Depending on how we have defined our strategy, we can build several types of Customer Journey Maps, but you must choose the one that suits you best. In our previous article, How to use touchpoints within your Customer Journey Map, we explained that you should choose the type(s) of buyer persona you are going to work with, we also talked about knowing the touchpoints with your customers in order to anticipate your buyer persona’s decisions and guide them to your website or your physical address.
Just as there are different types of Buyer Persona, there are also other types of Customer Journeys, each of which is used according to the needs of your business. When we create our Customer Journey Map, we must keep in mind the strategy we have defined and the objectives we want to achieve to establish the type of map we want to develop. In this article, we will show you the different types of Customer Journey Maps. Once you know them, you can decide with your marketing team or digital marketing consulting firm the kind of map you will create.
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Types of Customer Journey maps
Each type of Customer Journey Map has a purpose, they can help you know the daily life of your potential customers, and future states, among others. Depending on what your company has determined with its digital marketing consultant, you will choose the one that best suits the strategy and objectives that have been outlined, or you can establish several Customer Journey Maps to use them together and have a clearer vision of what needs to be planned. Let’s look at each of the types of customer journey maps.
Current state
This map shows what the buyer persona is going through at the moment of contact with your business. It represents the emotions and experiences of the person while making that specific contact and is used to establish possible points of improvement in the process.
Day in the life
It is also based on the person’s day-to-day life but from a broader point of view. This map not only looks at the buyer persona’s interaction with your business, but represents a whole day in the life of the person including their activities, preferences, and interests. The objective of this map is to infer what the person is needing at the moment to help the marketing and sales team to know what the person’s unmet need is at this and to be able to offer a solution.
Future state
In this type of map, you represent what will be the future of the person and their relationship with your business including what the person will feel, think, and do relating to your business. It is used to establish future objectives such as the development of a new product or establishing a new line of products for sale.
Service blueprints
This type of map is built from some of the information gathered from the previous ones, and information is added regarding the interactions that occur during the Customer Journey, such as related people, policies, technologies, and processes (whether or not known by the person). They help identify future actions that the person will make or the causes of customer dissatisfaction.
Draw the Customer Journey you have established
You have already established the type of map you are going to use to achieve your objectives, now you must make a diagram of it. This diagram allows you to visualize the whole process more efficiently, if you have elaborated a service blueprint, include this information in the diagram as well.
One way to do this can be to draw a graph of axes, where on the X axis are placed each of the phases of the customer journey and on the Y axis are placed the thoughts, experiences, and desires of the person, either positive or negative.
By having the map completed, we can see both the point of view of the person and the company: the client with his feelings, and the company with its strengths and weaknesses to work on them. We will submit ourselves to the client’s scrutiny on this map in order to establish potential points of improvement. Once we know where we need to improve, the next step is to evaluate why that point of improvement exists. This is called establishing the root cause of the problem.
To establish the root cause of the problem you can use one of the various methods developed by specialists in continuous improvements, such as the five whys, and brainstorming, among others.
