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hey everyone I'm here to talk about why you should ditch the funnels ditch jobs to be done and instead here's how you can map your customer Journeys to build your product products or Services better but again why does knowing your customer matter you want to know how to make your prospective customers uh either sign up or discover your product maybe upgrade to a paid version or a higher higher premium version of your product and retain them in the long term and there are many ways for you to know about your products about your customers one that you might have heard of before is the marketing funnel here are some examples from semrush and one where I worked with the b2c SAS company before uh which talks about in and visualizes it very well on how you have a lot of customers who may be aware of your product a few of them go through the other stages so this is great at visualizing your numbers what it isn't good at is providing an explanation why did customers go from one step to the other it also assumes all of your customers a uniform which you know is not true every customer or a lot of customers are different from other customers then there's jobs to be done uh which this is great at understanding how your product is service fits in the overall customer Journey or overall life of a customer and it tells you the why of why did a customer sign up to your product what it doesn't tell you is how did they hear about your product uh and what's the distribution of your customers how many are doing the diff using the different features within your product then there's the design thinking emotional roller coaster and the one example here is from windmill digital another is when I was working with a b2c restaurant booking app uh and you can see that it's great that it provides some visual imagery it also provides a understanding of the emotions that your customers are going through uh what it it's lacking though is it's assuming everybody starts from the same entry point and exits or churns from the same exit Point that's not really true everybody might discover a product with with a different reason and to a different Channel it also does not quantify these parts it sometimes focuses too much on micro emotions for example on the left side there's one which says the cashier wasn't very helpful or here there's something which says somebody says no to the restaurant that this group wanted to go to I'm sure you can I guess that these are not Universal these are not things that every customer or most customers of yours are going through these are a very anecdotal for for a customer now let's take the fourth example of storyboarding storyboarding was uh is used by fbmb sorry it's also used by Disney to visualize the story or the Journey of your customer and this is great to have visual tools to share with your stakeholders Airbnb in fact hired a pixel illustrator to build the storyboard in their office in San Francisco but do you have a pixel Pixar quality illustrator with you to build such storyboards or and do you have in some kind of offline or physical product that you can use to visualize this also this doesn't tell metrics so before we step for uh move to the next thing I would recommend you take put a timer for two minutes pause on this video and write down your customers Journey take your customer from discovering your product and signing up to churning from your product okay um assuming you pause the video you came back or you just skimmed through let's go to the next part so why does a customer Journey map matter you want to know how to make your prospective customers buy your product uh upgrade to your maybe your paid plan and retain them for the longer term but does the marketing funnel tell you why or what makes a prospective customer do either of these things uh it doesn't what about Job student does it tell you how many customers are at different stages of your pipeline it doesn't so how do you find out how many customers where when why are they to doing and imagine that's where customer Journey Maps helped me and I'll walk you through a few examples of where they help me make product decisions and how you can build it when you should build but before before we look at customer Journey Maps where does this content and where do I come from uh I'm hashel patil I run a product consulting company spark Creative Technologies where I work with B2B SAS companies to help them improve their customer experience including helping them with customer research before this I've had product experiences at uh most recently as a staff product manager at twilio before that I've had product management and Engineering experiences at Cisco tellesign qualcomm.com I did my undergrad in IIT kanpur from India and my MBA from UCLA in California so let's come back to a customer Journey map here's one example for a hotel a budget hotel platform that I worked with so I use this example as my first example because any viewer has likely been to a hotel or an Airbnb or booked one and with the with the first thing that you'll notice when you look at this this is very monotonous this is very Monarch romantic is it's not a lot of colors here it's not it's also very uninspiring but it's valuable it's valuable for you to have discussions with your stakeholders and bring them to the same page about what needs to be done for your customers and how should your customers be informed about any changes I'll walk you through this customer Journey now remember the first part of a customer Journey starts in their mind a customer may book a flight to Portugal and then realize oh I need somewhere to stay there that's the part you see here outside where the user realizes they need somewhere to stay they may open your app they may search and evaluate through multiple options confirm and pay for one of your options so go through your checkout process let me receive a confirmation email immediately or it could be a text message they may receive a reminder email later on closer to the date when they're flying and it's similar just as this can be email or text or push notification similarly it can be an app it can be a website it can be some other form of interaction with them now they are stepping out of the first step out of your web app or website into your email but they're still connected to you now they are completely out of your software whether it's but they are still part of your journey they are entering your hotel imagine the first time you open the hotel door you step inside or the first time you enter a hotel lobby and you're looking for the check-in desk this is that step in the experience the hotel for a few days and leave the hotel when they leave the hotel do they have a checkout flow do they need to pay for the minibar or all those things are part of this node of the experience then you may send them a csat survey where they look at where we ask them feedback for what went well what didn't then we can try to connect the dots for this entire Journey based on that feedback let's use what we built to solve some example problems and I worked when I was talking to this business they were looking to improve their customer experience and move their positioning from Budget Hotel platform to a premium brand so let's use this framework good customer experience is when the reality matches expectations and luxury brand is when the expectations are of exclusivity premium feel luxury so where can now let's take the question of which nodes would you focus on for either of these uh we'll take it first the example of a good customer experience if the reality is part of the accommodation but we do let's assume we can't change that that will mean we want to go and change the expectations where do we set the expectations for the customers set a few stages one is at search and evaluate when they are looking at the hotels and they're looking at the information maybe there's some information that's not too pertinent to decide between hotels but it's pertinent before they pay you money because once they pay you money they are committing themselves so maybe at the confirm and pay the checkout processities you want to give them your disclaimers and your explanations for how the experience what expectations should they have for the experience or when you send them a confirmation email or reminder email have clear call to actions for anything that they need to do before they enter the hotel for example is there a kyc no your customer requirement for in the for the country that they're going to put any hotel uh Travelers for a premium brand uh think of exclusivity and let's talk about the first node open the app think of somebody who can open an app on their phone and book a hotel does that sound exclusive to you does interview what about somebody who can still open an app maybe but it's either it's maybe it's a paid app you pay a subscription fee for it or you have concierge who who work walks you through what kind of Hotel would work well for you for the situation now think of search and evaluate node for exclusivity and luxury when you are showing your list of hotels do you want to show the biggest number as the price of the hotel and make people index on the price or do you want to hide that because that's something that you are implying does not matter to a premium brand or a luxury Traveler there are a few ways for you to play with this experience the other thing could be when they are at the hotel they are experiencing it as a premium or a luxury brand you want to point out to them there are no incidentals use whatever you want in the minibar it's all inclusive don't worry about any small thing when you are here so these are a few ways where I and when I was working with this business we were also looking at how to improve the customer satisfaction survey and how do we get more transparency into the customer Journey map but we talked about a few ways how you can think of changing the customer experience or changing the brand positioning and as I'm sure you can guess there's a lot more layers that you would want to go through to execute on this this work there are three simple steps to draw any customer Journey map for any kind of product you start with the skeleton from what you remember we may add maybe like few details to it and you draw rest of the effing hour or the journey map that's basically this is the draw the owl mean maybe you have seen it it's it's trying it's pointing out that you can start with the basics but to reach the end goal there's a lot of things you have to figure out on the way so let's do that process let's draw take five minutes to draw your customers Journey take your customer from discovering your app and signing up to churning and take five minutes put a timer draw it and then come back to it to this video because this that will help you internalize the next few steps and uh the way to think of this is what do you know about your customers Journey don't go around looking for details don't go around and do your product analytics or interviewing customers right now so straw what you remember okay let's move to the next part um and think again of what did you find to be easy in this and what was tricky for this as you drew it and now let's go back to those three simple steps with more details than the mean first step is draw from memory on a pen and paper it can be a digital pen on a digital paper it's totally good that's what I have done in a few videos that I've uploaded earlier which I'll link in the description uh understand your customers Behavior this is a huge bucket in itself we'll unpack that but basically you started with the skeleton now you want to understand which parts of the skeleton are true and what else do you need to add once you understood your customers Behavior thoroughly you want to synthesize your understanding by adding nodes quantifying the different connections between nodes and pruning unlikely paths we'll do this through an example let's draw it for a B to C SAS premium product I'll walk through this jargon b2c means a business you're selling not to other businesses but to individual consumers SAS means you're selling a software product but you're not selling the product you are selling access to the product premium means you there's a free version of your product and customers can pay more to get unlock more features uh now drawing from memory with the pen and paper I have not even told you what product this is but you can still guess these few steps of any B2B b2c SAS female product you the app you do the core task of the app uh and this could be an app or you go to the website core task could be something like on grammarly where you're accepting the edits that it recommends to you or on Spotify you play a song push notification you may get a push notification to come back to the app in some way for on Spotify it's you you keep getting push notifications to continue listening or whenever you connect to your car Bluetooth it starts playing or programmingly even if you are not asking it for suggestions it will start popping up to say we can review this document for you then upgrade or Go premium uh pay the premium version go to the higher like unlock more stuff for it using the premium account you just stop using the product and here the example I'm going to use is distill.io I worked with digital.io on improving their customer experience here's an example what does digital.io do it can monitor websites web pages for changes on the web pages for example I was tracking a 600 pound mechanical keyboard that I wanted to buy for my wrist Pane and it I could use this to monitor the stock availability of the product on a website uh so that's now let's let me explain more about the product so and align this to Earth two dimensional axis so the two Dimensions here are on the x-axis chronological for the customer the mole to the left the earlier they are in their life cycle the more to the right the later they are in their Journey uh left the top to bottom is transparency of customer needs how much visibility do we have into what the customer is looking for what the customer is doing when they when they are on a social media website you don't have as much visibility onto what all pages that they go to to figure you out but you have some visibility that okay this post of mine has five likes or fifty thousand guys but when they are using your app or they are on your website or your especially apps let's say you have a lot of visibility this could be through hot jar amplitude mixed panel of those where you're getting to know each and every click that your customer is doing uh and what you could help that could help you understand some confusions that they're going through let's walk through this journey installing the app happens on the Chrome Store or Apple Store in this case because digital.io is most popular as a browser extension then let me create a monitor which is the core task here they are tracking the stock availability of something uh then they may receive an email alert uh so they are receiving the email alert so that's again some kind of push notification they may upgrade or Go premium and they may downgrade they will stop using the product now how do we understand customer Behavior we have drawn the first step we have drawn it at a very high level based on what we can like based on the very simple understanding of the product what can we do more so now is the step to understanding customer Behavior I recommend merging anecdotes and data to be able to understand your customers during your experience so there are these three ways for it one is quantitative where you have product analytics Heap analytics mixed panel amplitude all of those which gives you a lot of data points uh for our like lot of distributions of customer behaviors but very little why did customers do something the qualitative qualitative anecdotes are things such as survey responses forums support tickets uh escalations to the product team there are fewer data points than the quantitative data but this is still helping you understand uh patterns but also now you are getting a better sense of why did something happening glasses interviews where you may do a few interviews but that really gives you deep insights into the mental model of the customers so a lot of why not a very few interviews so there's more information here which you can pause and take a look at I've covered this in more detail in an article that I've Linked In the description now we complete the step 3 of the customer Journey map for this product I'll walk you through some of my findings here for example I found out that once a user realizes they need web monitoring uh they may go to Reddit or forums or Facebook groups and say hey I I know you I'm trying to buy Nvidia GPU but it's really hard to find what's working for you guys to buy it so they get referred by somebody on a social media or Forum page to their uh to to the product and I found that 15 of traffic was from social media or they could search and evaluate an example of that is they go to Google and this how do I track uh Nvidia or how do I track the changes in stock availability for a product 25 of traffic was from search engines so knowing this could help me uh work with the business to prioritize how much of the time should we spend on solving for C versus B how can we make it easy for one user on a forum to refer our product to another user on the phone versus how can we make it easy for Google being dock.go to find our product for the different things that our people are searching for the users are searching for then a gradual reveal of the other parts here they'll come to our website after installation so till that point they are not even on our website so once they come on our website we have better understanding of what they are doing they may create a monitor in this case we realize that 80 users do this core task within the same day as they the extension on app 40 users at any time in their life create monitors which means we can't track 60 of our users only 10 to 15 uses Go premium and big only those users can go premium who have created an account so if I were to ever send some kind of marketing messages through the app I should only focus on users who have accounts um or or if you are new in their Journey then 80 are churning after six months so now how did I use this journey map one I found out that a lot of users have errors at any given point and this is one of the reasons that users might turn around great so this helped me understand that one of their priorities is to provide the right documentation and connect this documentation to the app to help them debug their use cases now yes we can reduce the number of errors that anybody gets that's an ongoing long-term core roadmap project I can think of the counter model providing them the steps so that they can themselves debug and solve their problems despite a wide variety of problems that each user might face can reduce us the join our downgrade second thing here was we were looking to add new marketing channels for video content and textual blogs content of a different case study style how do I find out why are customers finding this for so I can figure out what kind of content will resonate the best with let's say YouTube audience there's another thing that we looked at solving using the customer Journey map so these two things one creating a new marketing channel or campaign to uh finding the most important part to focus on were decisions that I could make by use looking at the customer Journey map another example here values of a B2B setting is of billing hundred thousand plus customers in this case and you can think of this when you receive a utility bill or a Broadband bill with from somebody you you may receive an email that their bill is available on the website go to the website to download the bill or invoice and you may have some confusions if you do you reach out to support now let's take this whole experience and make it in a B2B context so we emailed the invoice to some customers there is some customers may open the web portal and download the invoice either way then they read the invoice they may reach out to support or they may open some how-to articles to clarify their questions are the email the PDF that we emailed uh is it's on email so we have because emails can have tracking you may have heard of MailChimp and Market over and send it in so many different tools that you can use to track the emails that you have sent whereas a document if somebody has a PDF document in front of them I'm sure you can imagine it's very hard to track what's happening and the scenes there if they reach out to support you have better tracking because now it's in your system it's like some kind of support ticket handling system if they're on your web portal you have a lot of insights because they are you're able to track every click and every wait time every confusion that your customer may have now we have unveiled it from step one to step three you can see a lot of things changed and and now let's you can see a lot more nodes get got added a lot more like connections between nodes got added but how exactly is this happening so where did the data come from so what's the step two like so I have again we'll use the same inverted pyramid framework uh and here are some logos of some tools or some methods that help me get this data on the top for interviews you'll find Zoom calendar Google Docs as a representation of customer interviews on the bottom you'll find look a Google Big Data bigquery Heap analytics and grid Google analytics in the middle you'll find jira Salesforce Google Sheets centers and let's instead of going more in detail here let's talk about this in the next slide where we overlay these logos I'll walk you through a few examples pen grid on the left bottom side again tells me how many people receive the email how many open the email when did they open the email and how often did they keep coming back to the same email once they open the email do they click on any links in there or do they close it off within a few minutes so that's the information that I can get using same grid let's look at Heap analytics it tells me how many users open the web portal at the end of the month which is when invoices are generated how many users maybe download the documents at that point or they go and change their email preferences to start receiving emails of the invoices so stop receiving emails uh some the example zendesk support tool as an example for customers to reach out to support and for us to track all our cases we can also have escalations through jira or Salesforce to product teams which we can track for what questions are the support not able to answer of the customers so when can you build this um I guess before when can you build this let me talk about a few examples where I use this customer Journey map you see right in front of you one I realized that uh based on some initial research I really found that there was some portion of the invoice which was really confusing to customers so I remove that part from the invoice and started revamped the invoice and sent it out to customers suddenly there was an influx of questions to the support team and escalations to the product team that there's this crucial section which we need from some other customers and we really need it you need to put it back right now and send us an updated invoice and that was not possible because they were ish there were issues in that challenge in that section but I needed to understand the customer Journeys that I can find better ways to solve it I realize that customers I I found out the journey here so in customers are reading the invoice they are reaching out to support at that point but there's another place where this information exists so if customers are searching for that information in the invoice at a specific part in the invoice can I point them to the web portal where they can find this information in a more accurate Manner and in a self-service manner versus relying on a PDF to be delivered to them or versus reaching out to the support at the same time support will always have some questions from some customers about the same thing so instead of making them reach out to r d or to product team and wait for a response what kind of tooling can I for a make discoverable for supporting so that they can solve these problems faster for customers so this was an example of um reducing dissatisfaction among customers by using the customer Journey map to find the right nodes of changing something another example was a time when there were about 10 000 plus customers who had sent really angry emails to a team and this was a team of just two people so two people handling 10 000 plus emails was just impossible they were overwhelmed and I realized that this was because when we sent an email to customers they would read the email they would just reply to the email with a single sentence question and that would go into a black hole because that two people team was not meant to look at inbound questions so this customers would be really worried and get angry once they did not receive their response at some point they were escalated to the support team and the start of the escalation was already at an angry footage although this team had never heard of them so by looking understanding this journey I could figure out if I change the reply to email if I change the sender email for the customer if I set up an auto reply these are simple process changes that I could do because they were there was nothing wrong with the product but we still had a lot of dissatisfied customers so the journey helped me understand how to redesign the process to improve customer experience when can you build this one example is when you want to start a new product or service you want to build something you're starting from scratch an example of this is I unders realize that the customer Journey or a user Journey for an aspiring product manager we have a resume they submitted to a few places they get back rejections they immediately go to resume checkers online and start editing the resume or they go to the job description put that copy paste it in and try to compare their resume with the job description they're trying to match their resume to show the skills that a product manager needs and that was a helpful for me to understand that I should I could build a product management resume Checker and launch it which I did earlier this year and it helped or get few paid and from customers foreign the other example is when you see there's a drop in customer satisfaction I talked about an example where customers there were a lot of dissatisfied customers because I removed information from the invoice and how I use the customer Journey map to understand how do I provide the right invoice information to them in the short term enable the support team in the medium term and in the long term what information should be provided in which format and where to customers third example is a marketing campaign launch a channel launch we talked about an example of building video content for digital.io finding the right places to share this information also documentation to help customers solve their own problems and surfacing the documentation at the right point in the journey fourth example is of a process redesign I talked about how the emails that customers would send was going into a black hole into an overwhelm overwhelmed team and how we looked at improving that so think back again take two minutes of your time think back to this month where can you use customer Journey Maps as a tool and again like you can use it for new product development processary design dissatisfied customers or new marketing campaign or challenge uh think about this this would be a great way for you to internalize the learnings you had and also find out what works well amongst this and what's useless out of these tools so what can you take away today from this this video that you have watched one you can visualize a map to show the why how many where when how of your customers you can combine data empathy qualitative data quantitative anecdotes to Uno and quantify your customers Journey you can review The Journey at launch review or design stages using this journey map to make things better and again think back to what else surprised you and let me know I'd love to uh take action on that and help you on those friends and these are a few coordinates that we can stay in touch with Beyond this video