Journey maps are game-changing tools to illustrate your current customer experience, highlighting friction points that impact loyalty.
If you’ve researched the topic, you may have noticed that different creators apply the 10+4 criteria of an effective customer journey map very significantly. As a critical input to your customer journey design, journey maps need to grab your reader’s attention and quickly communicate the emotional impact of your experience, highlighting areas that most require focus..
Below is my take on how to map a health insurance purchasing journey. You can see that it applies the 10 criteria, specifically showing the highs and lows on the journey. But it’s just one approach.
As an alternative, I reached out to Sproute Creative to see how they would approach this same journey. I’ve worked with Constantina in the past, and really enjoy her vision. She created the journey map at the top, which I am using for my new brochure.
You’ll notice a number of consistencies. For example, both show level of emotions on the vertical axis, and both highlight the customer persona on the left.
But you can also see very different interpretations of the criteria. Constantina elected to create a special callout for the moments of truth. She also collapsed the journey section to enable room for verbatims and related research. Lastly, she abandoned the 11×17 format to allow a foldout that clients can bring with them.
What I have found is that researchers tend to like my design, but most clients prefer Sproute Creative’s. That comes back to your customer – your design needs to match their needs, calling out what is most critical for their journey. These are just two possible ways to accomplish that.