Ensuring customer satisfaction across all critical interaction points is pivotal for business success. However, pinpointing these key interaction points can be challenging. Customer journey maps can serve as an invaluable solution in this domain.Service design is a strategic initiative undertaken within the marketing and management realms of businesses.Within the context of website development, this can be likened to user experience (UX) design. In essence, service design entails crafting or fostering positive emotional responses in customers during their engagement with a service or product, with a focus on interactions across various channels (spanning both online and offline environments). A beautifully designed website is insufficient if a customer’s visit to your physical store is a negative experience, or if their tech support call is unsatisfactory.Therefore, service design is a comprehensive business strategy. Yet, this article aims to discuss the application of certain service design principles specifically within the realm of website development and design.Conveying positive emotions to customers hinges on guaranteeing an exceptional experience at every point where they encounter and interact with your business. These points of interaction, known as touchpoints, include:
call center
showroom
website
newspaper
TV
radio
Within a website, these touchpoints might include:
contact web form
help desk/support
phone
live chat
comments section of blog posts
The question arises: How can we pinpoint critical touchpoints on our websites? The answer lies in leveraging one of the most crucial tools in service design: customer journey maps.Customer journey maps depict the path a typical customer takes through our touchpoints, illustrating how their attitudes and feelings may evolve towards our company. 
They enable us to identify touchpoints that significantly influence customer satisfaction
They facilitate a user-centered design approach for our website
They help us pinpoint potential user needs and desires
They offer a clear depiction of the entire user process (which can aid in client presentations and pitches, akin to storyboarding)
They summarize existing information on user behavior
They help identify UX enhancement opportunities and areas at risk of dissatisfaction
Here are the general steps to create customer journey maps:Step 1: Compile and evaluate your current knowledge about your usersEssentially, this step involves gathering and utilizing information from past user research and studies. This approach mitigates subjectivity and avoids drawing conclusions based on assumptions. If your user data is limited, various usability tools can assist in collecting relevant user data. Outcomes:
Insights from user research and studies
A list of touchpoints
A list of user activities during their journey (e.g., researching a product, purchasing it through your online store, seeking help/support for the product, etc.)
Advice:
Avoid drawing conclusions based on unsupported assumptions.
Incorporate employees who regularly interact with customers into the data collection process (e.g., help desk staff, client relationship managers, social media managers, etc.). They often possess valuable insights into user needs and satisfaction levels.
Include decision-makers early on, as the customer journey map and its outcomes can significantly impact product and brand strategy.
Step 2: Address knowledge gapsIdentify what you don’t know and what remains uncertain. For these areas, conduct additional user studies to gather, test, and validate information. Outcomes:
Reports detailing the results of additional studies with answers to our questions.
Advice:
Avoid overemphasizing demographic/statistical data and instead focus on ethnography and the users’ voice.
Analyze the collected data and test your assumptions.
Step 3: Develop user personasWith sufficient data, create an accurate user persona, a fictional character representing the goals and behaviors of your average user. 
User personas are beyond the scope of this article, but here are some resources to help you create them:
Develop Personas (usability.gov)
Personas: The Foundation of a Great User Experience (uxmag.com)
An Experience with User Personas (boagworld.com)
Making Personas More Powerful: Details to Drive Strategic and Tactical Design (boxesandarrows.com)
Ad-Hoc Personas & Empathetic Focus (jnd.org)
Usable Personas is a database of pre-built personas you can use (sites.google.com)
Persona Template is an MS Word template for helping you develop user profiles in projects (sites.google.com)
The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web (amazon.com)
Outcomes:
Insights into user expectations and concerns
Visual representations of target group members as a set of personas
Advice:
Don’t automatically dismiss data that isn’t statistically significant. It can often form the basis for additional hypotheses to be tested in further user research.
Step 4: Create your customer journey mapOutline the highlights of the findings from the previous steps. Start by defining the principles governing the purchase process. For instance, if you’re selling a technical book on JavaScript or PHP, a key principle in your service design is that a purchase is unlikely to be impulsive, as these books cater to professionals already committed to learning.In contrast, items like shoes, junk food, or sale items tend to be impulse purchases, and the principles governing the process are vastly different. Outcomes:
A customer journey map depicting the processes, needs, and user experience during product contact.
Advice:
Focus on important content over details and aesthetics.
Utilize multiple maps if you have more than one user persona. Customer journeys can vary between different user personas.
Don’t overlook the graphic layout of the customer journey map. While content is paramount, layout is also crucial. Use customer journey mapping tools to create an easy-to-understand map, and display it in a public, accessible location for all employees to become familiar with it.
For inspiration, refer to the contents of our customer journey maps: 
Here are additional examples of customer journey maps: 
The creation of your customer journey map is not the ultimate goal; the key is to derive appropriate conclusions from it to enhance the user experience. Initially, identify areas requiring immediate improvement, primarily those that diminish user satisfaction. Once addressed, focus on enhancing satisfaction further.Finally, remember that the use of the customer journey map is an ongoing process. It’s a tool for periodically monitoring user satisfaction and swiftly identifying development opportunities.
Creating a Timeless User Experience
Lessons We Learned from Our Biggest UX and Design Mistakes
Your Guide to Customer Journey Management
