Using Customer Journey Mapping To Create User-friendly Websites

By Author: Karan Singh
Total Articles: 3
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The entrepreneurs are all aware of becoming customer-centric. These people are aware of the significance of customer experience as the competitive market strives to cater to their customers in an improved manner. Simultaneously, the customers are also leveraging the digital innovation to reestablish the complex relationships that exist between them and the companies. These trends have tethered to create an enriching customer experience landscape that leads us to the topic of the article, the customer journey maps.

Whenever somebody approaches a web development company, and thinks to hire programmer, the core touch point in their requirement is user satisfaction that would be critical to the success. The customer journey maps are often found to be an incredible tool for assistance in this area. Before proceeding with rest of the article, let us understand the meaning of the term.

The customer journey map would enable the developer to walk in the customer’s shoes, as they would interact with the company. This can be based on sound research, and enable procuring of an accurate outside view that would focus on outcomes ...
... from the perspective of the customer. The customer’s needs at each intersection can be evaluated, and thereby it is easier to find the hidden opportunities for improvement. This tool would simultaneously fit into the context of customer experience. To draw this, it would require significant customer insight driven inputs and internal buy-ins to be effective. The most important thing to remember is that systems and customers change over time and this must be considered when discussing about insights to drive action or lead to actual improvements.

The service design can be defined as an activity that is performed by the marketing and management departments of the businesses. In regards to the website development, the service design is analogous to the user experience design or UX. The service design would provide and create positive feelings for customers while they use the product. The focus would be on interactions that would take place in multiple channels including the online and offline modes. Just a well-designed website would not suffice for the customer’s bad experience to the physical store. The service design can be said to be a holistic business approach. The following are some methods by which service design can be applied to website production. The next thing to understand what is a touch point.

Touch point can create positive feelings for the customer that would ensure their experience is superlative in all places that they visit. The place where the customer and the business come to interact with each other is known as touch points. In the website, this would be the email, contact us form, customer support, live chat, and phone and comments section of the blog. To identify these critical touch points, one needs to use the customer journey maps.

The advantages of using these customer journey maps are as follows:

• The crucial touch points once identified would have the biggest impact on customer satisfaction.
• The focus would shift towards the user and thereby become a user-centered design.
• The user’s potential needs and wants can be recognized.
• The customer journey map would provide a clear presentation of the whole process and thereby help in creation of pitches.
• We can safely summarize the information about the user and their behavior.
• The developer can easily locate the improvement opportunities and thereby does not risk to dissatisfy the user.

The following are the steps that would enable gathering of accurate information from these customer journey maps:

The first thing to do is to gather and assess the information about the target audience. This would remove all subjective approach to the problem. If the user data were lacking, the usability tools from the web would help in gathering appropriate information. This would result in preliminary insights, touch points and activities that the user would perform during the journey. However, it is important not to draw any conclusion based on hunches. Including employees and staff would help in garnering the data. The last thing to do is to include the major decision makers in the process. This would prevent any fastidious decisions.
The second step in the creation of customer journey maps is to fill the knowledge gaps. The process is implemented by identifying things that they are unsure about. The result would be providing all the details to the unanswered questions. The focus should not be limited only to the demographic or statistical data. The focus should be on ethnography and the user’s voice. The second tip is to analyze the collected data and test the assumptions.

Once all the data has been collected, the third step is to create accurate user personas. These fictional characters would represent the goal and the behavior of the average user. This would help gain insights into the expectations and the concerns of the users. It is important to remember that even if the data may not appear statistically significant, it does not mean that we have to reject the same.

The last step is to draw the customer journey maps. The first step is to map out the results that were gathered from the previous steps. The process can be started with defining the principles of the transaction process. For each product and service, this process would change. The result is an illustrated process for the needs of the user during the contact with the process. Time should be invested to determine on the content of the map. Multiple maps can be used for multiple user-personas and it is important that the hired programmer does not neglect the graphical layout of the customer journey map.

Conclusion:

Once the customer journey maps have been developed by the hired programmer, the key lies in the ability to draw the appropriate conclusions to improve the user experience. This can used to identify the areas that would need immediate attention, as they are the components that would reduce the overall user-satisfaction. It is important to remember that this is an ongoing process and therefore, the tool should be used for periodic monitoring to determine the current level of user-satisfaction.

Author Bio:
To hire programmer, it is important to do a thorough research on their abilities. Karan Singh thinks that the best approach is to visit teamhiring.net to achieve a user-friendly website design.