We learned about Customer Journey Maps on the Product Management course with Flow Interactive. They are a great way of considering how your customers interact with your product through different stages. They can give you insight into what content you should make available at each stage.
1. Start with thinking about how customers interact with your product; try come ups with 3 to 6 main stages, including a stage before they hear about you or your product. It’s good to have a rough idea of what happens in each stage.
Our stages are:
Discover -> Compare -> Consider -> Commit -> Coach -> Retain
2. Next create some personas for your product. We already had some we have used before so we reused them. Usually persona’s are fictional people who represent your target market, but we found it useful to base them on actual people who had enquired about our products or services. We have 8 personas but that’s probably overkill, try have between 3 and 5.
One persona we have is Shirley.
She is an HR manager/OD professional who is interested in applying agile outside of IT. She is also interested in coaching since it is similar to organizational development. She is a people person, budget conscious and looking for ways to improve the whole organization.
3. Now for each persona, consider the questions they would be asking in each stage. We started going through each persona for each stage, but found it easier to complete all stages with a single persona, before moving on to the next one.
Some example questions Shirley might be asking for the Discover stage are:
What is an agile coach?
Can you apply agile outside of IT?
4. Looking at the questions decide what the main goal or message you want to send is for each stage is.
Our message for ‘consider’ is:
We would love to talk to you to understand your situation
5. Now look at each stage and decide what part of your product addresses that stage and how the content might need to change.
For us our discover stage is all the stuff we do to build awareness of our brand and drive people to our website or to contact us directly. This is things like our blog, newsletter, conference talks, linked in, twitter etc. We now know what questions we should be addressing through these mediums to drive potential customers to get in touch.
You can read more about the technique here:
http://bigdoor.com/blog/2013/11/01/a-quick-guide-to-customer-journey-mapping/