multi persona journey map

Personas and Journey Maps: Strategic tools for improving customer experience

But more importantly, for sharing customer insights across the organization, these tools can be critical for building buy-in and helping teams take targeted action to improve customer experience .

To get started, you’ll want a clear understanding of what customer personas are, why they’re important, and what makes a good persona. Once you’ve created your personas, you can take a walk in your customers’ shoes with a journey map .

What are personas?

Personas are fictional, yet believable archetypes you can develop to represent your target customers. They go deeper than generalized customer segments by having individual names and stories that reflect personal attributes and behavioral characteristics such as needs, motivations, attitudes, and pain points.

Why are personas important?

Personas have been commonly used to help organizations develop user-centered design. As focus on customer experience has increased in recent years, personas are gaining popularity as a tool to benefit a wide range of departments across an enterprise from sales and customer service to operations and HR.

Personas can help guide customer-centric practices in various ways:

• Develop a deeper understanding of your customers Like Jeff Bezos’ empty chair that represents “the most important person in the room,” personas help you build empathy with your customers. What are their needs and goals? What motivates them? Why do they behave in certain ways?
• Design processes with the customer in mind Personas help you understand how your customers interact with your company throughout the entire lifecycle. Do your processes reflect the true customer experience, or do they reflect your internal operations? Personas provide awareness of the many journeys your customers may take, so you can improve them.
• Build stakeholder buy-in To build support for an enterprise-wide customer experience initiative, personas – especially those backed with data and research – can help you describe to executives and stakeholders what a better experience should look like.

Tips for creating highly effective personas

• Align with business objectives to help make your personas powerful tools for teams across the company. Engage key stakeholders to gain diverse perspectives on goals, processes, and issues unique to different lines of business that influence the overall customer experience.
• Use data and research to identify and inform each of your personas. Market segmentation research, surveys, interviews, and social customer insights are all useful methods. This qualitative research can complement your understanding of how customers behave with insight into the “whys,” providing important nuance and detail that humanize your personas.
• Demographics : Age, location, education, income, household or family size
• Personal attributes : Their goals, needs, and interests when they interact with your company
• Customer lifecycle : How their needs may vary for different channels and touch points, and how their needs may evolve over time
• Make them eye-catching and memorable with polished, professional quality photos and information layouts for socializing the personas across your organization. The more “real” you can make them, the more your teams can identify with them and map their own actions and attitudes toward delivering the best possible customer experience.

Using personas to map the customer journey

Once you’ve created distinct personas, you can use them to create customer journey maps that describe each persona’s experience at various touch points during their lifecycle with your company. An effective journey map is based on real research and behavior, and should represent the true customer experience– good or bad. That way you build an accurate picture of where you need to make improvements as well as where opportunities exist for cross-sell and up-sell.

Much of the information for creating a journey map will come from your personas (e.g., their goals, motivations, key tasks they want to accomplish, and current pain points), which is why it’s best to create the personas first .

At each step, the journey map should consider factors such as:

• Context – Where is the interaction taking place (e.g., in your store, on the phone, online or mobile, in social media) What is going on around the customer? How might their current context influence how they need to interact and what they want to do?
• Progression – How does each step enable the next?
• Emotion – How does the customer feel at each step? (e.g., are they engaged, bored, or frustrated?)

With a detailed and insightful customer journey map, your business can more effectively assess current and proposed processes, identify targeted actions to resolve pain points, and leverage opportunities for building stronger customer relationships.

The wins from using personas and customer journey maps

Companies can use personas and journey maps to rally employees behind the common goal of improving and optimizing the customer experience. That shared commitment is key to building a customer-centric culture. From there, your organization has the best chance to deliver what your customers want, understand how to exceed their expectations, and create experiences that nurture brand loyalty.

Bottom line? Investing in small powerful tools can translate into very big wins for you and your customers.

Interested to explore customer personas and journey mapping can work for you? Let’s talk!

You might also be interested in…

• White paper Download: Using Personas and Journey Maps
• Customer Personas & Journey Maps – Success Stories and Use Cases
• Prioritizing projects with customer journey analytic

Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!

Why Choose a Multi-Persona Journey Map Over a Single Persona Map

‘There are two common scenarios when you might need a multi Persona map. First, when you’d like to compare similar genus of different customer segments, and when you want to show how your personas interact with each other.’

‘Multiple Persona Maps visualize the interaction of multiple personas, multiple customer segments with your business.’

There are two common scenarios when you might need a multi Persona map:

• When you’d like to compare similar genus of different customer segments
• When you want to show how your personas interact with each other

Multiple Persona Maps visualize the interaction of multiple personas, multiple customer segments with your business.

Related Posts

Get your FREE ebook landing page now!

2024 WordPress Landing Page Creation: Fast and Easy Guide

• Inbound Marketing Strategy & Implementation
• CRM & RevOps System implementation
• Business Process Review and Automation
• Campaign Management
• Web Design and Development
• Mobile Marketing
• Digital Publications

How to Craft Customer Journeys Using Personas: A Step-by-Step Guide

Services list.

Understanding your customer's journey is critical for any company that wants to provide a tailored and effective service. Personas allow you to sketch out these journeys in a more targeted manner. This post will walk you through the process of generating persona-based customer journey maps, which are an important tool for increasing customer happiness and driving business success.

Covered in this article

What Are Customer Journey Maps? Steps to Create a Persona-Based Customer Journey Map Benefits of Persona-Based Customer Journey Maps The Power of Data Analytics in Customer Journey Mapping Wrapping Up the Journey: The Final Takeaways

What Are Customer Journey Maps?

Customer journey maps are visual representations that outline the steps a customer goes through when interacting with a business. These maps can cover various touchpoints, from initial awareness to the final purchase and beyond.

Why Use Personas?

Personas are semi-fictional characters that represent your ideal customers. By using personas in your customer journey maps, you can:

• Identify specific needs and pain points for different customer segments
• Tailor marketing strategies more effectively
• Enhance customer engagement by offering personalised experiences .

Steps to Create a Persona-Based Customer Journey Map

Step 1: research and create personas.

Before you can map out the customer journey, you need to know who your customers are. Conduct market research to gather data on customer demographics, behaviour, and preferences. Use this data to create detailed personas.

Step 2: Identify Touchpoints

List all the possible points of interaction between the customer and your business. These could include your website, social media channels, customer service, and physical stores.

Step 3: Map Out the Customer Journey for Each Persona

For each persona, outline the steps they would take at each touchpoint. Consider their goals, challenges, and emotions at each stage.

Example Table: Customer Journey for Persona "Tech-Savvy Tina":

Step 4: Validate and Refine

Once the initial map is created, validate it by gathering real customer feedback. Use this information to refine your map and make it more accurate.

Benefits of Persona-Based Customer Journey Maps

• Targeted Marketing : Tailor your marketing efforts to specific customer segments.
• Improved Customer Experience : Understand and address the unique needs of different personas.
• Increased ROI : By focusing on the most profitable customer segments, you can allocate resources more efficiently.

The Power of Data Analytics in Customer Journey Mapping

In an era where data is often termed the 'new oil,' leveraging data analytics in customer journey mapping can provide a competitive edge. Data analytics not only quantifies customer interactions but also offers actionable insights that can significantly improve customer experience.

Types of Data to Collect

When it comes to customer journey mapping, various types of data can be useful:

• Behavioural Data : This includes click-through rates, time spent on a page, and other actions taken by the customer on your digital platforms.
• Transactional Data : Purchase histories, cart abandonment rates, and other transaction-related data fall under this category.
• Feedback Data : Customer reviews, surveys, and direct feedback provide qualitative insights into customer satisfaction and areas for improvement.

Integrating Analytics Tools

There are several analytics tools available that can help you collect and interpret this data. Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and custom-built solutions can track a wide range of metrics. The key is to integrate these tools seamlessly into your customer journey mapping process for real-time data tracking and analysis.

Benefits of Data-Driven Customer Journey Maps

Utilising data analytics in your customer journey mapping offers several advantages:

• Precision : Data analytics allows for a more precise understanding of how customers interact with your business at each touchpoint.
• Proactivity : Real-time data enables you to proactively address issues before they escalate, improving customer satisfaction.
• Personalisation : With data insights, you can create highly personalised experiences for different customer personas, thereby increasing engagement and loyalty.

Case in Point: Velocity's Success with Data Analytics

At Velocity, we have successfully integrated data analytics into our customer journey mapping services. This has enabled us to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for our clients in the technology, energy, real estate, and education industries. As a result, our clients have seen measurable improvements in customer engagement and ROI.

Wrapping Up the Journey: The Final Takeaways

Creating persona-based customer journey maps is an invaluable strategy for any business looking to improve customer experience and drive growth. It allows you to understand your customer's needs, preferences, and pain points, enabling you to offer a more personalised and effective service.

Ready to take your customer experience to the next level? Contact Velocity for expert guidance on creating effective persona-based customer journey maps. Alternatively, sign up for our newsletter to stay updated on the latest trends and insights in digital marketing.

Quick Lists

The psychology behind conversions.

WE OFFER THE BEST CRM SOLUTIONS

Let us be a part of your success.

Head Office

The Black Church, St. Mary's Place, Dublin, Ireland D07 P4AX

South Africa

25 Club Street, Linksfield, Johannesburg

[email protected]

• Joburg.co.za & Pretoria.co.za

Useful Links

Copyright © 2024. All Rights Reserved.

• Privacy Policy
• Terms of use
• PAIA Manual

Integrations

What's new?

In-Product Prompts

Participant Management

Interview Studies

Prototype Testing

Card Sorting

Tree Testing

Live Website Testing

Automated Reports

Templates Gallery

Choose from our library of pre-built mazes to copy, customize, and share with your own users

Browse all templates

Financial Services

Tech & Software

Product Designers

Product Managers

User Researchers

By use case

Concept & Idea Validation

Wireframe & Usability Test

Content & Copy Testing

Feedback & Satisfaction

Content Hub

Educational resources for product, research and design teams

Explore all resources

Question Bank

Maze Research Success Hub

Guides & Reports

Help Center

Future of User Research Report

The Optimal Path Podcast

Maze Guides | Resources Hub

User Personas: Your Guide to Building Personas for UX

0% complete

Persona mapping: How to map personas to drive better decisions

In this chapter, we’re covering how to manage persona mapping as part of the UX process. We’ll cover the questions you need to ask, how to organize your answers, and the benefits of persona mapping. We’ll wrap up with how you can repeatedly test and validate your personas.

Persona mapping enables you to accurately build user personas with rich data. Done right, persona mapping will be the fuel to well-rounded personas that are usable and understandable for your product team.

In chapter two, we took you through a 9-step process to building user personas; this includes everything from defining your plan, all the way through to distributing your personas with your team.

In this chapter, we’re going to build on one of the most crucial steps from chapter two: persona mapping. Here, you’ll learn the types of questions you need to ask, as well as how to map the answers you get, in a way that helps you build usable personas.

First, let’s start by clearing up what persona mapping actually is.

What is persona mapping?

Persona mapping is a logical step in your user persona build process. Persona mapping helps you collect and use your target audience research data to create more distinct personas.

Despite constantly being in debate, most UX designers consider the act of persona mapping to be from the moment you start creating your user research questions.

Therefore, this chapter will consider the process of persona mapping to start at those all-important questions that will enable you to better segment your data further down the line, and truly understand who’s using your product.

Done well, persona mapping can help product teams devise relevant marketing campaigns, and design and build better products.

How to create a persona map

Ask the right questions.

You can only finish with valuable user personas when you start with a solid set of questions. Ash Oliver , UX Designer & Design Advocate at Maze, runs us through his thought process when it comes to crafting questions that get results.

“Ask open-ended questions, and ensure they’re rich questions that can potentially be asked to anyone. Asking a question that anybody can answer helps guide the conversation.

Building on this, you’ll definitely need a combination of closed and open-ended questions. Closed-ended questions help for segmentation upfront, whereas open-ended questions help you find persona cohorts further down the line.”

So, what sort of questions do you need answering to better segment users and build a better customer experience? Here are nine user persona questions you can rewrite to fit your niche:

1. What role do they perform at work?

By identifying their role, you can better understand their jobs-to-be-done, and likely use cases for your product and its features.

2. Do they have the final say on purchasing decisions?

This is more a consideration for building buyer or customer personas, but a useful personal attribute to know in UX personas as well. Are your personas decision-makers or product advocates? Do they have direct access to budgets? This information will help you understand their seniority and likeliness for in-app purchases.

3. What device do they use?

Meet them on devices they use every day. Especially if your product team is running off of the RARRA framework—focusing on retention over acquisition, you’ll want to be building interfaces that work with their device and screen size. Answering this question will help you focus on designing a UI that helps retain users.

4. Do they use social media? What do they use it for?

Another good question to ask when building buyer personas, and this question can certainly support your product marketing’s social media strategy. However, it’s also a great-to-know for UX/UI designers. When you understand your personas’ most-used social media channels you can borrow tactile UI navigation rules they’re already familiar with, making their product interactions with you seem like second nature. For example, if you find one persona typically uses TikTok, a swipe up feature to navigate to new screens may be more familiar for your mobile app than a swipe across or click.

5. What are their career goals?

Looking beyond jobs-to-be-done, how can you help your users achieve their entire role, and be championed for their work? Identifying personal attributes like this can help highlight new features, onboarding strategies and more.

6. What are their values?

Today’s users won’t buy products that don’t resonate with their values. What’s more, helping users achieve personal missions and values will create product advocates, increase referrals, lift net promoter score (NPS), and more.

7. What workplace culture are they in right now?

Identifying workplace culture will help you make core product decisions. Are personas looking for a product that can keep up with their agile culture—rapid releases, sprints, and fast-paced teams? Do they have a waterfall culture that will require admin rights and seniority levels within your app?

At the same time, are you dealing with people in an entirely distributed team, and your product also needs room for digital communication?

Remember, you’re not building for the culture they aspire to create—if you do that, your product won’t be relevant. Build for the culture they are working with right now.

8. Who are they following?

Who are your user personas following? These can be competitor brands, industry influencers, or likeness brands. Answering this decision will help you better understand the personalities you’re dealing with, the language and references they’re accustomed to, and UX branding traits they enjoy.

9. What language & sentiment do they use?

Take a look at how your current users talk about your product, or your competition’s if you don’t have a product on the market yet—what trends are you noticing? Do they refer to features another way to what your team has named them? Do they feel a certain way toward a feature, product, or even brand? What language do they use to express this sentiment?

Understanding all this can help UX writers—and marketers in general—put together copy that resonates, weave onboarding flows which are understandable, and thread tooltips that your personas will understand.

Now we’ve covered the questions to ask and how they can help your persona mapping process, let’s look at how you can learn from them and map your data into something useful.

Map your answers

Start by segmenting answers based on your respondents’ goals and barriers. Consider demographic features like job title, geolocation, and age—but only if you deem demographics to be important to your product design decisions.

Ash Oliver, UX Designer & Design Advocate at Maze, explains how he likes to go about segmenting data.

“I’m a big whiteboard, mind mapper-type designer—very visual. I tend to work heavily in Miro. That’s where I can start to sort and make sense, and organize user information. Physical or digital whiteboards can play really helpful roles in the storming stage of user persona-building, and later on as well.”

We asked Ash, why Miro ?

“Personas tend to be boxed into a one-page, text-driven template doc, and that’s okay if they serve their learning purpose. However, Miro helps build an interactive learning place—it hosts a live project we can come back to time and time again.”

Alongside Miro, Ash also highlighted some other tools as key to his persona mapping process.

“Notion is another big tool I use. The flexibility within the document structure is really helpful. I’ve also used Excel for more quantitative research and creating a measure to run with, once I start coding out teams and tags.”

After you’ve started to group your data into the above trends you can micro-segment them to enable you to build user personas from each segment. Two categories to consider are:

Lifecycle segments:

• First-time users
• Passive users
• Regular/active users
• Power users/advocates

Note: If you’ve run an NPS survey with your user base, then the information from this research will drastically aid this segmentation through use of detractors, neutrals, and promoters.

Purpose segments:

• Experiential users: People that use your product recreationally
• Side-hustle users: People that use your product outside of work for their passion projects
• Professional users: People that use your product for their work

Understanding these further segmentation categories will help you understand the potential customer lifecycles for these personas. For example, it will highlight if they’re likely to churn, not activate, or be a long-term advocate of your product. It will also help you define the feature sets most relevant to each persona.

Segmenting all of this information will help you map user personas that can truly inform your product design roadmap and provide a personalized experience for the right people.

Now you know the right questions to ask, let’s cover the benefits of persona mapping.

8 Benefits of persona mapping

When you dive into the details of your target audience and accurately map detailed personas, there are plenty of benefits on the table. Let’s take a look at eight persona mapping benefits for UX researchers and their product teams.

1. Develop more personalized UX strategies

Personal details win user longevity. They help you develop conscious products that are aware of users' needs, surroundings, and problems. They give your users a tailored experience that you can scale to a wider audience.

2. Fight customer churn

Customer churn is a metric every company tracks, and with good reason. However, when you run persona mapping, you’re able to fight customer churn by implementing anti-churn strategies within each persona’s first few in-app experiences.

This can extend outside of your application too, with push notifications, email messaging, and more.

3. Build on customer retention via referral rates & growth loops

Let your product do the selling for you. Product-led growth teams that are able to increase their customer retention rates, referral rates, and create impactful growth loops generate a larger and more scalable ROI.

Persona mapping can provide key information to support these strategies and build customer experiences that resonate around them.

4. Increase NPS

This is another core metric that validates product-market fit, and a promising retention rate. Persona mapping can help you build products that create a positive NPS. The information you collect will dictate core product design elements that users love.

5. Understand jobs-to-be-done and 'aha!' moments

When you’re better able to understand your users, you’re able to identify their jobs-to-be-done, and aha! moments that will activate them within your product. Next, you can build smoother onboarding flows to get new users to these moments quicker, and to keep delighting them with more throughout their lifecycle.

6. Create products that are easier to onboard

Businesses often struggle with attracting potential customers, even if the customer knows they need the solution. Why? This could be a pricing and cost issue, however, it can also be a fear of change; due to time, capability, or something else.

When your team runs persona mapping, your product development efforts shift to create solutions which are easier to onboard, helping attract new users, either through word-of-mouth or other product-led growth (PLG) strategies. Suddenly, the task of onboarding a new tool doesn’t seem so daunting after all.

7. Create accessible interfaces

Your target market has needs that are larger than what your product can provide. If your product team is small, then it can be hard to consider this array of potential needs which you must adapt to.

When you conduct persona mapping, you create empathy and open the floor up to diverse and inclusive product decisions which will attract a wider user base, create a better digital presence, and give every user the accessibility they deserve.

8. Build better product positioning

Although we’re specifically discussing persona mapping to build user personas, this will also help your product positioning.

The buyer insights you’ll get from this research will help your product marketing, as well as allowing your product teams to better place your product and its features in the market, set it apart from the competition, and convey benefits in a way which resonate.

Furthermore, it will help you hone in on product messaging within your product, ensuring you’re using the right language that accurately reflects how your users view your product and features.

The importance of testing and validating your user personas

Your persona mapping doesn’t have an end date and your team should constantly be updating and tweaking personas to adapt to change.

At Maze, we approach user personas on an ongoing basis, it’s part of our UX team’s routine. That doesn’t mean we need to update a particular UX artifact—like a persona PDF one-pager—every six months. Instead, we have ongoing workshops every eight weeks or so, to constantly find out things that are contrary to what’s documented.

In order for UX teams to learn often, you’ll need to make their learning pathway as easy as possible.

Ash Oliver , UX Designer & Design Advocate at Maze

To enable regular user persona testing and learning opportunities, move away from project-minded personas and take an iterative approach. Do your internal users feel like the information they’re getting is specific and valuable?

It could be specific, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s valuable. A great example of this is demographic information. Do you really need that information to relate to someone? This data may not (and probably won’t) help your internal users.

Does your team feel like they’re getting specific, valuable information that’s driving successful decisions? Or are they finding the decisions they’re making unsuccessful? Furthermore, validating comes from a combination of data and product decisions.

Take copy and positioning, for example. Say you’re making decisions on this based on persona research—if it doesn’t move the needle, it either suggests you’re leaning in the wrong direction, or haven’t gone far enough.

In order to test and validate you need to place some educated bets and decisions. It’s always a test, and things can always change further down the line.

Conclusion: persona mapping

That’s a wrap on persona mapping. Hopefully you’re now in a position to collect and segment your user data in a way that enables you to efficiently map personas which optimize UX tactics and product growth strategies.

Now you’ve got all your data, and have segmented it, you’re ready to start displaying and sharing it. The final chapter in this guide will walk you through how to showcase your data for internal teams.

Frequently asked questions about persona mapping

Persona mapping is the process of collecting and segmenting potential user information to create archetypes that help your product team make informed product-led decisions.

Persona mapping helps encompass your ideal customer’s characteristics, job-to-be-done, diversity needs, and more.

Why is persona mapping important?

Persona mapping is an essential UX research strategy that enables your product teams to collect an array of customer-centric data. This data segments ideal users and ensures you’re building products that are empathetic, inclusive, usable, and retain target customers or existing clients for the long-run.

How is creating a user persona beneficial for customer journey mapping?

A user persona is beneficial for customer journey mapping as it helps product marketing teams understand who they’re selling to and the types of long-term users that benefit from their products. Persona mapping helps flip traditional AARRR pirate metrics to RARRA growth models, prioritizing retention over acquisition.

User persona templates

Multi-persona Journey Maps: One Map, Many Perspectives

About Multi-persona Journey Maps: One Map, Many Perspectives

Join the event to learn more about multiple-persona journey maps, what they can be like, and when it’s best to use them.

​It’s not a secret that, typically, a customer journey map reflects the journey one persona takes when using a product or a service. But what if there are a couple of different personas that walk similar journeys? Or the ones who interact with one another? You can definitely build a separate map for each persona, but it’s where multiple personas on the journey map can come in handy. Join the event to learn more about multiple-persona journey maps, what they can be like, and when it’s best to use them. During the webinar, we’ll share our approach to building multi-persona maps and will showcase two examples to provide you with a clear understanding of how multi-persona maps work in practice. ​📄 During the event, you will: ​🔹 Learn what multi-persona customer journey maps are and why you might need them; 🔹 ​Understand how to choose between building multiple journey maps and one multi-persona map; 🔹 ​Explore 2 use cases for this type of map; 🔹 ​Walk through B2B and B2C examples of a multi-persona map. ​By the end of this event, you will have gained the knowledge and inspiration needed to create effective multi-persona maps that drive customer-centric strategies and lead to enhanced experiences for your target audiences.

lu.ma/multiple-personas-on-one-map?utm_source=neonmoire

#journeymapping

Related Topics

• Design Thinking
• Internet Culture
• Experience Design
• Digital Design
• Design Systems

Virtual Location

Steaming URL

Tell your friends

Customer Journey Maps and User Personas

In this article, the main focus is on:

• highlighting the importance of the use of personas in helping craft good customer journey maps (CJM).
• how the Automatic Persona Generation (APG) system can help make CJM’s in a quick and effective way! 

Disclaimer: This article does not cover the topic of CJM in-depth but rather focuses on the marriage between CJM’s and personas! For a detailed breakdown on the what, why and how of CJM’s, refer to this customer journey mapping guide by the folks at UXPressia .

Let’s get to the exciting stuff now!

What is a Customer Journey Map? 

It can be challenging for an organization or a product team to get into the minds of its users. Often times, you might be left wondering why a user is spending so much time performing a particular action (an example could be on an e-commerce website where the customer is spending a lot of time adding products to their cart) or why does it take him/her several steps to get from Point A to Point B when it should only take a few! 

Whatever your issue might be, the root cause of this is that you don’t have a clear grasp of the customer journey. This is where a CJM comes into picture. 

CJM is a visualization technique which allows you to see how your users/customers are interacting with your business over time and across channels (e.g. mobile, website, laptop, social media etc.). 

A CJM allows you to:

• Understand the entire journey which a user takes to accomplish their goal when using your product or service. 
• Get a better understanding of (and subsequently improve) their experience when using your product/service. 
• Retain users! 

Let’s take a look at the following example of CJM. In this CJM, there is a person named Eric who is impulsive, wants to buy a car and wants to do his research online. He has certain expectations of an “ideal” website which he can use to both search for new cars and also the dealership which will sell him the car. Specifically, Eric wishes that the website should have:

• Ability to compare cars and their breakdowns. 
• Good photography with closeups, inside and out
• Video overview of car with demonstrations

He comes across a website and starts searching for cars and also dealerships. The following CJM describes his entire journey when he is doing all of this! 

It describes his frustrations, his expectations of when he is frustrated about how the website “should have been designed” and also some moments where the design of the website made him happy!  Now to flesh out this CJM is a cumbersome process.

Using Personas in making a customer journey map

While there are several steps involved in making a CJM, the most important step is making a user persona . 

A user persona forms the backbone on the basis of which a good CJM is made.

If you take a look at the CJM template which I have shared below, you can see that a user persona is presented in the same CJM, and the pain points, expectations and frustrations of the persona would be represented in the CJM.

It would be safe to say that personas are a tool that helps you take a user-centric approach to customer journey mapping: they help you to really define the tasks that your users want to complete and their needs and pain points in doing so across the customer journey. 

By understanding these needs and pain points, you can start to define the ‘moments of truth’ that really matter to your users, where your business has a role to play and what you need to do to make this possible.

If there is one persona which you need to make, then this is a relatively straightforward process. Say for instance, you need to make persona for Eric (on whom the above CJM is based), then the process would look like: 

• Contact Eric and users similar to Eric and agree for a suitable time for interviewing.
• While interviewing, understand more about him, his needs and wants from an online car shopping portal. 
• Make a persona which describes Eric the best. 
• You observe Eric when he is searching for a car online and makes a purchasing decision. 
• Based on your observations, you draft a CJM. 

There is no right/wrong, linear or prescriptive way to make a CJM. For the sake of brevity, I am simplifying the steps involved. 

Now imagine, if there is an organization which wants to understand the journey of most of their users when they are interacting with their product or services. Let’s take the example of the fictitious website which was used to draft Eric’s CJM “YourCarNext.Net”.

Assuming “YourCarNext.Net” is a popular company and has thousands of people who use it. If one day, the company decides that they want to understand how users in a particular city, say New York think of their website, what are their needs, pain points, frustrations and how do they actually use their website, then this would be a hugely cumbersome task. 

The organization might need to take help of many UX Researchers who would interview/survey all of these people, construct many many personas and then flesh out CJM’s. And this is not the end! Once they have all user personas and CJM’s in hand, they need to compare and analyse the common problems/frustrations/pain points/journeys of most users to be able to improve their service offering! 

Needless to say that this is a bummer!

Not just this but CJM’s also vary in their complexity! If your boss wishes to see many details in a CJM to understand different facets of a user interaction with your product or service,  then you might need to go the extra mile to get that extra information about your user! Take a look at the following two CJM’s – I hope you are able to appreciate the complexity of these CJM’s. 

So, we have established following things so far: 

• CJM involves (lots!) user research.
• Most important step in making a CJM is a persona.
• Personas can take a lot of time if you have many users! 

However, an easy way to simplify all of the above is to have a good starting point to make CJM’s- an automatically generated persona which is representative of your user base by using the Automatic Persona Generation system developed by the APG team at the Qatar Computing Research Institute . 

Automatic Persona Generation System (APG)

APG is a tool for turning your data into personas. It works currently with YouTube Analytics, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Facebook Insights (if you have enough video content). The system pulls data from these sources and automatically generates user personas that represent your most engaged audience segments.

The benefits of APG are:

• Data-driven personas are created within minutes.
• Data-driven personas are updated automatically every month, thus saving a lot of time for your product team in manually updating these. 

APG is both a methodology and a system for automatically creating data-driven personas from online analytics data!  

Say, for instance, your organization has a large and diverse customer base (like in the YourCarNext.net example above)  and collects digital information on them. Using APG would enable you to better understand all of them! 

Take a look at the following persona which is automatically generated using APG, without the need for manual user research! 

As you can see from the above figure, the persona which is generated using the APG contains anonymized names of all users of a particular organization. If I go back to the example of YourCarNext.net, a persona generated using the APG would look similar to the above and would list user needs, goals, wants, frustrations etc. 

Not only this, using the APG, one can also search for different users (all of whom will have unique problems, needs, pain points, goals etc.) using the APG system as shown below: 

Needless to say that combining customer journey mapping with data-driven personas generated using APG is an exciting research endeavor, one that is not time consuming and sustainable for you as a business! 

The customer journey concept relies on the notion that users or customers engage with an organization’s products and messages on various channels at various times. Data-driven personas can help isolate, conceptualize, and communicate information on customer segments that are specifically salient at each step of the customer journey.

Think of the countless hours you would save on interviewing users, manually drawing CJM’s and user personas! 

Would you like to learn more?

If this article got you intrigued, read our persona analytics research for more in-depth knowledge on persona development.

If you are interested in learning more about how APG can help identify user pain-points and inform design decisions for your team, contact us !  

Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., Jung, S.G., and Guan, K. (2021).  Data-Driven Personas . Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics,1 Carroll, J. (Ed). Morgan-Claypool: San Rafael, CA., 4:1, i-317.

Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., and Jung, S.G. (2020)  Data-Driven Personas for Enhanced User Understanding: Combining Empathy with Rationality for Better Insights to Analytics .  Data and Information Management . 4(1), 1-17.  https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/dim/4/1/article-p1.xml

How can we help you today?

Multiple personas / journeys on one journey map print.

Modified on: Thu, 4 Nov, 2021 at 10:24 PM

Illustrate multiple journeys on one journey map to compare the experiences of two or more personas.

About journey maps with multiple personas

How to add multiple personas to one journey map, how to duplicate one lane to use it for a second persona, example journey map.

A journey map can be used to illustrate the experiences of more than one persona. Where do they show similarities or differences in their steps or emotions?

Each persona in a map has certain lanes that are dedicated to that persona (e.g. text lane, storyboard), however some lanes allow you compare personas within that one lane. The channel lane, emotional journey, and dramatic arc clearly allow you to illustrate both personas at the same time. This way you can, for example, compare satisfaction on the emotional journey and add both persona's satisfaction scores to the same lane.

Check out this webinar where we talked about how to use multiple personas on one journey map to compare their experience.

To include multiple personas in one journey map:

• Open/create a journey map 
• Click on the button "Add persona" on the journey map outline  
• Either pick a persona from the existing ones or create a new persona from there

Afterwards add lanes to your journey map and decide what persona each lane should focus on (Choose a persona for this lane). Please choose this carefully, you can't change it at a later point of time.

You can add personas to your journey maps anytime – either at the very beginning on a blank map, or later when the journey map is filled.

Currently, there is no direct way to copy single lanes, however, there is a workaround for that: you can duplicate the journey to the second persona and delete the lanes that you don't need anymore.

To do this, (1) click the add persona button and click the "duplicate existing journey" icon. This will allow you to (2)choose the Persona's journey that you wish to duplicate, and who you want to assign it to. 

Please find an example journey map illustrating two customer journeys on one map here .

In this webinar , we talked about how to use multiple personas on one journey map to compare their experience. Also we included stakeholder groups into the discussion and learn how backstage activities and service blueprints are connected to personas.

Did you find it helpful? Yes No

Related Articles

What is Persona-Based Customer Journey Mapping?

Persona-based customer journey mapping helps you understand core customer segments so you can add value to these groups.

As promised, this weeks’ blog is a continuation of last week’s post titled Aim Before You Fire . In that post, I shared my thoughts on the importance of immersing yourself in an understanding of the core customer groups for whom you wish to design loyalty building experiences.

After discussing a myriad of ways you can deepen your customer understanding (e.g., focus groups, surveys, etc.) I wrote:

In our next post, we will talk both about the how and why of  persona-based  customer journey mapping and a process I refer to as optimal future customer experience road mapping.

Since this is the next post, let’s dive-in…

The Pain of Reality

Frequently, I work with leaders who are trying to transition their company in the direction of customer centricity – knowing that their business is currently optimized for operational efficiency.  One of the early pain points encountered by leaders during this transition process is an appreciation that they have achieved excellence by crafting a “one-size” fits all experience.

Persona-based journey maps serve as a research and design tool to understand the current journey of core customer segments and to find opportunities to make improvements that add value for those groups.

Going Beyond Segments

Before I proceed with the virtues of persona-based journey maps, it is essential that we share an important distinction between core customer segments and customer knowledge needed to craft true personas.

To be clear customer segments do not translate into personas without work and investment.

For example, I can know that I would like to attract customers that represent households with incomes of over $150,000 and that my products best serve families with two children.

That level of knowledge about a consumer segment, however, is insufficient to craft the type of persona ultimately needed for worthwhile mapping.

Typically to build a persona you need to conduct a deep dive inquiry with a representative sample of individuals from that demographic segment to understand psychographics and lifestyle preferences for those who constitute that overall consumer population.

That inquiry looks at purchase preference, media consumption, an average day, fears, aspirations, values, buying behavior, etc. Armed with this knowledge then this segment can be humanized with a name and backstory that infuses the segment data into an amalgam we refer to as a persona.

That persona can then be used to help explore the interactions with your brand from the standpoint of the persona’s wants, needs, desires, and lifestyle.

Here are a few additional considerations, we’ve found essential to effective persona-based customer journey mapping.

Start by building a map for a persona that represents a large portion of your existing business

Map before you fix, think of fixing and elevating moments in the journey.

Let’s look at each of these considerations in slightly more detail!

My momma once said, “Remember the one you brought to the dance.” While stretching it a bit my mom’s wisdom is applicable. To develop the discipline of journey mapping it’s often best to, begin with a group you most likely know well and for whom your existing business should be optimized.

By nature many leaders are doers, but mapping is initially about understanding.

Before we can improve the customer experience, we need to understand our business from their side of the interaction. Initial mapping is about what is happening from the customer’s vantage point.

Later the process shifts to what can or should be happening.

There is a growing body of memory research that suggests humans remember moments, not days.

We tend to fixate on peak experiences (whether those peaks represent a high point or a pronounced low point) but we should focus on recent or end experiences. You don’t need to address a movie playing in the head of your customer, you need to execute flawlessly at important highs and end events along their journey with you.

There is so much more to talk about concerning persona-based customer journey mapping but this experience moment has passed!

Should you wish to reach out to discuss persona-based customer journey mapping at your business, please contact us to set-up a time to talk.

Joseph A. Michelli, Ph.D.  is a professional speaker and chief experience officer at The Michelli Experience. A New York Times #1 bestselling author, Dr. Michelli and his team consult with some of the world’s best customer experience companies.

Follow on Twitter:  @josephmichelli

Subscribe to The Michelli Experience newsletter.

Leave a Comment

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

FREE RESOURCES

The Starbucks Experience: Leadership Tips eBook

Elevating Care in Healthcare: Lessons from the UCLA Health System eBook

How to Win Every Customer, Every Time, No Excuses! Article

7 Ways to Analyze a Customer-Journey Map

March 22, 2020 2020-03-22

• Email article
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Twitter

A customer-journey map is an infographic visualization of the process that a persona segment goes through in order to accomplish a goal. Journey maps are useful in communicating the general narratives and themes uncovered by longitudinal research done to understand how a customer works toward a goal over time.  

This journey map includes all the information necessary for understanding and analyzing the user experience of shopping for a new car. In this illustration, we have intentionally left out one key piece of the map —  the insights and opportunities gleaned from the map. This section is often found at the bottom of a customer-journey map and highlights how the organization can optimize and improve the customer journey.

In this article we will demonstrate how to analyze a journey map and, thus, how to identify the insights and opportunities for improvement.

In This Article:

Analyzing the journey map.

Longitudinal research and analysis is necessary to create a map like this.

Every journey map will look different because the research insights and the resulting visual depend entirely on the context of the journey, its underlying activities, and the persona completing it. That said, there are 7 common elements you can and should look for when analyzing a customer journey.

1. Look for points in the journey where expectations are not met.

Users go into an interaction with an organization with certain expectations. When the interaction does not meet their expectations, you see pain points in a customer journey. To identify these instances, first reflect on who the persona is. Ask yourself; what is important to this persona, where did she come from before this journey, what has she seen and what does she know already? Putting yourself in the user’s mind space will allow you to understand which interactions conflict with user’s prior ideas and expectations.

Of course, you should look for places where users verbalized their concerns, but also use your logic to assess interactions with no explicit complaints or negative comments.

Sometimes people bring their expectations into the journey from other experiences. For example, users expect that when they pull up to a hotel, the bellman will open the door, because that’s what always happens when you pull up to a hotel with a bellman — it’s the mental model that they have formed for that situation. Some organizations set inaccurate expectations early in the customer journey. Others don’t set expectations at all, forcing users to make assumptions and possibly be disappointed if those assumptions prove wrong.

Find the trouble spot and work backward to identify the triggering factor and how the expectations were (or were not) set. Work to resolve the conflict between expectations and reality.

In the car-buying journey map, there were two clear points where Eric’s expectations weren’t met. These instances are annotated using red numbered circles.

2. Identify any unnecessary touchpoints or interactions.

Are there any steps in the customer journey that could be eliminated in order to streamline the total experience? Look for logical ways to optimize the process to reduce total interaction cost . That may mean removing an existing step that is no longer needed or adding something to the experience that bring efficiency to the overall journey.

3. Identify the low points or points of friction.

When you step back and look at the whole journey, you should be able to see where the user experiences the most pain or friction. These points are usually represented visually as dips in the journey diagram. See where the journey reaches its lowest point and compare it to other low points in the journey. These should be on your shortlist of optimizations. That said, not all fixes are created equal: there can be dependencies and constraints involved. Work with your team to decide which low points should be addressed first and which can come later. (Because of the peak-end rule , the lowest point in a journey will have a particularly ruinous impact on the branding effect of the user experience.)

4. Pinpoint high-friction channel transitions.

Many journeys take place across devices or channels . A lot of times the journey breaks down and friction appears when users change channels. For example, a user receives a newsletter about a specific offering from a company. She’s interested in the offering and clicks the call to action in the newsletter. However, instead of being taken to a landing page detailing that particular offer, the user lands on the company’s homepage. At this point, she has to put in effort to find the offer.  Or, another user may begin filling out a form on the mobile phone, but wants to complete it on the laptop when it becomes too laborious. Doing so means losing work and starting over. These channel-transition pain points should be identified and streamlined. Think outside of the box: rather than forcing users to work hard, build a bridge for them to get to the other side easily.

5. Evaluate time spent. In your journey map, provide time durations for the major stages of the journey.

This information gives you another lens for analyzing the experience.  Assess how long it takes users to achieve the underlying substeps. Are these times appropriate? Time spent often correlates to the amount of user effort. Call out areas of the journey where time and effort are problematic.

6. Look for moments of truth.

Some points in the journey are so important that the rest of the experience might hinge on them. Think about the personas’ attitudes, needs, and priorities. Is there a make–or–break moment in the journey for that persona? This moment may be where your research shows a lot of emotion or where you see a strong divergence between the paths different users take. If this moment goes well, it can save the experience. For example, think of the first time a car-insurance customer files a claim. She’s been paying her policy responsibly, and now she needs her insurance to come through seamlessly for her. The first interaction in the claim experience might be a moment of truth for this persona. If it goes wrong, the user may move to a competitor. Be sure to look for moments of truth and to call attention to them when you find them.

7. Identify high points or points where expectations are met or exceeded.

Good UX practitioners should always balance their analysis by pointing out things that are working well in any experience. Look at the high points in the journey — the interactions that users are happy with. Where do they express positive thoughts and emotions? These insights are also valuable. You may be able to amplify them or recreate similar experiences elsewhere in the journey.

Whether you’re evaluating journey research for the creation of a map or digesting a map created by another party, it’s important to know what to look for. As the creator of the map, you’ll want to identify and call attention to these important elements through visual emphasis and storytelling. As a consumer of the visualization, apply this checklist like lenses through which to view the map in order to find the most actionable insights.

Related Courses

Journey mapping to understand customer needs.

Capture and communicate UX insights across complex interactions

Omnichannel Journeys and Customer Experience

Create a seamless, cohesive cross-channel experience

Interaction

Customer-Journey Management

Build a crossfunctional journey-centric design approach that scales

Related Topics

• Customer Journeys Customer Journeys

Learn More:

The 3 Competencies of Journey Management

Kim Flaherty · 5 min

Journey Management vs. Service Design

Kim Flaherty · 4 min

Types of User Pain Points

Sarah Gibbons · 4 min

Related Articles:

How to Conduct Research for Customer Journey-Mapping

Kate Kaplan · 7 min

Good Customer Experience Demands Organizational Fluidity

Kim Flaherty · 7 min

Journey Mapping: 9 Frequently Asked Questions

Alita Joyce and Kate Kaplan · 7 min

Remote Customer Journey Mapping

Kate Kaplan · 5 min

Journey Mapping in Real Life: A Survey of UX Practitioners

Customer Journeys and Omnichannel User Experience

Kim Flaherty · 6 min

• Business Strategy
• Docs & Reports
• Human Resources
• Marketing & Sales
• Product Management
• Productivity
• Project Planning
• Software Development / IT

Customer journey mapping template

By atlassian.

Journey mapping helps you visualize how customers experience your product or service, and how they feel along the way

How well do you really know how your customer experiences your product and service? The answer may surprise you! As creators of a product or service we tend to know it inside and out, but it’s important to ask what it’s like for the customers we are building for.

Customer Journey Mapping is an exercise that helps you understand what your customer is trying to achieve through your product or service, and what emotions they are experiencing as they move through your funnel. It will help you uncover areas of strength and areas for improvement to make sure you are delivering the best possible experience.

How to use the customer journey mapping template

Step 1. identify your customer.

Pick a specific customer persona, and understand their goals and motivations that bring them to your product or service. Imagine the pain points and requirements that have brought them to you.

Step 2. Map their journey

Your customer journey map will be composed of the following sections:

• Stage . As defined by you, the point in time that your customer is experiencing. Examples include: landing on a webpage, signing up for your product or service, contacting customer support. The touchpoints are endless!
• User Action . The specific action that your user takes at each stage. Be as specific as possible.
• Pain points and questions . Document the questions that may arise for your user upon a certain action. Note any needs that they may have at this stage, either expressed or not expressed. Note down certain “ouch” moments your customer may experience (like long wait times or lack of clear information).
• Emotions . When your customer experiences a pain point or has a question, what emotion does that produce in them? On the flip side, if your customer is elated or inspired by your service, document that as well. Seeing the emotional journey as your customer processes through the stages you define will give you a clear picture of where their head is at.

Step 3. Find and mine the golden opportunities

Now that you can clearly see what your customer is experiencing: the good and the bad, you can identify areas you want to improve. Whether it is simplifying the user experience, cutting out an unnecessary step, or offering greater support, you’re sure to find many ways you can make things even better for your customer. Your good work won’t go unnoticed!

Atlassian is an enterprise software company that develops products for software developers, project managers, and content management.

More product management templates     View all

Competitive analysis.

Keep up with competitors by documenting their offerings and strategies.

Customer interview report

Turn customer interviews into insights with the customer interview report.

Elevator pitch

Use this template to create an elevator pitch that communicates the value of a project.

• Case studies
• Expert advice

New JM template: the sneakers store visitor journey map

Have you ever built journey maps with multiple personas? Visualizing interactions between different personas on the same map can help you get valuable and even unexpected insights that you wouldn't obtain by mapping out separate journeys for each persona.

At our recent webinar , we spoke about multi-persona journey maps. Our new sneaker store visitor journey map template helped us explain how multiple-persona journey maps work and how to create one in UXPressia.

And now we are making the e-commerce journey template available to the wider public (the webinar recording is already here in case you want to watch it 😉).

In the template, you will find seven personas, three of which are on the map from the very beginning and take similar steps. Four other personas appear on the map at later steps to help customer personas with the orders they make.

Use it as a starting point for your own CJM or as a source of inspiration to build a multiple personas map from scratch. One thing is for sure —  a multiple-persona journey map can help you to look at your customers’ journeys from a different angle.

Rate this post

Open Design Kit

Journey mapping define.

Define the happy path for your personas.

• Video conferencing app
• Screensharing app
• Mapping app

We use journey mapping as an exercise for determining a list of requirements for our project as well as uncovering hidden issues. It also encourages the team to empathize with users.

When to do it:

Journey maps are created after you’ve made personas for your project.

Who’s involved:

Designers and stakeholders. These should be done collaboratively. The bonus of collaborating is that valuable conversations arise through the process of co-authoring the journey maps. They can also be done solo as an exercise to work through design issues.

Time estimate:

Small (1 -2 hours per persona)

One way to do it:

Review the persona’s goals, values, and what makes them stressed. (If you haven’t made a persona, and are short on time, try to identify a typical user for your project.)

Have one participant take on the role of the persona. All of the other participants should take notes in a mapping application such as BoardThing or Trello .

The person playing the role of persona should start out by identifying what their goal is. (Example: my goal is to book a hotel for my vacation with my partner). Next, have them identify the very first step that they might take in order to achieve that goal. Note that this most likely will start before the persona even gets on to the website or application.

Describe each step in detail. From here on out have the persona role player walk through every possible step that they would take until just after they reach their goal. The steps taken after the goal has been achieved are crucial to note as it informs you where they are heading next. If you have an application, don’t start at logging in, instead start at the motive that would make someone need to log in.

Once you have completed documenting the entire scenario, have the non-persona role playing participants provide feedback on the journey. Now is a good time to ask clarifying questions ranging from the order of steps that a persona might take to more nuanced inquiries.

• The Lyra Project

Learn More:

• All You Need To Know about Customer Journey Mapping
• Using Customer Journey to Improve Customer Experience
• A Beginners’ Guide to User Journey Mapping