You may be an entrepreneur, a manager, a designer, or a copywriter. Regardless of your specialization, if your job involves interacting with customers in some way, the key to your success will be to fully understand what your product is like from their perspective. This is why you need to be aware of all the touchpoints your customers go through as they interact with your product, what difficulties they encounter and what you can do about it. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay There are a lot of factors to take into consideration, so it's not always easy to get an overview of the entire customer journey. This is exactly the purpose of customer journey mapping. In this article we'll cover the basics of customer journey mapping and the opportunities it can offer product owners and managers. We'll show you how to create a customer journey map and then use it effectively. What is CJM The general idea behind the Customer Journey Map is to identify all the sales process touchpoints that customers go through along their journey, find out where they may encounter difficulties and confusion and possibly summarize them in a form concise and illustrative. Why CJM Matters Creating customer journey maps can provide insights to all levels of company management. It also highlights gaps in customer experience that would otherwise be difficult to detect. Here is a list of the opportunities that customer journey mapping has to offer businesses: providing an overall view of the entire customer journey; understand the crucial modalities of the customer journey, where further improvements will have the greatest impact; improve customer loyalty by managing pain points and ensuring all necessary information is available at every stage of the customer experience; zoom in on a particular trip from a specific channel; prioritize actions in their long-term user experience strategy. More importantly, a well-crafted customer journey map allows a business to minimize all negative experiences and maximize the efficiency of the journeys a customer takes, which means more sales and better conversion rates. How to Create a Customer Journey Map Of course, there are no hard and fast rules to create a proper customer journey map, as it is something like a work of art and mainly depends on the imagination of the designer. However, here are some guidelines for you to make it more informative. Normally, a customer journey map is a kind of infographic, which includes a timeline of the user experience (ads, awareness, desire, search, choice, purchase, etc.) and a set of criteria to evaluate each stage of the customer journey (customer needs, customer expectations, touchpoints, pain points, problems, ideas, etc.). All of this combined presents a broad picture of the customer experience in an understandable and illustrative way. Define whose journey you will map, in other words, your persona. This can be a particular type of customer, a target customer or a group of customers. A person's choice depends on the purposes of the journey mapping. Once you've created distinct personas, you're ready to create customer journey maps that describe each persona's experience at various stages of the lifecycle with your product or company. Now you're ready to conduct research and collect some data about your customers' experiences. Independently.