Customer Journey Storyboard Definition
The customer journey storyboard template is a diagram that outlines a series of steps in a customer journey. This template is a good jumping-off point when creating a customer journey map and is key to understanding every action the customer takes.
Journey mapping is key to creating a positive customer experience, and the first step in this process is analyzing the actions the user takes throughout their journey. The customer journey storyboard breaks down a journey into seven steps, but it can easily be increased if there are more touchpoints in their experience.
Storyboarding Template Walkthrough
Customer experience mapping is a complex process that involves market research, user feedback, and a deep analysis of your product/service. Using a storyboard helps kickstart the journey mapping process by highlighting the user’s tangible actions along their journey. Here is a quick overview of the customer journey storyboard and how to use it.
Step 1: Define Your Scenario
The first step to completing a customer journey storyboard is defining the scenario you plan to analyze. This will be agreed upon by your team and should entail the overall journey the customer takes while using your product. This should be something that you can gather feedback about or measure to make your later analysis credible.
Step 2: Begin Brainstorming
After defining your scenario, begin brainstorming every stage in their journey. Get as narrow as you can to each individual action and how it impacts their experience. List out as many stages as you need to map their entire journey accurately.
Remember to be as descriptive as possible when mapping their steps to gain a deep understanding of their actions and intent.
Step 3: Analyze the Journey
After brainstorming steps and organizing them onto your storyboard, look back and analyze the steps you listed. Are there any key steps that you forgot? Are there places you can already see room for improvement?
This map will be the foundation of creating an effective journey map, so it’s crucial to complete it thoroughly.
Benefits of Storyboarding
Storyboarding is important on its own but also as a part of the greater customer journey mapping process. Here are some brief benefits of storyboarding.
- Creates Empathy: Creating a storyboard forces you to view the customer’s experience from their perspective, helping build empathy. This is key to journey mapping and helps find sustainable solutions.
- Emphasizes Attention to Detail: Storyboarding emphasizes the details within your customer’s journey and prompts you to break down each step into smaller actions. This exposes minor details that might impact their experience that you’d never noticed before.
- Provides Baseline Assumptions: Creating a customer journey storyboard is a great way to understand your baseline assumptions about your users. Whether these assumptions are later verified or not, you will gain some important perspective on the differences between you.
- Implements User-centric Thinking: Storyboarding forces you to look at problems from the user’s perspective and think about their experience. This is an implementation of user-centric thinking, which can be a helpful practice in other areas as well. Practicing user-centricity is a key part of understanding customer requirements and meeting their needs.
Fresco Customer Journey Storyboard Example
The above whiteboard shows how a storyboarding template might be filled out for a customer workshop planning online. Here are the steps in the process, with the analysis to follow.
- Define your Scenario: Planning a virtual workshop over zoom.
- Step 1: Develop curriculum and visuals. Make sure there is unique knowledge and value offered.
- Step 2: Outreach on social media and within their network to people who might be interested. Use university connections to leverage participants.
- Step 3: Send out invites and finalize the guest list for the workshop. Prepare for questions and extra material for anyone interested. Send out online whiteboard links for the meeting.
- Step 4: Facilitate the workshop on Tuesday. Conduct two separate sessions over zoom and through an online whiteboard. Gather feedback and send thank yous.
- Step 5: Incorporate feedback into the next version of the curriculum, and ask participants to spread the word in their networks. Send them the online whiteboard link again as a relic for them to keep.
- Step 6: Add their emails to a drip campaign involving the information discussed.
- Step 7: Send drips every month to boost engagement.
- Analysis: This example shows how complex each step in a storyboard can be, and each of these points could be expanded further into multiple different steps. After mapping this journey, we can see how important the outreach and follow-up steps are to the engagement process. It’s more than just the meeting, and this signifies that an additional boost in these areas could be valuable to the customer.
