Building a b2b customer journey map

👋🏻 Hi, this is Nikki with a 🔒subscriber-only 🔒 article from User Research Academy. In every article, I cover in-depth topics on how to conduct user research, grow in your career, and how to fall in love with the craft of user research again.

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Attempt one 💩

The first time I created a customer journey map, I had no idea what I was doing, as you can see below:

I was the first and only user researcher working at a hospitality platform. Not only was I the first and only UXR, but it was also my first and only (real) job as a user researcher. Before this role, I did ad-hoc projects for family/friends and volunteered at charities or organizations to improve my skills (and build case studies).

So when I was tasked with creating a customer journey map, I did the one thing I knew how to do: googled it.

Unfortunately, in that day and age, user research resources were few and far between. I couldn’t simply look at templates online because there weren’t any. I couldn’t read articles on Medium because it was only one year old at the time and not filled with user research content.

So I scrambled and did my best to create the dumpster fire “customer journey map” you see above. Needless to say, people were quite disappointed in the result, but they couldn’t one hundred percent pinpoint why because they weren’t even sure what a customer journey map was. And I definitely wasn’t at the point in my career where I had the ability to ask what people needed and start with the goals.

There sat my customer journey map. Sad, alone, and looking suspiciously like a task flow rather than a journey map. It was a mess, and I was bummed out that I didn’t provide my team with what they needed.

After that, people dropped the concept of a journey map, and we went on with our regularly scheduled usability testing and sending out surveys to a too-small sample size.

However, luckily, over time, I learned to distinguish between a task flow and a customer journey map and how to create one. And I’m going to walk you through the step-by-step process I took to create one of my favorite journey maps I’ve created thus far.

Why and when are customer journey maps important?

Sometimes we tend to rush to decisions to create a deliverable. Someone shouts that we “need” a customer journey map without thinking about why or what we need it for. This very conundrum has led me to create many deliverables that have taken a Herculean amount of effort and, subsequently, have barely been looked at. We want to avoid that situation!

So before diving into how to build a customer journey map, we should explore why and when they can be important.

Why are customer journey maps important?

Customer journey maps highlight what the customer experiences as they interact with a product or service. It is the end-to-end journey someone takes with your product.

Consider when you interact with a digital product or service. It typically takes you several steps to do the things you want to do with the product, or you might come in at different parts of the stage. Some journey maps even show us the decision-making process before someone uses a product or service.

Let’s take a quick example from real-life. About a year ago, my husband and I were planning our end-of-2022 and 2023 trips. As I looked at the (alarmingly large) number of trips we were planning to take (having global families is fun), I thought about the pets and how we would contend with getting someone in to look after them, especially during Christmas and the summer.

I researched the problem and discovered kennels and pet sitters charge enough money that we could have taken several extra trips on top of what we already planned with the money we’d spend on pet care. With this, I found an alternative solution on Trusted House Sitters - you pay a yearly fee, and people travel to your house and stay there for free on holiday while looking after your pets.

Once I found this solution, I filled out all the necessary information about our house, the pets, sitter responsibilities, amenities, a welcome guide, and I set the dates. I then vetted people for the dates we would be gone (ranging from people already living in Jersey but wanting a break from family, to a nomadic couple from France, to a retired couple from the US). I booked them in, and we were done!

If that company wanted to understand the full journey I’d gone through, they would have started by asking me about my entire process, from when I was aware of the problem to when I booked the pet sitters.

And why is this important information to know?

Customer journey maps are a clear visualization that shows the ups and downs someone goes through, the unmet needs not reconciled, the pain points they encounter, and the feelings they have when using your product. It is a clear answer to the ever-burning question of, “what do users think of us?” or “what are users doing on our product?”

Customer journey maps can highlight problem areas in our product and lead us into solution-land, resulting in us either improving what we currently have or innovating to become more advantageous against our competitors.

Not only that, but customer journeys can be wonderful tools to condense a lot of data into a visual that’s easy to present and act on.

When should we use them?

Instead of picking a customer journey map out of a deliverable hat, it’s important to understand that what we want is aligned with what a customer journey map can give us. Usually, that discrepancy is why we are so disappointed with deliverables.

The goals I typically have for customer journey maps are:

• Deeply understand the customer’s end-to-end experience with our product and service

• Identify gaps in the current experience, particularly those that are painful for customers and where we don’t currently support them

• Uncover unmet needs that could lead to improvement or innovation

• Help teams recognize the importance of working cross-departmentally on solving problems by demonstrating the importance of creating a coherent and jointed holistic customer experience, from sales to customer support

• Foster empathy for the current experience across the organization

Creating a b2b journey map: a case study

There is no better way for me to talk through creating a journey map than actually recounting one of my experiences. Remember, this is just one experience and will differ depending on your organization’s needs and structure. However, I hope it serves as a model and jumping-off point!

The case study I am using to illustrate my journey (so meta!) is a b2b social media management platform aggregating user-generated, influencer-generated, and brand-generated content (photos, videos) into one repository. By engaging and working with user-generated content, brand visual content costs decrease, and the efficiency of optimizing visual content for every unique e-commerce touch point increases.