering several factors: emotional journey, pains and gains, channels, and jobs to be done/products and services.
Emotional journey
Put yourself in the user's shoes and think about how a user would feel when going through the different steps of their customer journey. Will they be feeling down, enlightened, happy, sad, etc.? The main purpose of this step is to try and keep negative emotions out of the product or reduce them, and raise or evoke positive emotions instead.
Pains and gains
You need to know where the customer's pains and gains are so you can adapt the steps so they relieve the pains and create extra gains. This is where you can truly look for places to create the most impact.
Channels
Identify what channels you can use to communicate with your customers. Figure out how these channels can keep customers engaged with your product or how they can re-attract customers to products.
Jobs to be done/products and servicesJobs to be done/products and services
The final step is to couple jobs to be done with different steps in the customer journey, where the jobs to be done will get translated into products and services. The trick is to identify at what point in the customer journey does the user need to do what job, and at what point in time does the user want specific features from the product or service?
Achieving success with a happy flow
The customer journey should always have a happy flow; flowing in one direction and without distractions from branches or other sub-flows coupled to the main one. Along the way, you might discover unhappy branches to re-include, extra entry or exit points, or a branch that returns to the main flow.
Lost your way or want to dive deeper into creating customer journeys? We're only a phone call or email away!
