Visualize customer touchpoints, deepen your understanding of their experiences, identify areas for improvement, and strategize to enhance overall customer satisfaction.
Now that you’ve set up your customer journey, click on it in the Journeys tab to dive in. You’ll enter the Activity Map, the command and control for your entire journey. This is where you’ll find your journey’s primary display, which helps you monitor your activities and manage the ins and outs of your journey. Think of it as a visual mind map of your company’s mid to high-level interactions with customers, which we call Activities.
The Activity Map offers you various options to fine-tune your journey. These functionalities are easily accessible from the menu at the top of the page, right next to your journey's name:
- Edit Name and Description: Update your journey's name and description to reflect its current focus or strategy.
- Add Metrics: Enhance your journey's effectiveness by adding relevant metrics. This helps in better tracking and analyzing its performance.
- Change Color: Change your journey’s color to make it visually distinct and easier to identify.
- Export Data: If you need to analyze your journey's data externally, share it, or present it to investors you can export it directly from this menu.
- Delete Journey: Should the need arise to remove a journey, you can do so easily from this same menu.
In Out of Dark, you can switch between three different views of your journey - the Activity Map, the Detail view, and the Warnings view, each of which we'll explore in detail.
Invite colleagues to join your journey by clicking on the share button. Enter their name, email, and designate their team, then send the invitation. To invite multiple people at once, simply click the Additional Member button.
Get a quick update on how the journey is doing, and quickly gauge its overall satisfaction and readiness with a fun smiley happiness meter.
Journey Phases
It is often helpful to organize your customer journey into four distinct phases starting when your customers first discovery your company to when they become its stalwart advocates. While there are various frameworks and terminologies to describe these stages, they fundamentally embody the same principle. To simplify the process, we set every journey up using the Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Loyalty framework (which segments the audience based on their engagement level, from initial awareness, "Awareness," to considering a product or service, "Consideration," deciding to make a purchase, "Purchase," and finally to post-purchase engagement and loyalty, "Loyalty"), however, this is merely a starting point. Feel free to customize it, rename the phases, or rearrange their order, to fit your unique needs.
To maximize the effectiveness of your journey, it's important to clearly define each phase, including its purpose, actionable steps, and key metrics for success. For instance, in the "Awareness Phase" of her eco-conscious online clothing shop, DreamCatcher, Carrie could use the following description:
To effectively measure the success of each phase in your customer journey, remember to include relevant metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). To add these, simply click the three dots next to the journey name. It's important to note that metrics added to one phase will not affect other phases. For a deeper understanding of how each phase functions in Out of Dark, you can find more information here.
To create a new phase, click the yellow “plus” button marked Create and choose Create Phase. Then name it and select where on the timeline you wish it to appear. Finally, click create. Phases can be further customized by dragging and dropping them anywhere along the timeline.
Activities
Activities are the main building blocks of your customer journey and are essentially your company’s mid to high-level interactions, i.e., advertising, internet sales, customer reviews, product returns, etc. They are most effective when they are tailored to each phase and represent the specific steps you are taking to reach your goals for that phase. For Carrie's "Awareness Phase," activities could include showcasing eco-conscious products on Instagram, crafting educational blog posts about sustainable materials, and partnering with influencers who share her eco-friendly ethos.
Activities in Out of Dark play a crucial role in shaping the customer journey. They represent specific company actions or interactions with customers. These activities can be touchpoints, milestones, or other significant customer-related events. By strategically placing these activities along the journey's timeline and assigning them well-defined goals and metrics, you:
- Get a quick high-level mind map of the ongoing or upcoming customer activities and a clear overview of the entire customer journey.
- Can track and analyze the impact of each activity on the overall customer experience.
- Ensure accountability and regular updates on the status of each activity.
- Gain insights into how customers feel at each stage of the journey.
- Highlight areas where the company can enhance its services and address arising opportunities.
To create a new activity and attach it to the timeline, click the yellow “plus” button marked Create and choose Create Activity. Then name it and select the phase on the timeline you wish it to appear. Finally, click create. Activities can be dragged and dropped anywhere along the timeline.
Timeline
The timeline is a core element of the Activity Map, spanning all phases from discovery to retention. By mapping activities to the timeline, you can visualize the chronological order and continuity of the company’s key customer interactions within the journey and gain a clear overview of when activities occur and how they are interconnected. Additionally, the timeline helps you:
- Visually map out activities, making it easier to grasp the overall structure of the customer journey.
- Spot gaps or overlaps in activities, helping to maintain a seamless and well-organized sequence of actions in the customer journey.
- Monitor the progression of activities over time, so you can easily pinpoint completed tasks and delays.
- Boost teamwork and dialogue among team members by providing a clear and mutual understanding of the schedule and enhancing effective collaboration.
- Make data-driven decisions regarding the timing, sequencing, optimization of activities, patterns, trends, and areas of improvement.
Learn more about mastering your customer journey by checking out the Detail view, or choose another article in Journeys.