Customer Journey Canvas

Customer Journey Canvas

The Customer Journey canvas is a tool to help you get insight into, track, and discuss how a customer experiences a problem you are trying to solve according to Design a Better Business.

It helps you answer questions such as How does this problem or opportunity show up in their lives? How do they experience it? How do they interact with you?

They also explain that mapping this journey will provide you with insights into how customers experience a product or service, as well as how they might be better served or even delighted. This is especially true when co-creating the journey together with your customers or when validating your assumptions with them. What are the circumstances? How do customers feel throughout? What are the moments when the experience can best be improved?

Customer journeys are not linear. A customer can jump from one phase to another depending on many factors. They interact with some touchpoints and miss out others. It is your job, as a designer, to understand the moments when customers engage so that you can design better experiences for them in the future. This tool helps in looking at your products and services through the lens of the customers.

Canvanizer explains that the customer journey canvas tool supports the audit of existing services and covers not only the period of time associated with the encounter but also the pre-service and post-service phases of the journey. Customer journey maps are typically focused on the front stage encounter from the customer’s point-of-view but as an audit it’d be great to see a complementary version demonstrating the connections with the back stage supporting processes.

And Brucey Industrial Marketing states that they like it because it allows a business to go beyond identifying a customer need, to defining their customer’s changing needs at each key moment (stage) of the overall journey. Businesses can then identify how best to connect with and support their customers throughout the journey.

Of course, no customer journey canvas is totally complete or made without assumptions. Mapping the customer journey is based on the knowledge and insights of your team. This tool simply helps you understand and explore from the customer’s point of view.

The customer journey canvas helps make things real. Through the mapping exercise you can identify where customers get stuck, where they have great experiences, and why. One outcome of using this tool with your team will be the so-called low hanging fruit that you can deliver on immediately. Once you have co-created and assembled the customer journey maps, you can add real customer data gathered through customer safaris, interviews, and feedback. This will enable you to make informed decisions based on reality.

Checkout other business canvases in our Canvas Database