How to create themes and storylines in your customer journey map
Journey maps are powerful for communicating the customer experience to your internal stakeholders. But to get management and people from different departments onboard, you need them to understand and accept the rationale behind your insights, conclusions, and ideas for improvements derived from the customer journey. Here is how you can use the structure in your journey map to create the customer storyline.
Most often - and for natural reasons, we read the customer journey map horizontally and visualize how the customers move through your service and the steps they are taking.
But equally important is to structure your journey map in a way that makes it easy to read in a vertical way. In this video we are explaining the importance of connecting the dots and creating main themes top-down in your customer journey map. By doing so, you will not only be able to create a coherent customer-centric storyline but also get people to better understand the customer insights, pains and the reasons behind the conclusions, ideas and solutions.
Click here to explore the journey map template used for this case
The key take-away in this case is to make sure to connect the insights to the conclusion (pain points and problem areas), all the way to the solutions, tests, and the changes that you want to implement.
In effect, you are then creating logical paths, that not only goes from left to right in the map but also top-down, starting with the customer perspective. This will enable you to communicate the customer journey better, helping your team to understand why you have arrived at the key issues, painpoints, and solutions that you’ll want to take action on.
Pro tip!
Create a story from your customer journey map, where you describe important insights and explain how and why the solution ideas and concepts were created.
Use colors and icons for the status and progress of the ideas or solution you are testing.
By Sabina Persson - May 5, 2021