Visualizing the customer’s journey is at the heart of UX design or redesign. Creating a data-driven customer journey map (CJM) lets you figure out what users typically do in your app, how they get their tasks solved, and what steps they take to find their way. It also highlights the problems users may encounter when interacting with your app, giving you workable UX/UI improvement and optimization insights.
So, once you decide to hire a UI/UX design firm, you need to check whether they are competent in customer journey mapping and what software they use to create the visual data presentations. Here is our intro to customer journey mapping software; it is conveniently categorized by the approach and tools used by designers.
What Can CJM Give You?
In a nutshell, CJM is a process of visualizing the customer experience. CJM software gives a neat visual presentation of the steps that users take to complete different goals with your apps and products. For example, if you aim to create a hotel booking app, a CJM tool will show:
- what data the users insert in search filters,
- how they review the hotel pages,
- what aspects they pay attention to before making the booking decision,
- which payment methods they use more often,
- what bottlenecks they come across in the process of booking and paying for the order, etc.
Thus, when using CJM software in UX/UI planning, you will get valuable, data-driven insights on a range of subjects.
- Who your user is and what action they want to complete with the help of your app.
- What steps the user makes on the way to task completion, and which of them are easy or cause challenges for them.
- Insights into the app’s functionality and useful/redundant features.
Types of CJM Tools You Can use
You can approach customer journeys from various perspectives, depending on your goals and breadth of coverage. For instance, some companies are more interested in finding out where their users come from (i.e., how they build awareness about their product). Others want to know more about their users’ socio-demographics. Additional points of interest are the steps users take in the app, the tasks they accomplish with the help of specific digital products, and actions they find easy/hard to perform. So, you can choose one of the three CJM tool types to get to know your customers better.
Website and Behavior Analytics
These CJM tools give a broad insight into who your customers are and what actions they perform on your website or in your app. They provide data about traffic and demographic features of your product’s visitors. They also prepare reports about the bounce rate, the percentage of new and returning customers, and your conversion rate. In the behavioral domain, CJM tools offer insights into how users behave on the website, what pages they view the longest, at what point most of them abandon the resource, etc.
Using this information, you can easily identify the problematic points in usability and achieve greater UX by fixing those issues. The most commonly used CJM tools for these goals are Hotjar and Heap.
- Hotjar is an all-in-one tool for getting insights into customer behavior. It collects data and presents it in clear visuals (heatmaps and session recordings) to help you make sense of the information quickly. Other handy tools are a feedback widget and surveys, giving you additional touchpoints with customers.
- Heap also tracks every stage of users’ activities in your resource, clarifying what pain points people experience. The data it provides is invaluable in retention improvement and churn rate reduction. You can regulate the depth of insight, from a general report on monthly user activity to an individual sneak peek into every user’s journey on the website.
Visualization Tools
Visual data is the driver of wise business decisions. Besides, it’s much easier for comprehension, even for rookies in data analysis. Visualization CJM tools enable unrivaled insights into your users’ journey on the website. Besides, they are remote work-friendly and collaborative, helping distributed teams make efficient UX decisions. The top 2 recommended tools are Miro and Gliffy.
- Miro is actually an online whiteboard on which remote teams can work together to visualize customer journeys and develop analytics-based strategies.
- Gliffy is a handy program for building diagrams. It can help you present complex analytical data in simple, user-friendly formats to enhance comprehension.
User Feedback Collection Tools
Apart from measuring the customer journey as an independent researcher, you can give your users a voice in the CJM process. These are referred to as voice-of-customer CJM tools, allowing companies to get first-hand impressions and feedback from their target audience. The most recommended products in this category are InMoment and Clarabridge (Hotjar also has VoC functionality).
- InMoment is an AI-powered bot that elicits user feedback in real-time and gives prompts for more detailed responses.
- Clarabridge is also an AI-powered tool collecting user feedback across the web based on your specified search criteria. It can capture data on-site (in live chats and contact forms) and off-site (on social media and review websites).
Choosing the Right Tool
Now that we’ve covered many CJM tools available on the market and meeting a realm of UX/UI needs, you might feel confused about which one to pick for your project. This is a matter of preference and focus, first of all. You need to keep your CJM’s complexity in mind, figuring out which tool will reflect that complexity better with more business insights.
The tool’s choice also depends broadly on your expertise with the mapping process. Some tools are meant for proficient users, while others match the newbies’ needs. Finally, your expectations matter much; you need to be clear about what you would like to learn from the CJM process. Will it be a sketch of steps in the app, or should it be a bigger picture with information channels, touchpoints, heatmaps, etc.? So, choose the tool wisely and dive deeper into the customer’s perspective. It is a winning approach to product effectiveness and UX improvement.