2. TAKING COOPERATION FORWARD 2
PERSONA OR EMPATHY MAP
CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP
A CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP TRACES THE INTERACTIONS FOR TYPICAL CUSTOMERS, THEIR DECISIONS, AND EMOTIONS THROUGHOUT
THE PRODUCT ACQUISITION CYCLE. THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP IS COMPLETED FOR A REPRESENTATIVE PERSONA IN EACH
MARKET SEGMENT. AFTER COMPLETING THE CUSTOMER INTERVIEW WORKSHEETS, YOU WILL SUMMARIZE CUSTOMERS WITH TWO TO
FIVE PERSONAS.
3. TAKING COOPERATION FORWARD 3
PERSONA OR EMPATHY MAP
CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP
A CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP TRACES THE INTERACTIONS FOR TYPICAL CUSTOMERS, THEIR DECISIONS, AND EMOTIONS THROUGHOUT THE
PRODUCT ACQUISITION CYCLE. THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP IS COMPLETED FOR A REPRESENTATIVE PERSONA IN EACH MARKET
SEGMENT. AFTER COMPLETING THE CUSTOMER INTERVIEW WORKSHEETS, YOU WILL SUMMARIZE CUSTOMERS WITH TWO TO FIVE
PERSONAS.
Example: Sharon (persona) is a 33-year old teacher. Her home coffee maker broke on a Monday morning when she needed to arrive at work
early for a meeting with school staff. During breaks in the school day, Sharon checks features and prices of coffee makers online, and she
noticed an ad on television in the break room for a coffee maker. After work, she goes to the mall to pick up her dry-cleaning, so she also
stops at a nearby department store that advertises small appliances and sells brands she trusts. With scheduled exams for her students
during the week, she decides to purchase a coffee maker immediately since it has comparable features and prices compared to the ones she
researched online. She is delighted to receive special coupons via email for disposable supplies, like filters and special blend coffees.
4. TAKING COOPERATION FORWARD 4
PERSONA OR EMPATHY MAP
CUSTOMER EMPATHY MAP
An empathy is a collaborative tool,
teams can use to gain a deeper insight
into their customers. Much like a user
persona , an empathy map can
represent a group of users, such as a
customer segment.
Any good product,
service or designis
only good if it
matches what a
customer desires in
the product.
5. TAKING COOPERATION FORWARD 5
PERSONA OR EMPATHY MAP
CUSTOMER EMPATHY MAP
A CUSTOMER EMPATHY MAP FOLLOWS THE THOUGHTS, FEELINGS, PAINS, AND GAINS OF A POTENTIAL CUSTOMER.
USE THE CUSTOMER EMPATHY MAP TO SELECT FEATURES FOR PRODUCT AND SERVICE DEVELOPMENT SO THAT THE
HIGHEST PRIORITY NEEDS OF THE CLIENT OR CUSTOMER ARE MET. ADDITIONALLY, THE CUSTOMER EMPATHY MAP
IDENTIFIES THE EMOTIONAL PULL OF A PRODUCT OR SERVICE FOR A CUSTOMER AND HELPS TO BUILD THE
CUSTOMER VALUE PROPOSITION FOR THE FINAL PRODUCT OR SERVICE.
6. TAKING COOPERATION FORWARD 6
PERSONA OR EMPATHY MAP
CUSTOMER EMPATHY MAP
A customer empathy map follows the thoughts, feelings, pains, and gains of a potential customer. Use the customer empathy
map to select features for product and service development so that the highest priority needs of the client or customer are met.
Additionally, the customer empathy map identifies the emotional pull of a product or service for a customer and helps to build
the customer value proposition for the final product or service.
Example: Juan (persona) is a 50-year old office manager. He needs to buy a new vehicle because her car is old and becoming
unreliable. Generally, he does not enjoy the car-buying experience, but he wants to get the best vehicle for the money. Juan really likes
some of the features of his current car: manual transmission, quality brand, and reliable. He’s also excited about some of the new
features on his wife’s new car: Bluetooth, lane departure warning, and more trunk space for his golf clubs. He hears a lot about cars
from the guys in the office and he sees a lot of ads on television during football games. With a mixture of excitement and dread, Juan’s
thoughts and feelings about buying a new vehicle are reflected in the customer empathy map.
7. TAKING COOPERATION FORWARD 7
PERSONA OR EMPATHY MAP
QUADRANT 1: THINK & FEEL
•What does the person think and feel?
1. What really counts?
2. Major Preoccupation?
3. Worries and Aspiration?
8. TAKING COOPERATION FORWARD 8
PERSONA OR EMPATHY MAP
QUADRANT 2: HEAR
•What does the person hear?
1. What friends say
2. What teachers say
3. What parents say
4. What Influencers say
9. TAKING COOPERATION FORWARD 9
PERSONA OR EMPATHY MAP
QUADRANT 3: SEE
• What does the person see?
1. Environment
2. Friends
3. What the market offers
10. TAKING COOPERATION FORWARD 10
PERSONA OR EMPATHY MAP
QUADRANT 4: SAY& DO
•What does the person say and do?
PAIN GAIN
1.Fear 1.Wants and Needs
2.Frustrations 2.Measures of
Success
3.Obstacles 3.Obstacles
11. TAKING COOPERATION FORWARD 11
PERSONA OR EMPATHY MAP
QUADRANT 5 & 6: PAIN AND GAIN
•What is the person´s pain and gain?
1. Attitude in Public
2. Appearance
3. Behavior towards others
This presentation gives an overiew on some methods to understand (future) customers better.
The Customer Journey is a tool to help you get insight into, track, and discuss how a customer experiences a problem you are trying to solve.
A Customer Empathy Map is a tool used when collecting data about customers to better understand your target customer base. They allow you to visualize customer needs, condense customer data into a clear, simple chart, and help you see what customers want — not what you think they want. By following this map, you can systematically find answers, without playing a guessing game.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a research-based tool. It examines the story of how a customer relates to the business, brand or product over time. As you might expect – no two customer journeys are identical. However, they can be generalized to give an insight into the “typical journey” for a customer as well as providing insight into current interactions and the potential for future interactions with customers. They can help facilitate a common business understanding of how every customer should be treated across all sales, logistics, distribution, care, etc. channels. This in turn can help break down “organizational silos” and start a process of wider customer-focused communication in a business.
They may also be employed to educate stakeholders as to what customers perceive when they interact with the business. They help them explore what customers think, feel, see, hear and do and also raise some interesting “what ifs” and the possible answers to them.
Adam Richardson of Frog Design, writing in Harvard Business Review says: “A customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination. The more touchpoints you have, the more complicated — but necessary — such a map becomes. Sometimes customer journey maps are “cradle to grave,” looking at the entire arc of engagement.”
Creating customer journeys (including those exploring current and future states) doesn’t have to be a massively time-consuming process – most journeys can be mapped in less than a day. The effort put in is worthwhile because it enables a shared understanding of the customer experience and offers each stakeholder and team member the chance to contribute to improving that experience. Taking this “day in the life of a customer” approach will yield powerful insights into and intimate knowledge of what “it’s like” from the user’s angle. Seeing the details in sharp relief will give you the chance to translate your empathy into a design that better accommodates your users’ needs and removes (or alleviates) as many pain points as possible.
What is a Customer Empathy Map?
An empathy map is a simple, easy-to-digest visual that captures knowledge about a user’s behaviors and attitudes. It is a useful tool to helps teams better understand their users. Empathy mapping is a simple workshop activity that can be done with stakeholders, marketing and sales, product development, or creative teams to build empathy for end users. Originally invented by Dave Gray at Xplane, the empathy map was made in an attempt to limit miscommunication and misunderstanding about target audiences, including customers and users.
Creating an effective solution requires understanding the true problem and the person who is experiencing it. The exercise of creating the map helps participants consider things from the user’s perspective along with his or her goals and challenges.
Empathy maps are most useful at the beginning of the design process after user research but before requirements and concepting. The mapping process can help synthesize research observations and reveal deeper insights about a user’s needs. (The maps are most effective when based on research data, but like provisional personas, can be built using knowledge from internal participants or using existing personas.) It can help guide the construction of personas or serve as a bridge between personas and concept deliverables.
When included in early project stages, the exercise helps teams enter the user’s world and approach things from his or her point of view before creating solutions—whether it’s ideas for content, a webpage design, app prototype, or new service offering. The benefits include:
Better understanding of the user
Distilled information in one visual reference
Callouts of key insights from research
Fast and inexpensive
Easily customizable based on available information and goals
Common understanding among teams
Step 1: Establish Focus and Goals
Who is the person for the map?
This is the user who you want to understand and empathize with. Summarize his or her situation and role. If you have multiple personas, each one will need their own map.
What is the desired outcome?
This is what you hope the user will do. What does success look like? For example, what does he or she need to do differently or decide? While the exercise is about building empathy and not selling or designing anything, answering this question helps focus participants and set context for the activity.
This section mainly focuses on the customer’s emotions and feelings. You want to find out what really matters to the customer, what are their major concerns?
How do they react to certain things, and are they are happy with your service or product?
Here, you need to identify who or what is influencing your customers.
Who are they listening to and getting their advice from? Are they influenced by family and friends or do they trust the media and advertising more?
You also need to focus on how and where they get their information: through which channels or means. Are they using social media, certain blogs, watching TV news, or reading magazines and newspapers? This will be very important when you come to choosing where to focus your advertising budget.
Within this part of your map, you want to assess what is happening in the market. What are other competitors doing? Do they see a change or a shift in the industry?
Also, what are their friends doing and using?
You can also ask your team to provide more details on what problems your ideal customer is exposed to on a daily basis and what exactly is in their environment.
All this information is valuable to understand their external influences, how is this affecting them, or how will this affect their purchasing behaviors. You can then use this to be proactive in creating products that solve a problem they foresee.
What are they actually saying in public about us or to us, and what do we wish they were saying?
Are the things they say accurate, or based on external influences and brand gossip?
You should be able to understand these behaviors and map out a clear strategy to make a shift in their performance. Then educate and help them to buy a specific product or service by adding value.
From there, you will be able to further understand if their words match their actions and what really matters to them. Frequently people do one thing and say another, especially if they are not informed accurately about the industry.
If you have them, you can place direct customer quotes in this section.
The final two sections, pains and gains, are optional but certainly beneficial.
The pains section is where you want to find out what are their fears, frustrations, and the obstacles they need to overcome. You can then use this information to find out what is stopping them reach their goals and desires, such as roadblocks or challenges.
In the gains section, you should include information regarding your target customers success, and how they obtained it. This will also include their goals, wants, and needs; what exactly makes them happy on an everyday basis.
The persona canvas can be used to give a customer segment a face and name and make it easier to step into the shoes of the customer. Personas make talking about customers and their characteristics more tangible and concrete, and make it easier to refer back to a pattern of characteristics. Personas make it possible to create and share mental models and have a common language about several customer types.
Change or streamline the categories to work with the session goal, persona or available data. For example, if the customer is a purchasing manager at a B2B company, feelings might not have been relevant or revealed by the research. Make whatever changes are needed to ensure the outcome is useful and the session is productive.
When all the sections are complete, take a moment to reflect. Have participants share their thoughts on the experience. Ask how it changed their perspectives or if it produced new insights. Capture conclusions and ideas the team generated, take pictures, or create a new electronic version for sharing online.
