When it comes to customer journey mapping, many believe that defining stages of a journey is the easiest part of the whole process. But from our experience, we can tell that it oftentimes is one of the hardest parts for both novice and expert mappers.
So we decided to come up with some tips and tricks to help those who find it difficult to get customer journey stages right.
What we did
To find common patterns, we gathered statistics about stages from about 40,000 maps that users created in our customer journey mapping tool.
As we didn’t have access to the maps themselves and their content, we decided to include in the statistics the maps that were regularly opened maps and more than 60% complete. We suggested that such maps would have a more or less defined structure and meaningful stage names.
We grouped the stages by meaning (e.g., “Consider” and “Consideration”) and removed those that didn’t have matches.
Then we divided the remaining stages into three high-level groups:
- “Before” stages take place before customers even know that a service exists. They are often called the AWARENESS stage. At this stage, businesses typically focus on increasing brand awareness, getting more leads, and improving conversion.
- “During” stages cover the part of the journey where customers familiarize themselves with a service or a product. At this stage, businesses want to increase customer satisfaction, adoption rates, and customer engagement.
- “After” is what happens when customers already have some experience with the service/product and start considering their next steps. Typically, it's where customers churn or retain.
We noticed that most customer journey maps tend to focus on “Before” stages and pay significantly less attention to “After” stages.
Graph 1. Maps that included stages from different groups, %
Such distribution of stages might result in gaps in customer experience as the experience of existing customers is under-addressed. Their path becomes completely “unmoderated” and they are left on their own.
What we found
Here is what we had at the end:
Graph 2. "Before" stages.
Graph 3. "During" stages.
Graph 4. "After" stages.
The result
We used the findings to produce a new free deck of cheat cards, this time for customer journey stages. To make it easy for you to download the deck and start using it, we put it in a downloadable PDF file, link to which you’ll find below.
There are 27 cards in the deck, each of which contains the stage name, its description, and tips on how to improve the customer experience at the given stage.
How to use the deck
Download customer journey stages cheat cards, print them out if you want, and use the deck every time you work on a CJM map.
These cards are both useful when you start a new map and when you want to improve the existing one. They will help you define customer journey stages properly and determine whether you missed anything, besides providing inspirational ideas for building a better customer experience.
ENTER YOUR DETAILS TO DOWNLOAD CUSTOMER JOURNEY STAGES CHEAT CARDS:
