How do you map customer journeys across channels?

Three things to consider while defining objectives for customer journey mapping: 1. Understand the needs, goals, and pain points of prospect journeys (before they sign up for a trial) and customer journeys (after they sign up for a trial and convert). The key thing to remember is that your customer onboarding starts the moment they are researching your product, not after they sign up. 2. Understand your ICPs across plan types--self-serve and enterprise plans. This helps ensure you remove friction in the customer journey with content and clear CTAs and helps drive conversion. 3. Thinking of the customer journey in terms of web, in-app, and email would help simplify the scope and definition of the project and break it down into milestones.

Web analytics is a great way to learn about various traffic sources and conversion metrics, as your website is a junction box where all traffic converges, so you get actionable insights. Supplement this data with product analytics to analyze checkout, activation rate by channel, and key actions customers take in your product. Google Analytics works great as a starting point. Validate this data with tools, including Segment, Amplitude, and SFDC, if available. For qualitative insights, customer interviews using UserTesting work great. Consider using the JTBD framework for user interviews. These insights will help you prioritize the key channels and customer journeys to focus on.

To do this well you should create a service blueprint that maps out the touchpoints, actors, locations and props involved in the user journey. Personae are also really important during this step, as they enable you to understand user needs and wants.

Customer centricity is at the heart of successful business. Delivering value to buyers at every stage of the customer journey drives sales conversions and retention. The 5 stages of the customer journey are: Awareness Consideration Decision Retention Advocacy According to Gartner, only 17% of a customer journey is spent in direct conversation with the vendor. The remaining 83% takes place through independent research and internal deliberation. Hence, it’s important for businesses to distribute relevant value at each stage of the journey — even outside discovery sessions and demo calls.

Miro is a great tool to map out the current experience and the ideal experience. I've used Miro to map out ideal renewal and trial flows. The analysis for the current customer journey wouldn't be complete without session replays, heatmapping data, and talking to sales and CS.

Watching session replays and heat mapping tools like Hotjar or FullStory work great to understand the gaps and opportunities. You can get amazing insights into their current experience and how they navigate your website. These insights can help you uncover user's frustrations and pain points, perform page path analysis, and determine the ideal customer journey to drive a conversion lift. In-app/product: FullStory also can analyze onboarding journeys in-app/product. One of the most effective ways to gather qualitative inputs and identify gaps and areas of opportunity is talking to Sales and CS. Ideally, you are doing this BEFORE you map out your desired customer journey, not after.

Ideally, you are breaking your customer journey analysis project into manageable chunks because there is a lot to document and optimize, so prioritization is key. For example, you can determine where your funnel drop-offs are and optimize for those journeys. This way, you can track the conversion for your quarterly goals and determine what falls into long-term conversion optimization projects versus short-term conversion.

Often, sales and marketing teams conflate customer journeys and sales funnels. Sales funnels involve objective steps of conversions from awareness to deal won. Customer journeys, on the other hand, aren’t as clear-cut. Different buyers behave differently along each stage of the journey. Some may spend several weeks researching different products in the awareness or consideration stage. Others may simply jump ahead to a demo call without any research at all. Hence, customer journey stages provide a rough framework to classify the average behavior as they progress from visitors to prospects to paying customers.

Analysing the user journey across channels isn't only important for marketing - as any business that is product led will know if you don't provide a seamless, delightful experience across channels your service will suffer, customers will stay away, and you can't achieve the revenue goals you have set out to meet. Service design helps product teams optimal experiences - to do this well you need to involve front stage and back stage colleagues, for example customer service, operations, marketing and any other teams that are involved in providing the service.