Need a starting point to optimize the customer experience on your website? Creating a website customer journey map is the most important step you can take to start standing out from your competitors.
Just like how unknown geographic locations need to be mapped for people to learn how to best access them, the same thing applies to your website. This is something a customer journey map can solve.
Why Should You Map the Website Customer Journey?
As a UX researcher, customer journey mapping is one of my favorite techniques to learn and visualize the best parts of the customer experience on a website, as well as the areas that require improvement.
This type of visual representation can help different professionals who work on a particular experience—like customer success, customer support, marketing, design, and the customer data analytics folks—improve it from both a strategic standpoint, as well as a more tactical one.
Essentially, what it does is help you tell a story in an interesting way. No more long reports that nobody reads. Instead, you’ll get a nice visual that tells the customers’ perspective.
You can use this in a workshop or even multiple workshops to inform your stakeholders about the results, get their feedback, and align on the next steps of improving your website’s customer journey.
This way you’ll be able to know what parts of your website need optimization and think about the best way to do it. Sometimes, the solution will be digital-only. Sometimes, you might even need some human help in the loop, depending on how complicated your customer journey is.
What Is The Website Customer Journey?
Let’s back up for a moment. A website customer journey is a process a customer goes through on a website in order to achieve specific goals. A good example could be an e-commerce website, where a customer searches for a piece of clothing, compares a few, adds some to a shopping cart, then checks out. As you can understand, every customer journey has a few parts, and each part is considered a customer touchpoint.
Some of these touchpoints happen on a website, some might originate from your social media accounts, and some can involve human help using a live chat, and even a phone call from your service or sales team. It all comes down to the complexity of the task and, in some cases, what the regulation requires you to do (e.g. the case of banks where you need to perform a customer validation is a good example).
Throughout their interaction with a website, it’s very likely that a typical customer will go through a few high emotional points, as well as low emotional points that are sometimes called customer pain points.
Some UX researchers only map a certain part of the customer journey (e.g. add to cart and check out, requesting an exchange, etc.) and some researchers go through a comprehensive journey mapping.
The more comprehensive mapping exercises may include anything from becoming aware of the website’s existence (e.g. discovery) to becoming a returning customer and even an advocate, in some cases (customer loyalty).
The decision on what part of the customer journey to map is yours, in accordance with the existing knowledge you have about your website, the customer needs, and the areas of your website you’d like to improve.
Also, it’s important to mention that the terms user journey and customer journey are usually used interchangeably and they usually mean the same thing.
