A bird's eye view of customers' needs

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the interactions your customers have with you across all touchpoints. It helps you ensure every interaction with them, no matter how small it may be, will not go unnoticed or forgotten and ensures that no one falls through the cracks. Mapping customer experience is a valuable process to ensure nothing is missed.

It tells the story of your customer's experience from their first interaction with the organisation through to the end. Mapping the customer journey reveals gaps in customer experiences and explores innovative solutions that customers value. It works for B2C and B2B customer journey mapping.

They help businesses to walk in their customers' shoes and experience the brand from the customer's point of view. They give everyone in the business a complete picture of how customers experience the products, services and brand in their daily lives to build empathy and understanding on how the business can become more customer-centric.

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Man writing on Post its for a CJM

What a customer journey map reveals

The way that you can really get into the mind of your customer is by understanding how they experience each point on their journey. You need to look beyond just metrics and explore human behaviour at every step in order to truly understand what it's like for your customers.

There are many different points of interaction and each can have an effect on how the customer feels throughout their experience with your company. In order to design a great customer service experience, it is important that you understand your customers' underlying mindsets, emotions, motivations and desires. By undertaking rigorous methods of research, an organisation can begin mapping out the steps that customers take throughout each stage so they know how best to engage with them.

Customer journey maps have three main components: a perspective, an experience and findings and insights. These components enable organisations to understand how customers experience their products and services.

The Perspective is the person the consumer journey is being mapped for and the goal they are aiming to accomplish. We've discovered that taking a typical customer's trip and mapping it gives coverage of 70-80% of issues across many personas. A Customer Journey Map can also be deconstructed by persona. Understanding the needs, pains, and goals of your customer makes it simpler to develop a suitable solution. These findings may also assist you in determining which persona to focus on in your Customer Experience Program, or they might help you identify new problems and possibilities.

The Experience is the core of our journey and catalogues every customer action, thought or emotional experience. To make it feel real you should include verbatim (direct comments from customers), videos and images captured during research that helps understand what they're going through in order to increase empathy with them.

The Finding and Insights is the part of your Customer Journey Map used to transform insights into profits. What key learnings, or "insightful" moments did you uncover during research? Based on these findings what opportunities are there for moving ahead with a plan in mind that would meet customer needs better than ever before? How might we put some practical use outwards so internal teams can begin meeting those high expectations?

A comprehensive journey map is a tool that helps the organisation understand their customers by showing all channels they interact with, including emotions behind it and insights into what makes them tick. This empowers employees within your company to have empathy for each individual customer so you can approach every situation holistically and with a full understanding of what your customers want and how they feel.

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Open Gumtree Customer journey map portfolio

Truly understand our customers' journey

Access deep insights and uncover blind spots along your customers' journey and turn problems into opportunities

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How a customer journey map is created

Customers go through more stages than just buying and using a product or service. They interact with an organisation directly and indirectly across multiple channels and touch-points.

At each point for a customer, there are many incentives and obstacles to doing business.

A comprehensive journey map shows each customer touch-point clearly, and viewers can absorb each interaction from a new perspective.

Why customer journey maps are valuable

Customer journeys are not an afterthought; they should be at the heart of your content marketing strategy and processes for all team members, from designers and developers to marketers and customer services.

What makes a customer journey so valuable is the process that you undertake. Creating one requires detailed research and storytelling, which helps identify areas of friction as well as creates empathy for customers during their interactions with your business. Take your teams out of their silos and ask each one to step into the shoes of your customers. In doing this, you will be able to identify friction points - areas for improvement for your own processes and customer interactions.

Businesses today know that customers are their biggest asset and a customer journey map reveals key customer pain points and moments of truth where process, system and service failures are revealed. It digs deep to indicate what your customers are thinking, wanting and doing as they engage with your services. It keeps the customer at the heart of every decision.

When it comes to discovering exactly where customers struggle with a service or interaction, and where change is most needed, there are few tools more powerful than customer journey mapping.

2 women standing in front of a CJM pointing at details Man filling in information on a CJM

"A customer journey project doesn't deliver a set of conclusions or recommendations. The true value of a CJM comes in when employees really embrace the study and keep themselves immersing into the deliverables, time after time, after time. Therefore the quality of the deliverables is very important. Proto pay in-depth attention to the quality and usability of their deliverables."

Coen Horrevoets, Head of Product at Gumtree

Truly understand our customers' journey

Access deep insights and uncover blind spots along your customers' journey and turn problems into opportunities

GET IN TOUCH

FAQ

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What is Customer Journey Mapping?

A customer journey map illustrates the way a person interacts with your organization from their perspective. This helps you to see how they are actually experiencing it versus what we think is happening, giving us an opportunity for change if necessary.

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What are the benefits of a Customer Journey Map?

The customer is the focal point of every business interaction. Understanding their needs, wants or desires provides a framework for how you can best meet those requirements in order to create successful partnerships that are both tangible and long-lasting by putting customers at the heart of every decision.

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What makes a good Customer Journey Map?

It is important to create customer journey maps that include people from different departments. These touchpoints are the points of interaction with your customers and it's through these conversations where you can find out what they're experiencing firsthand, which will help ensure every step on their path has been met with satisfaction.

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What is a touchpoint in customer journey mapping?

A touchpoint in customer journey mapping is any point of contact a consumer might have with your company, from when they first visit until the very end. Touchpoints can help you identify opportunities for improvement by looking at each step along their path and seeing where there's room to improve service or communication.

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What is service design?

Service design improves the experiences of both the user and employee by designing, aligning, and optimizing an organization’s operations to better support customer journeys. (online)

Delivering phenomenal outcomes


“Working with Proto was a leap of faith, but they have become a major strategic partner in our CX evolution. The work they've developed and the way we've been able to embed it in the organisation has been absolutely phenomenal, and we're getting the outcomes we want.”

Felicity Clark
Felicity Clark Customer Experience Manager

Creating empathy to deliver outstanding results


“Proto were a pleasure to work with. They were adaptive and responsive, and developed a deep empathy for both the client and their customers. The quality of their products and services was outstanding.”

Michael Storey
Michael Storey Manager of Customer Research and Strategy at Sydney Water

Halving your customer churn


“Without the customer experience insights from the research program, we would not have been able to identify the acquisition issues that we had. Changes to the customer interactions that led up to financial protection have reduced the outflow rates by 50%.”

Felicity Rowcliff Dean
Felicity Rowcliff Dean Customer Centred Design Manager

Take your NPS score to the next level


“From an NPS perspective, I have gone Spinal Tap on you guys and gone to 11. I still think the work you did with us, the way you went about it and the deliverables amounted to one of the best pieces of consulting advice I've ever commissioned.”

Matthew Liebmann
Matthew Liebmann Former Chief Operating Officer

Enabling customer-centric design


“Over the last 18 months, we've constantly referred to the work Proto did for us when designing and developing all the improvements to the app we're making. We've found their work to be highly valuable and has resulted in significant improvements to the MyOptus App that, without their insight wouldn't have been possible.”

Lucy Turner
Lucy Turner CX Design Launch Manager

Exceptional prototyping


“The outcome of the prototyping has been exceptional and we continue to use the knowledge and expertise that Proto shared with us during their engagement. The icing on the cake for me was that Proto captured all of the insights from the customer workshops into an organisational asset that we now use as an integral part of our toolkit for training and briefing new team members.”

Sharon Nanetti
Sharon Nanetti Optimal Care Program Director

Prioritising what matters


“Proto's in-depth customer research helped us to uncover underlying customer needs that wouldn't have been possible without an 'outside-in' approach. The team identified the core customer problems and provided actionable insights that enabled us to remove key areas of customer friction and frustration and redesign a credit card experience like no other.”

Christian Johansson
Christian Johansson Head of Marketing, Customer Finance

Achieving a 20 point increase in NPS


“I have worked with Damian and the team at Proto for several years. In this time, they have worked collaboratively with us to build a roadmap of strategic 'outside-in' initiatives that ultimately resulted in a 20 point increase in NPS. They imparted a great deal of CX knowledge, approaches and tools that have been invaluable to the team and the business.”

Amanda O'Donnell
Amanda O'Donnell Head of Customer Experience

Insight driven, customer centric ideas


“Proto revealed and captured a ton of insights, putting Gumtree in a position where we can take our experience from good to great!”

Coen Horrevoets
Coen Horrevoets Head of Product

Award-winning customer experiences


“We won the AFR Smart Investor SMILES award for Best Online Broker. This award is based on customer voting and I believe this was as a result of a clearer focus on our existing clients which you helped us to understand.”

Arni Selvarajah
Arnie Selvarajah Chief Executive Officer

Design that reduces cost to serve


“The Proto team demonstrated flexibility in their approach which made such a refreshing change. They took the time to coach and mentor each of us in a highly creative and energetic environment. Furthernore, they helped us exceed our customer satisfaction targets, all whilst stripping out in excess of 20% of our service costs in under 12 months. Proto helped us to stay focussed on the customer which enabled us to win in the market.”

Matthew Anderson
Matthew Anderson Chief Operating Officer

Service innovation at scale


“We worked with Proto on an exciting & unprecedented challenge at Optus, to design the customer experience of the future. Damian & the team had high energy & together we operated as 'one team'. Proto worked hand in hand with us to bring the internal team up to speed, & also brought in global experts to work with us to take our deliverables to another level of quality & innovation.”

Dan Sunderland
Dan Sunderland Director of Customer Experience Strategy and Planning

Actionable Customer Strategies


“Proto developed a membership strategy that addressed points of friction along our members journey, identified opportunities to improve and clarified the types of engagement that our members needed at the different stages in their career. We were impressed with the depth of insight that Proto were able to bring to the project - as well as the energy and ideas that they helped to generate.”

Sarah Thompson
Sarah Prescott-Thompson General Manager Shared Services

A partnership for CX


“Working with Proto was very much a partnership. We worked hand-in-hand to put CX on the map within the organisation. The team are flexible, trustworthy and do what it takes to achieve the best outcome. If you’re looking for a quality agency, providing quality data and insights – Proto are your guys. We received over 90 initiatives from the project of which 79% have now been implemented and we are seeing the benefits flow through!”

Customer Experience Specialist

Unique Product Innovation


“Proto integrated into multiple simultaneous projects to ensure we achieved the best outcome. They brought real clarity around customer needs, the fundamental elements of our value proposition and provided a clear roadmap of where we're trying to get to. This allowed us to differentiate beyond the traditional proposition. As a result, one customer-informed initiative we developed was loanScore™. This unique innovation helps customers see how good their home loan is and evaluate their options for a better deal.”

Anthony Justice
Anthony Jusitce CEO