Creating Customer Journey Roadmap

Why they are important and what they should include

I’m humbled and grateful to Elif Nur Çakır for her help.

Hello there! I’m here with my 3rd post of the Product Development Series. My headmost post was Creating User Personas, and after that, I wrote Creating Wireframes. Now I greet you with my third post, and as you can see it’s about creating customer journey roadmaps.

Before getting started I must share I didn’t create this customer journey roadmap by myself. We’ve created it together with my colleague Elif Nur (UX/UI Designer), thanks a lot.

Customer Journey Roadmap is the journey of your target user while using your products. I strongly recommend you to read Creating User Personas before this post because User Personas are key for Customer Journey Roadmaps. A good persona makes the Customer Journey Roadmap more effective and useful during the design process. That’s why you should create a Persona before your customer journey.

What is a Customer Journey Roadmap?

The Customer Journey Roadmap we’ve made with my colleague Elif Nur

We can say the Customer Journey Roadmap is a visualization of the journey of the customer; it is also called the user journey or customer roadmap. It helps you understand the customer’s journey while using your product and by creating a Customer Journey Roadmap you’ll see your customers’ pain points with using these you can improve the quality of your product and make a more user-friendly product. It helps you to understand the user journey and clarify the possible interactions in the usage scenario.

We can say you are creating the journey of your customer's interaction with your product to see their Actions, Pains, Touchpoint, Hesitations, Concerns, and Feelings.

Actions: What does the customer do? What information do they look for? What is their context?

We can say a customer’s first action is starting using the product, like signing up. After that comes up First Use, Engage, and Recommend.

Needs: What does the customer want to achieve or avoid?

A customer need is a motive to buy your product. These needs can be functionality, price, design, reliability, efficiency, etc.

Pains: What does the customer want to achieve or avoid?

Pain points are particular problems your customers fare through in the marketplace. Determining, analyzing, understanding, and solving these pain points can enable you to take a bigger place in the market.

Touchpoint: What part of the service do they interact with?

Touchpoint is a mutual effect between businesses and customers that take place during Customer Journey Roadmap.

Customer Feeling: What is the customer feeling?

How do customers feel about their experience through using your product?

Opportunities: What could we improve or introduce?

This is what you offer your customers, why should they choose you? Like price, functionality, reliability, etc.

Journey steps are Discovery, First Use/Interaction, Engage/Regular Use and Recommend/Loyalty.

Discovery: Why do they even start the journey?

First Use/Interaction: Why would they trust us?

Engage/Regular Use: How can they feel successful?

Recommend/Loyalty: Why would they invite others?

These steps will help you gain insights into your customer’s feelings. These questions above will help you identify your pros and cons.

The Customer Journey Roadmap we’ve made with my colleague Elif Nur

And, at the end of your Customer Journey Roadmap, you’ll have an outcome like this. This outcome will show you how your customers’ life will change after they start to use your product.

Why is a Customer Journey Roadmap important?

1. Have an overview of the Customer Journey
2. Identify the pain points in usage
3. Understand the possible improvement areas of the product
4. Helps you to improve the quality of your product
5. Helps you personalize your customers
6. Prioritize your work
7. Helps you understand your customer's feelings

Because it provides us with a better understanding of customer expectations, pain points, and feelings.

I think the most important thing about a customer journey roadmap is you personalize your customers. With the development of technology, we have become accustomed to seeing people as numbers/columns on Excel. But while creating a Customer Journey Roadmap, you have to understand and treat them like they’re people.

Tools I recommend for Creating Customer Journey Roadmap

My favourite tool is of course Miro, such a user-friendly app, with lots of easy and guider templates — this is the best part, especially for newbies.

Besides that, you can use Figma, Adobe XD, FlowMapp, Lucidchart, Mural, and Invisionapp.

Thanks for reading.

Take care of yourself.

Looking forward to reading your feedback.