How to establish a customer journey

Understanding your customer journey is essential to the success of your business. Mapping out what it is today and what you want it to be are the first steps towards serving your customers better.

When it comes to optimizing the experience for your customers, the first step is easy: walk through it. Take the time to go through how your users or clients experience your product, whether it’s from signup or the website. At a glance, you might think it’s pretty good and optimization will be easy.

But before you can begin to optimize, you need to ask yourself: what happens before this? Where are your users coming from? Maybe they came through a landing page. What happened before that? Maybe it was a google search, or maybe it was an ad on LinkedIn. Keep looking back one more step. Why did they search for a certain term, what external resources are helping them arrive at your business?

So okay, great, you understand how people get to your business. Now you ask yourself, what happens next? Are you sending a confirmation email? What does that say? What does it ask of the reader? Are your customers expecting a call? How long do they have to wait before they hear from you? Keep digging until you know your customer has completely churned, and you’ll never see them again.

But we’re not quite at the optimization stage just yet. Now that you have your journey from conception to churn, it’s time to dig deeper. Is your language consistent? Are you making the same promises again and again? Are you communicating the right concepts? Take a look at what you are trying to get your user to do, and how you speak to them along the way.

Once all of your messaging is consistent, the optimization begins. Choose a hypothesis you want to prove or a question you want to answer. Implement one change at a time, and begin your tests. Make sure to analyze your data and compare cohorts to get the best understanding of what your customers are telling you.

At the end of the day, don’t over-engineer it if you don’t have the resources. Your customers will use you as long as you’re providing value. The exercise of digging into your customer journey is a great way to remind yourself of the value you’re looking to provide, and make sure you’re providing it at every chance you get. Optimization is important, but don’t be afraid to launch your product or service. Done is better than perfect.

“If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.”

—Reid Hoffman

This is, of course, an incredibly simplified version of what it takes to optimize your customer journey. Every customer takes a different path, and they could meet any number of people along the way. By equipping your teams with an understanding of the value you’re looking to bring to your customers, you’ll be able to better understand them when they run into problems, and solve those problems quickly as a result.