Insights On Customer Journey Touchpoints

Great journey maps start from the intersection of user touchpoints. A customer journey map shows a customer's experiences with your organization, from when they identify a need to whether that need is met. Journey maps are often shown as straight lines with touchpoints explaining a user's challenges. start •—------------>• finish At the heart of this approach is the user, assuming that your product or service is the one they choose to use in their journey. While journey maps help explain the conceptual journey, they often give the wrong impression of how users are trying to solve their problems. In reality, users start from different places, have unique ways of understanding their problems, and often have expectations that your service can't fully meet. Our testing and user research over the years has shown how varied these problem-solving approaches can be. Building a great journey map involves identifying a constellation of touchpoints rather than a single, linear path. Users start from different points and follow various paths, making their journeys complex and varied. These paths intersect to form signals, indicating valuable touchpoints. Users interact with your product or service in many different ways. User journeys are not straightforward and involve multiple touchpoints and interactions…many of which have nothing to do with your company. Here’s how you can create valuable journeys: → Using open-ended questions and a product like Helio, identify key touchpoints, pain points, and decision-making moments within each journey. → Determine the most valuable touchpoints based on the intersection frequency and user feedback. → Create structured lists with closed answer sets and retest with multiple-choice questions to get stronger signals. → Represent these intersections as key touchpoints that indicate where users commonly interact with your product or service. → Focus on these touchpoints for further testing and optimization. Generalizing the linear flow can be practical once you have gone through this process. It helps tell the story of where users need the most support or attention, making it a helpful tool for stakeholders. Using these techniques, we’ve seen engagement nearly double on websites we support. #productdesign #productdiscovery #userresearch #uxresearch

What does neuroscience teach us about the customer journey? It's a predictable, human process: ➡️ Value is learned. The brain uses reinforcement learning to make action-outcome associations and inform future decisions. This means the customer’s journey is not only about learning to use new technology, but evaluating the offering and deciding whether you can be trusted. ➡️ Expectations matter. During reinforcement learning, the brain reflexively compares outcomes to expectations and determines if the decision produced a reward or a punishment. This means expectations are as important as outcomes, and ensuring you meet or exceed them is essential. ➡️ Expectations change over time. Once an outcome occurs, the brain adjusts expectations in the direction of the reward or punishment to minimize prediction errors. Past is prologue; a series of good or bad experiences affects what your customer expects will happen next. ➡️ What starts right, stays right. Initial expectations are very fluid, based on perceptions, similar experiences, and what other people say. Once it coalesces, this anchor point has outsized influence on the trajectory. So your crucial first step is ensuring expectations are properly set with all decision-makers. ➡️ Not every touchpoint is important. Memory is extremely limited, so the brain only bothers to store events that are novel, relevant, salient, surprising, or filled with emotional content. This means you must manage a critical few moments well, rather than a trivial many. ➡️ Emotions rule. Besides the preferential recall, emotions dominate decision-making. Logic mostly sits on the sidelines unless greater discrimination is needed for a decision. This means you must pay closer attention to how your customers feel than what they think. ➡️ Bad events are more impactful than good ones. Due to natural selection, the brain weighs negative episodes about twice as much as positive ones, especially when it comes to subconscious threats. So minimizing negative experiences trumps maximizing positive ones. ➡️ Once established, beliefs linger. During reinforcement learning, the brain gains confidence when expectations, good or bad, become accurate predictors. This creates a belief, which is then used to filter new information. So time is limited to shape your customer’s perceptions for the long term. The takeaways? Science underscores the critical need to do things right the first time, from clearly setting value expectations before the sale to ensuring value is realized afterwards. And the process can’t be left to chance. Executing a few things well makes all the difference between a customer that leaves and one that stays and buys more.