Blog : Market Research

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is not just a technique for big-budget projects or companies, but a critical step in understanding your customers’ needs, desires and pain points. They allow you to stay focused on the consumer, and to identify the ways that you can better serve them.

So what are customer journey maps anyway?

A customer journey map is an illustration of a customer’s experience engaging with a company and its product or service. The map can tell the full story covering the entire customer lifecycle from initial contact to activation, engagement, and beyond or focus on only a part of the story that lays out interactions or touchpoints critical to part of the customer’s experience. What makes these maps unique to traditional funnels is that it focuses on the customer and the questions and motivations behind his/her behavior. This helps to humanize the problems and thus put the consumer at the forefront of a company’s mind and strategies.

These are fairly easy to construct (depending on the level of sophistication you use), and require you to do something you should be doing anyway: observing your customers and talking to them!

There are several forms of journey maps to be aware of, based on the scope of the visualization:

  • User Experience Journey Maps: to chart the digital experience
  • Customer Journey Maps: to holistically examine the full experience

We will focus on the last of these as it is the most expansive, most used, and often the most impactful in identifying big impact areas, and understanding your consumer’s full experience (which is what they will remember).

Another set of customer journey maps depends on the stage of the product. They can be either:

  • Retrospective Maps: in the case of existing products and with actual users where we map existing behavior OR
  • Prospective Maps: in the case of new products where we map how expect a consumer will behave

Here we will be focusing on retrospective maps.

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People Prefer Choice over Better User Experience

Recent research suggests that if consumers perceive that their freedom of choice is limited, they will often switch to a new product from one with which they are already familiar,  (“Why Dominant Companies Are Vulnerable“,  MIT Sloan Management Review,Winter 2012). The researchers, Kyle B. Murray and Gerald Häubl, explain that this phenomenon might be one important reason why market leaders such as Microsoft lose dominant market share over time. For example, consumers might opt to switch to the Firefox web browser and endure the cost of learning a new software simply to exercise their freedom of choice. Not only that, Murray and Häubl found that consumers might make the switch to the competitor even though the competing product is not as good.

The experiment consisted of websites with different interfaces that allowed users to search for new stories. Some participants were allowed to choose the website to use while others were not. Specifically Murray and Häubl found:

51% of consumers who had no choice in selecting the interface they learned to use switched to a competing website as soon as it was available. By contrast, among consumers who were free to choose the website they would learn to use, only 23% switched to the competitor, despite the fact that other users rated the competitor’s website superior on several dimensions (including ease of use, fun, efficiency and effectiveness)… [We] found that the market leader’s advantage in being able to install a set of nontransferable user skills in its customer base is offset by psychological reactance, a force that motivates people to act against perceived constraints on their freedom of choice.

Murray and Häubl go on to explain:

As people learn to use a particular electronic interface associated with information search or online shopping, for example, they often become locked in and develop extremely high levels of loyalty even when otherwise equivalent competitors are available; the cost of switching outweighs the benefit of using another product. However, our research indicates that the depth of loyalty weakens when consumers feel that their freedom to choose is restricted. Specifically, as people feel that their choice is constrained and that one interface dominates the market, they react against the constraint by turning away from the market leader’s offering, thereby subjecting themselves to the associated costs of switching.

What does this mean for product strategy? Strong-arming customers to stick with a particular product might actually alienate them rather than foster their loyalty.

Market Research and the Primitive Urges of the Consumer


ThirdSight Software on a Smartphone Decoding Expression

The BBC reports on an upcoming breakthrough for market research, currently being developed. Dr Roberto Valenti of the University of Amsterdam and Dr Theo Gevers.

The two have established a company, ThirdSight, to take advantage of computerized emotion recognition (decoding emotions from facial expressions). ThirdSight has successfully run its software on a smartphone, but the team acknowledges that results are not yet perfect, requiring a researcher to oversee the software, because it cannot decode context or hidden meanings. For instance, it considers both a happy smile and a bewildered smile as ‘positive’.

This technology poses some promising power in the future of market research.

Read full BBC article »