You may be a business owner, manager, designer, or writer. Regardless of your specialization, if your job involves interacting with customers in any way, the key to your success will be having a good understanding of what your product looks like from their perspective. To do this, you need to be aware of all the touchpoints your customers go through when interacting with your product, the difficulties they encounter and what you can do about them. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay There are a whole bunch of factors to take into consideration, so it's not always easy to get a view of entire customer journey. This is exactly what customer journey mapping is for. In this article, we'll cover the basics of customer journey mapping and the opportunities it can offer product owners and managers. We'll show you how to create a customer journey map and then use it effectively. What is CJM The general idea behind the customer journey map is to identify all the sales process touchpoints that customers pass through throughout their journey, discover where they may encounter difficulties and confusion and possibly summarize them in a concise and illustrative form. Why CJM is important Creating customer journey maps can provide insightful insights to all levels of business management. It also highlights gaps in the customer experience that would otherwise be difficult to detect. Here is a list of opportunities that customer journey mapping can offer businesses: providing a holistic view of the entire customer journey; understand the crucial stages of the customer journey, where additional improvements will have the most impact; improve customer retention by managing pain points and ensuring all necessary information is available at every stage of the customer experience; zoom in on a particular trip from a specific channel; prioritize actions in their long-term user experience strategy. Most importantly, a well-designed customer journey map allows a business to minimize any negative experiences and maximize the efficiency of the paths a customer takes, meaning more sales and better conversion rates. How to Create a Customer Journey Map Of course, there are no strict rules for creating a real customer journey map, as it is akin to a work of art and mainly depends on the imagination of your designer. However, here are some guidelines for you. to make it as informative as possible. Normally, a customer journey map is a kind of infographic, which includes a timeline of the user experience (ads, awareness, desire, search, choice, purchase, etc.) and a set of criteria to evaluate each stage of a customer journey (customer needs, customer expectations, touchpoints, pain points, problems, ideas, etc.). All of this combined presents an overview of the customer experience in an understandable and illustrative way. Define the journey you will map, in other words, your persona. This could be a particular type of customer, a target customer or a group of customers. Choosing a persona depends on the objectives of your journey mapping. Once you've created distinct personas, you're ready to create customer journey maps that describe each persona's experience at different..