Boost business growth and enhance customer interactions with this step-by-step guide to your first customer journey.
A customer journey is a conceptual map that helps you understand how customers interact with your business. By analyzing the customer journey, you can identify pain points, optimize touchpoints, manage activities, and enhance customer satisfaction, all of which drive business growth. It allows for a better understanding of customer behavior and reveals opportunities to improve business and customer relationships. Creating a customer journey is easy and can be done in just five steps. Let’s get started!
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In your Out of Dark dashboard, select the Journeys tab. Feel free to explore our demo journey to get started. Once you're ready, simply click on Create.
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Enter a name for your journey and choose a template from our template library, or start from scratch. For your first journey, we recommend using one of our templates. After making your selection, click on Create Journey to proceed.
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Your Journeys dashboard will now display a new journey card. Journey cards offer a quick overview of your customer journeys, including details such as personas, overall customer satisfaction, and alerts. You can create multiple journeys for different aspects of your product and assign them to accountable team members. To start editing your journey, simply click on the journey card.
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You have now entered the command center for your customer journey known as the Activity map. This is where you’ll find your journey’s primary display, which helps you keep track of your activities.
Activities are essentially your company’s mid to high-level interactions, i.e., advertising, internet sales, customer reviews, product returns, etc., and represent the fundamental building blocks of your customer journey. They can be arranged into distinct phases that map the lifetime of your customers from the time they first encounter your product to when they become brand advocates. To save you time, we’ve prepared these phases for you using the Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Loyalty framework. However this is just a starting point, you can customize both phase names and their order to suit your unique needs.
To add an activity, just click Create, then choose Create activity. Name your activity and select the phase of the journey where you want to add it. Once done, click Create
To add a new phase to your journey, simply click Create, then select Create phase. You will be asked to name the phase and select its position in relation to the other phases Then just click Create! Drag and drop anywhere on the timeline to change its position.
Another central element of the Activity map is the timeline where you attach your company activities. It offers a clear view of the sequence of events, highlights dependencies, and provides a comprehensive understanding of how your customer journey unfolds through each phase.
Give your activities power with goals, metrics, personas, and more, or edit them in the Detail tab. To get there, either click on an activity directly or select the Detail tab.
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The Detail view is where the magic truly begins. This is where you gather all the information about each activity in one location to build a history of your company’s activities. It is organized vertically by phase with each column representing one activity on the Activity map. Fill in the details under each activity with goals, metrics, images, personas, links, and more, and watch your story take shape. To do so, use the customizable widgets in the far left column.
There are many types of widgets to choose from, and it depends entirely on your needs and specific journey which ones you use. These are the most important ones to get started:
- Goals & Actions: Use this widget to define the desired outcomes and plan the exact steps needed to reach them in your activity.
- Metrics: Enter your KPIs and related data for an activity so you can monitor and analyze its effectiveness.
- Pictures: Use images and screenshots to visually depict the mood or essence of an activity.
- Owners: Assign individuals or groups to supervise and manage an activity, guaranteeing accountability and tracking its progress.
- Personas: Include detailed profiles of specific customer segments or target audiences to help you better understand their characteristics, behaviors, and needs.
To add a widget to an activity, simply click Add Widget at the bottom of the widget column. Select the type of widget you would like to add, then click add. Enter relevant metrics, images, descriptions, etc., by clicking edit or mousing over the widget for more interactions. Drag and drop the widget up or down the widget column to change its position.
Congratulations, you've completed your first customer journey with Out of Dark! As you continue your journey, remember this is just the beginning. Experiment, refine, and evolve your approach to drive continuous growth and build stronger customer relationships. If you need more guidance, there's plenty more to read in the instructions for each section of our Guide. To get started why not check out Journeys?