How to Create a Customer Journey

^{Editor’s note: At DLL we’re more than a financial solutions provider–we’re your partner. Your customer is our customer and your success is our success. It’s why we’re focused on helping you grow, not just through our product offering, but also by giving you valuable insights that can help you sustain and build your business for the future. The following article is part of a series from DLL about how you can take steps to improve the customer experience your business delivers. Customer experience is part of an ongoing journey at DLL, and it’s something we’re working to improve every day. Hopefully some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way can be valuable to your business.}

Let’s lay some groundwork: The customer experience you deliver is based on a journey of multiple touchpoints with your business. At every stage of that journey, your goal is (or should be) to deliver a well-designed and intentional experience that exceeds expectations. 

Developing a journey map is your best tool to represent how your customers interact with your business along with an understanding of their needs, concerns and emotions along the way. It helps you to see where they experience pain points (and they definitely do!) and illustrates opportunities for improvement.  

One very important note: Your journey map should not be built by your own assumptions or experiences. You need to actively source and solicit insights from your customers to understand the various steps of their journey and where improvement is needed.

To help guide the interview and document the journey with your customer, we’ve created a simple journey map template that you can use as a guide to get started. 

As you complete your journey map template, here are the steps you should take: 

Step 1: Develop your customer personas   

As we talked about, you can use methods like micro-surveys, transactional surveys, focus groups, and interviews to begin to gain insights from your customers. To fill out your journey map, you’ll need to use the last techniques –and interviews – to understand and document types of customer personas and the steps of the journey.  

Start small and identify 1-2 different types of customers that make up a large percentage of your customer base – each will have a journey to map out. Fill out the details on the left-hand side of the template to capture some of their goals, expectations and pain points as they experience your business. 

Step 2: Map out their journey 

As you accrue insights that help document the journey each customer experiences with your company, start looking at the main content section of the template. Be sure to document: 

• Each “episode” in the buying process – think about a “logical building block” within the customer experience – for example, researching a purchase, getting a quote, applying for credit, completing paperwork, receiving delivery of the product, using it, paying the invoice(s), scheduling service, etc. 
• Steps – these are the actions that might happen within each of the episodes to get from the beginning to the end of that phase.
• Needs and pain points – document what your customers need during each episode and what they might want to avoid during each episode. 
• Feelings or emotions – consider how your customers are feeling during each of the stages in the buying process – and why they are feeling that way. 

Step 3: Identify the opportunities 

Beneath each main episode, you’ll find two incredibly important areas to define: opportunities for measurable improvement and who owns the process in making that opportunity a reality. This helps you translate the insights you’ve placed into clear business opportunities and define who on your team should take that lead in driving improvement in that business area. 

The customer journey may end but yours never does. 
It’s important to keep in mind that your customer journeys will continue to evolve just as your business evolves. You’ll make improvements to address certain pain points and a new unforeseen issue could arise. Just because you created a journey map once doesn’t mean the journey is over! It’s a continuous process – which requires constant conversations with your customers – as you continue to design your experience. 

Get started. 
Download our easy-to-use template today to begin mapping out your business’s customer journey. 

¹Source: What Are Customer Expectation, and How Have They Changed? Salesforce, 2022