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Build Your Customer Journey Map

So now we're gonna kind of drill down into the specifics of customer journey mapping in the way that we're talking about doing it here. Um And again, you know, this is just one of several frameworks that you can use to to document your customer insights. Um but it's particularly powerful for companies that identify as wanting to drive a specific change to people's lives for the better because of the journey of it. The first thing you gotta do is decide what journey you're mapping, and that is largely about knowing what problem it is that you're going to try to address. Um That said, you know, the truth is sometimes we get to a place where in a company or in a business we need a little more detailed, like we just need to understand this piece of the customer journey. Um I encourage you to, especially if this is your first approach, a customer journey mapping zoom way out, don't try to drill in and understand the little piece. First, understand the whole journey first, then you can zoom ...

in. Okay so for example, I'm gonna use the same kinds of same companies that we've talked about before because they're just, you already know the problems and stuff. Um So at Trulia we would want to map the journey from renter to homeowner, like what does that whole process look like and my fitness pose like the journey from unhealthy living too healthy. Um At Airbnb, it might have been like the journey from feeling like an outsider in a place where you're a tourist to feeling like someone who belongs there is part of that local community, right? So the first thing you gotta do is decide what your journey, your mapping. The second thing you got to do is to get some helpers, get some help. She's right, you can't do this process by yourself. Um You can do, you can do like I actually just did a very small customer journey, a customer research project in my own business. Um That was like seven interviews that I could do by myself, but it was zoomed in. I had a really specific question I was looking for answers to. If I was doing a whole customer journey mapping process, I would not do it by myself. Even as someone who has done this a lot of times, I would get a couple of helpers, ideally you need at least like one person to moderate and ask questions. You need one person to take notes. Sometimes that note taker can also be a photographer. Sometimes it's helpful. I think Brandy like prefers to always just have a separate photographer because that person can just see things that you may not be seeing. And that's a little bit what you're getting is like if you're in someone's space in particular, there are all sorts that there's all sorts of contextual intelligence that you can get from what they're saying versus what's happening in the space. And also just from the space itself that you make and the other people in the space. Sometimes you can't get necessarily if it's just one person trying to like moderate and ask questions and take notes and you know, it's just too many things. So the moderator should be able to focus on having a one on one conversation with a person and asking the right questions which is mostly about listening, right? Just mostly about like listening to their answers, asking the follow up. Um, Yes and you want your note taker. So this is, I'm getting really nuts and bolts and tactical here, you do want your note taker to take notes as close to verbatim as possible. You are literally looking to capture like quote Phrases they said these three words. Um and generally like I will ask the note taker to put in quotes. Any phrases that are like that seems salient, that are direct quotes, I want to see them in quotes. Um What you'll find is when you get to six or seven people have, when you get to the point in your research process where you've interviewed six or seven people and you're putting the post, its on the wall. nine times out of 10 you'll start to see the same quotes people saying the same words. Um That is important when you hear it because that's what you put in your subject line. That's what triggers our mental frames for like, oh I care about that already. Right? When they see it in your content. So those quotes are important, verbatim is important. We always would do some level of recording whether it was audio or video um just to have the record in case something went wrong with note taking. But most people, people can type fast, you can kind of keep up actually. Um Alright, again, you're recruiting your customers. Um the way that we're talking about them, not people who are paying, you already were recruiting them from the broader pool of people who are facing, trying to solve the problem that you exist to solve with the mindset that they may not all be my current customers, right? Sometimes they're like for the small project that I just did, I was actually specifically doing a project around my ideal customer which is different and much narrower than um my target customer. Um So you've got to be, you know, thinking about who is that broader pool of people thinking referencing your problem all the time. And then we actually do normally recruit on Craigslist and then mix it up. Mix up your demographics especially if you're dealing with a bit, if you're truly dealing with a big human scale problem. Now if your company only is targeting a specific like like women, I'm not saying you have to go talk to some some guys but you know mix it up, it should be women of a variety of even income levels and um ethnicities and geography ease if you don't have a big budget for um travel, sometimes we'll do a couple of, we will often pick cities by how like the personality of a city and the size and feel of a city. So even near san Francisco within driving distance, within a four hour drive of san Francisco, there is rural, there is very suburban and there is urban, so you kind of want to capture those fields or you want to do some video interviews that if you really think there might be a big difference with people in other parts of the country that you hope to serve, you can do some of those by video um if you're trying to keep your budget down again, it's always kind of ideal if you can get in the room with people but there's no reason not to do it because you can't um the one other, one of the other ways in which you want to mix it up, you want to mix it up in terms of talking with people you suspect will be at different stages of the journey. All right, so you want to like, we wanted to talk to people who were like headed cross fitters and people who were literally morbidly obese. Like we're just really, really having a hard time. Um You want to talk to people at a wide range of knowledge, existing knowledge about the subject matter, wide range of skills, wide even extremes. In fact, sometimes the extremes are very illuminating. Um You want to talk to the people at the extreme, you wanted people and you also want to talk to the people in the mainstream. Um one thing you can consider is talking to experts um talking to people who have, and X I use the term expert, kind of loosely, I often find that talking to sales people in a space is very illuminating because sales people just talk to people, they just hear stuff that other people in a company don't here. So, you know, talking to the expert is helpful sometimes. Also, experts often times over their whole career have done essentially a customer research project because they've talked to like 1000 of your target audience members and they have they spot patterns sometimes that you might not. Um I wouldn't necessarily consider an expert the like part of my customer research, um part of my customer base or target audience, but I would for sure talk with them and maybe validate some of my insights against what they've seen. Um and then you want to write a really good interview guide. So whoever is doing like whoever your moderator is should not be going in with just like do do do I'm gonna have a good conversation today. Like they should be dialed with questions that everybody in the in the research project is pretty confident are going to get out the things that you guys want to get out. But also that aren't like asked with total bias. You know like if I had gone in asking these these you know, asking people in some of the suburban areas, you know an hour and a half or two hours from san Francisco about like so what brand of organic kale do you eat? It's been like girl please, that's not were reading, you know what I mean? But like or is cost a big issue to you even that has some bias in it instead of we just we asked a lot of open ended questions right, what is your number one obstacle? Walk me through a day literally walk me through what your day looks like and the things you might eat during the day or the food choices you make during the day. Part of being getting good at interviews is remembering that what people say and what they do is often very different, especially when it comes to kind of touchy subjects. So like one of the ways you can get around this a little bit is to do the interview where they're making their to sit in their habitat. Um That really helps for that. Ask them like can you show me? So can you show me as a follow up question solid? Like All right. So you just did your grocery shopping for your paleo cookbooks? Can you show me what you bought, jolly rancher vodka? Right? Just just can you show me um And then where there are discrepancies between what there, where you see visible discrepancies between what they're saying and what they're doing is often a really rich point of insight, right? Like there's something, there's definitely some shame there around this woman like holding to this idea that she's paleo but then she's you know what I mean? She's like doing some different things and that's just the shame part is something that from content perspective we could address. Um, I find shame to be very counterproductive in the process of making real change in your life. So we did a fair number of um, mindset management pieces in that blog around one of them, one of my favorites, which was something I wrote called, You can't hate yourself skinny, you can't. So we've got to stop hating yourself. Does more play that, you know what I mean? Because of things that we would hear and things that we would see people do. You know, this constant cycle of trying and self sabotage and then hating yourself for the self sabotage. Um, so those are just some tactical thoughts about, you know, going and prepared. And also again, it's really important that your moderate whoever is moderating, be super super engaged. And by that I just mean like listening dialed in because that person needs to be able to like follow up, ask the can you show me at the right point? They kind of have to be into it. But one thing is we would always take an executive with us um and a different one from a different team to different cities in part because not in part, largely because of the by an issue, um I'll talk to you a little bit more about that, but I would almost never have that person be the moderator, I kind of just want them to observe like you are probably thinking about your spreadsheets, so you think about your spreadsheets, but you're gonna listen to some cool stuff and then I'll go in, right? So here um just a couple more tips on interview guides, avoid leading them down a path. Like what they were organic kale example that I just gave, avoid yes or no answers. Yes or no things are pretty easy to find out in surveys and with these are data. Um yes, start broad. Like tell me what a normal day for you looks like and what you would eat in the course of a normal day that question people will talk about for a half hour, they will literally be like, here is what I pack this. I don't pack this, I think I'm gonna pack this. I buy that oatmeal because I heard it was good. You know, like tell you all this stuff that's actually really useful. What happens when I get to work? They've always got doughnuts and Michelle and the kids birthday parties and the pizza, the kid's birthday parties, like they'll just tell you a lot of what you need if you start broad and then you can, if you have really specific things you're trying to get out, you can get to them later, but often people will get to them for you if you start really broad. Another example of really broad is the, what are your obstacles, but in general, what is your number one obstacle to living a healthy life you wanna live? People will tell and then observe, I'm serve observed, observed um, and observe both the behaviors and the surroundings. Um, as you know in health things, people, a lot of people who have very good intentions and may even have a lot of discipline, don't do what they want to do because of perceived family pressure or family logistical challenges. Nobody else in the house wants to eat this, I can't cook two dinners, those kinds of things. So observing both them and their surroundings is actually important, decide what journey you wanna map. Get a team together to help you make sure that your recruiting broadly enough, including all of the kinds of people who are trying to solve the problem you exist to solve. Um, talk to people, you know, make sure that the customers you recruit from our, from a wide variety of backgrounds and a wide variety of stages in your process, um, and then write a really good interview guide. All right. So as you're doing this customer research here, the kinds of patterns that you're looking to spot to put together in specific to put together a customer journey map. You're trying to spot universal stages. So you're going to identify and name and I'll blow this up in just in just a second, you're gonna identify a name. Universal stages that people seem to go through along the journey that you're trying to map. You want to spot how they feel at the different stages. You wanna spot how they act at the different stages. These are patterns, you're gonna spot right in the customers that you talked to, you want a spot where they get stuck, resistance points. You definitely want to spot what gets them unstuck. And we call those progress triggers. Micro moments are what questions are they asking at what stage in the journey? What are they searching for and who are they asking? And then natural language. So this is just a sample journey map that I've created for this process or this journey from being broke financially to being actually a really good steward of your money, feeling like you're, you know, pretty mindful about money and feeling like you're pretty, financially health healthy. Um Sometimes, as I said, you'll you'll find other little um either whole frameworks or just little points that you want to put in to help. This becomes a an institutional memorial ization of your research process basically. Especially if you're in a larger company. This like lives on after the process and people end up using it ideally um to make decisions. So you kinda have to explain yourself so that the document stands on its own without you necessarily having to explain it every time. So for me, it was really important um to call out that, you know, this is progress, it goes this way and that um as you go along this access access access, you're getting your increasing in money, mindfulness and you're increasing in financial health. So let's talk about stages. I am a marketer, so I give everything a brand name, I can't help it. I love to give brand names that are funny and provocative as you can see with fi curious um and what we found a lot is that in transformational consumer journeys um on a, on a specifically like healthy, wealthy wise problem, you can tend to see people move from move from left to right, in degrees of struggle and success, right? Almost no matter what the problem is. Um people are like, I'm really broke and you know what, when I'm not broken broker than I was before, I'm really broke. That's like I'm struggling. It's like, it may not even sometimes we even do a pre stage, which is like, I'm not even trying, I just am not there yet. Right at this point, someone had some catalyzing thing that made the Middle East try or be uncomfortable enough to be thinking about their finances at this stage. They're struggling still. Um They may not be all the way successful yet, but they're trying a little more and we'll talk about those feelings and behaviors look like here, there's like a little, they're just more successful now, often at this stage before the end stage on a transformational consumer journey, there's still a lot of struggle. You know, this person, like it's in the weight realm, right? Like they're working out hard and it's not always fun to them, but they're doing it. They're actually like making gains right? And then the last stages where they're kind of getting some ease around it, their default behaviors tend to be a little more healthy. It's not so hard. So then at every stage of the process, you actually kind of want to document what people are, what their actions are and what their emotions are for every stage. Um so like just to kind of sample unbroken broker, their feelings are like, I feel really emotional about my money, I feel helpless. I dread dealing with it. I feel like my spending is out of control, right? And as they go across it's like there's still some overwhelm and embarrassment and still a feeling like I'm pretty sure my finances are worse than other people. Like, I don't know what they are, what other peoples are, but I'm produce your mind or worse. Um here people are like, ok, I have a little bit of control over this, like, I'm not totally out of debt. In fact, at this stage, people um expressed a lot of anger at their past selves. Like, okay, like I'm getting out of debt, I can't believe that I got myself in this mess, which on the, in my spirituality business, we would say like, frustration is a good step from just overwhelming dread. Like regret, even anger at your past self is like, oh, you, you say, you know, you're, you're, you're doing something and here they're like, oh my gosh, there's like exhilaration. One thing we saw here was that wealthy for these people a lot of times, they think negatively about wealthy people um here, they're like, oh, well that's good, you know? Um or they brag about frugality at that end. Like, I'm really good with money. Like, I don't spend, I don't spend my money frivolously, I don't buy things, I buy on experiences, those things people say at this end, y'all know, some of these people, I can see, um, behaviors at these different stages here, it's like avoidance and overspending. It's just like, I can't, I cannot even, whereas over here, it's like, kind of default behaviors are pretty financially responsible. There's like room nothing is going to get you know, emergency emergency items. In fact I think even on yes um they don't even see unexpected expenses as emergencies anymore, that's just like life. Um And they're not derailed by them. Resistance points, resistance points are sort of the obstacles that get people stuck or cause people to quit. Yeah you know going along making progress on their journey so under broken bro and we we don't do um resistant points on the sort of ease full um sell because they are not in stuck anymore. Um So here it's like number blindness is one which is actually a well known cognitive bias where many people just kind of glaze over when they think about big numbers. It's just out of there. I can't, there's a bunch of stuff here, scarcity, belief systems, People who can't actually imagine not being in debt, like that's never been their experience. So it's just not, it's a belief system that's not available to them. Um Here it's more like, you know, their families aren't on the same page, they spend emotionally um and over here it's a little, it's really like regret, self loathing new bills and emergencies coming up is a big derailer for these people because they're trying and they're actually like making progress, but something a big expense comes up and it kind of knocks them off. So these are things that commonly get people stuck progress triggers. Um So you saw on the original journey map that there's kind of one between each stage. There are some characteristic patterns we saw and what gets someone to move from one stage to the next. So that's kind of what you're looking for for progress triggers, um, here on broken broker, something that moves people over to in debt and intimidated, but actually trying to make some progress is like, you know what? I have a vision. I just have like something I want bad enough that I'm willing to work to get out of this. Um, cause and effect Aha moments remember how we talked before about the guy who stopped drinking beer because he realized his one beer was like two hours of cycling, That same kind of thing happens in finance, right? Where people are like, oh my gosh, wait, I had my late payments on my credit cards were how much like I had to work two days to pay off late payments that's not acceptable, right? So people kind of draw lines in that way. Um, going from here to the next stage, like me as big, someone likes me, tells me shares with me, their experience of getting out of debt and I start to kind of believe that it's possible for me in a way it wasn't before um where you know, I really can't, I need, there's something I really want to do, like I want to go to my somebody's wedding and I can't afford to do it and that's really not cool. Um milestone birthdays and life events actually are a big trigger, progress trigger in many um transformational journeys. People are like, I'm sorry, I'm 40 I'm not doing this anymore and they just like aren't doing it anymore and it triggers them into more action on their goals. Micro moments Micro moments, our concept that originated out of um Google's consumer insights organization. So micro moments are basically the questions people ask the searches they do. Um it can even be, they usually use it to mean online because google is a search a search technology organization, but it can, I've done projects where the micro moments were like pregnant women ask their O B G Y N. S. And midwives this question at this stage, like literally down to that level of specificity because you hear it over and over in the customer research, so it can be what they're searching for at different stages, you see how it changed. Like here it's like payday loans and here it's like should I be declaring bankruptcy? How do I get out of debt? Like I'm trying to figure this out. Um it can also be like what are they buying at different statements in fact, so the micro moment rubric is um it is the migrant moments are questions people ask in moments when they want to know something, they want to go somewhere they want to do something or they want to buy something that moves them down the journey, I want to know I want to go, I want to do or I want to buy and these are literally just patterns you spot in talking to people that come up over and over. Um recently google also did, they didn't call it this, I don't remember what they called it, but in my mind it was like transformational micro moments specifically that they found people were searching on their cell phones at specific times. Um and they called them like show me how moments, they often they talked about how that was often like people had bought a product already and they were trying to figure out how to use it. So that was like a really great moment in time for the brand to reconnect with and engage someone if they had good content, published about how to use a kind of difficult to use product. Um one step at a time moments um that one was about the example that was given was about people searching for information about the multi, multi multi step process of buying a home, just like while they're waiting in line, they're like, what do I do for mortgage? I probably need a mortgage, you know what I mean? So they're just like searching this one step time for a change moments. Um So that example was about a young gentleman who was just like over his terrible boss and terrible day job and he was like, I can't do this anymore, and started searching for like, like general assembly type classes, creative creative life classes, but in a technical context. Um And New Day new me moments where people are like kind of, you know, just bored and they're going, you know what I want to change in my life. So they're searching for like what does it look like to become a physical therapist or whatever. Um, and then natural language. So natural language is our way of capturing quote actual like phrases that people use that reveal how they frame the problem you exist to solve in their minds and that can sometimes be very different than the way you've been thinking about it. Um the power of this is that it allows you to, it allows you to create content and marketing and subject lines and campaigns and everything that just triggers their mental frames for like they get me. I already care about this examples. I often use our um, some of the programs we ran, we did did a couple of of blog posts and emails with the subject line. What to do when people push food on you, which is not like uh we had dieticians and engineers and like me and that come in, that company, that's not a phrase we would use, but our customers used it and it was very successful. People like that happens to me all the time. Um people push food on me like at parties are, I think we actually ran those with the holiday. Um we knew that our people were beginning exercisers and many of them had any injuries or any problems. So we had done some content on early, unlike workouts for people with knee injuries, nobody says knee injuries, who has knee injuries, they say I have bad needs. So we started publishing things with like workouts for bad knees and that was the thing that got people to open them. So it's literally about getting this granular where people are broke people are like, you can't buy happiness, you know what I mean? That's what these people were saying. Whereas here they're like the struggle is real. Um, my bad habits are though, this was a big one. My parents had a messed up relationship with money too. Um, and here a lot is we've paid off X and we have this much to go, that's just like a thing people say all of them. Um, so understanding natural language empowers you to engage people with content. So if you don't have a ton of time or money to do a to engage a company and do the customer research project or have five people go out on it. What you can afford to do is to listen. And by that, I mean online listening. So there are many online communities and forums where your customers are right now talking to each other about the problem that you exist to solve and they don't think anyone official is listening key. They don't think you're listening. So you should go to their and listen, you should listen for their comments. Listen for the questions you're looking for them. The people who rant and rave, you're looking for, people who are like, oh my gosh, you have to use this thing. You're looking in particular for repeats, where you see someone's different people saying the same thing over and over, expressing some concern over and over. And these are some of the places you should look. Um for sure amazon reviews, like even if it's not on your product, even if you don't have a product that you sell like that, is there a product that someone who's trying to solve the problem you exist to solve would be buying read the amazon amazon reviews for it. Read. I know people think that cora is crazy, but let me tell you there are many transformational sub. I'm sorry on Reddit there are many people transformational subreddit which are so on Reddit subreddit r like the individual discussion boards that are very subject specific. Many are wonderful, full of people trying to achieve goals with community. So there are separate, it's for personal finance, for frugality, for minimalism, there are separate, it's for every kind of fitness thing, every kind of diet. Um Same with core other people are going there asking questions and giving their answers, blogs and boards um subject specific media outlets and private facebook groups. So I have a piece of exercise equipment, like a very fancy boy in a spin bike at home and they talk about the raven market that they have um, this big private facebook group for community, but I'm sure they're using it for listening because all of the owners of these bikes are on this community and it's very active and people talk and I'm like guys, if you guys are not fixing that squeaky pedal, because every other post on this page is about that squeaky pedal, you're nuts. But like it's such a rich trove of um user inside without you having to spend a lot of money is just join one of the private facebook groups for people that are trying to solve the problem that you exist to solve and listen to what people say over and over again. So with that you're ready and if you go to your downloads at transformational consumer dot com slash Creative Live, you will see a blank customer journey map document that you can use and fill out on your own. Um, let's see here. It's also important to do that kind of final step, which is to really make sure that all of the teams in your company, that all of that your product, that you're, all of the initiatives that you do in your marketing are lining to the same customer journey. Um when you don't, you end up with situations like you've heard of the phrase greenwashing. Greenwashing I think is what happens when a company and their products are not actually that environmentally friendly, but the marketing team knows that they that's how to reach people. So they just make claims that aren't really don't, they're not meaningful, but they might tap into users desires and needs, right. Health washing is the same thing. All these products saying, you know, just making, just saying words that kind of sound healthy but don't really mean and don't beneath you know, or like natural okay. It has Adams in it so sure, you know what I'm saying, like that's the kind of thing that I think happens when people are disconnected and if you're watching this, you are a transformational leader. That's not really what you're trying to do right, you're really wanting to make change in people's lives. So there is um uh you know, as I've mentioned before, there's a need to do some real change management and make sure to Brandy's point that you're bringing people with you the whole way. So when I talk about enlisting a squad of change agents at every level and in every function, that's what I'm talking about. That's why we would always have an executive in every single cut an executive or like someone highly influential. So sometimes it was just like That one guy who's been here for years, everybody just like trusts, you know what I mean? Our that one person and there's always one or we had eight that were just like beloved customer support reps that people just love throughout the company because they're just decent human beings and really good people. And they often are already advocating for the customer all the time because they talk to them. So when you bring these kinds of people into your customer interviews, especially in a larger company context, what happens is, you know, you come out, you do your customer journey presentation to the company. Everybody's like, yeah. And then you do, you know, you're gonna set some goals and people are gonna maybe use it kind of remember it a little bit maybe. But when you've had these people with you, you then have five or 10 people in the company who are in all these different meetings where decisions are being made about the product all the time. And every one of them remembers the jello, the or the jolly rancher vodka story. Like they remember the individual stories better than they remember the actual journey. But that matters a lot because it just, it sort of gives your customer presence in all of these places and ways in the company that you couldn't do on your own. Um and there are a bunch of other things you can do in terms of like institutionalizing this knowledge. Like I said, Pinterest is a company that is a really good job of bringing actual customers into their meetings a lot. Um We did that I think once a month would pick a problem, a different version of customer problem and bring someone in um once a month. Um, There are lots of different ways to do that and I talk about some of those in the book, but generally it's helpful if you just have people with you who can advocate for your customer's point of view. Once you do that, you kind of have superpowers. Here's where you can find me transformational consumer dot com Soul tour dot com. Take my 30 day writing challenge, download your sample customer journey map the one we just went through in the template refillable one for yourself.