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Ever found yourself endlessly clicking through a website trying to buy something simple, only to give up in frustration? Or you experienced the opposite and had a seamless experience ordering dinner where everything just went super smoothly? That’s the difference between companies that understand their users’ customer journey and those that don’t.
In today’s fast-paced digital world, understanding how people interact with and use products or services, whether it’s an app, a website, or even an in-person service, is more critical than ever, as digital has become a crucial component in our lives. The reality is, when companies don’t fully grasp the journey that their customer takes with their products, it leads to a lot of guesswork for them, where they struggle to find what they need, ultimately leading to frustration.
Understanding how customers experience a product, can also be beneficial to help internal work processes: in fact, not having clear insights into where users are getting stuck, can result in teams focusing on the wrong priorities. Developers can be fixing bugs that aren’t critical, designers can be redesigning flows that work actually fine for users, marketers might push features that users don’t care about, and customer support could be bombarded with issues that could’ve been prevented. This not only hurts the product’s performance but also leads to internal friction and wasted resources within the team.
At fresk.digital, we use a method called Customer Journey Mapping to break through these barriers. By getting into the shoes of users and mapping out their experiences, we can spot the friction points, helping teams prioritise fixes, and, ultimately, creating a smoother and more satisfying journey for both customers and employees alike.
Customer journey mapping helps us during our Discover & Strategise phase to better understand the direction the product or service has to take, and we use it as a guideline to validate our decision during our Create & Launch phase as well.
Let’s see how it works!
Simply put, a customer journey is the path a person takes when interacting with a product or service. Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) is the visual representation of the path(s) a customer takes to achieve a goal within this product or service. Starting from a list of specific personas, CJM highlights every touchpoint from the customer's perspective, illustrating their needs, pain points, and emotions throughout their journey. This makes it a powerful tool for understanding users behaviour, improving user experience, and identifying areas for business improvement. By mapping out customers' experiences and touch-points, you can get a clear view of any areas needing improvement for your team or business.
This method can be used for existing products, to analyse the current journeys, or it can be done as a to-be state, to envision how a customer will use a product or service.
Understanding the journey users take, allows us to step into their shoes, understand their mindset, and figure out exactly what’s working and what’s not. It’s like trying to plan a road trip: if you have no idea where people are starting, where they want to go, and what obstacles might pop up along the way, it’s pretty hard to make sure they reach their destination.
By mapping the customer journey, you can uncover the moments that matter, these are the moments in the journey where things can either go very right or very wrong. Whether it’s a confusing sign-up process, slow loading times, or poor communication post-purchase, identifying these pain points is the first step to improving them.
When we approach CJM, we always start with a solid foundation: stakeholder interviews. These initial conversations give us a bird’s-eye view of the overall lifecycle, how the product or service is intended to work, who’s involved, and where the key moments are. From this, we gather enough information to make a list of potential customer journeys and the personas who’ll be walking them.
Once we’ve got that framework, we move on to the real magic: interviews and shadowing sessions with actual users. Shadowing is especially powerful because it allows us to see things from a fresh, unfiltered perspective. Observing users in their real-world context can uncover insights that wouldn’t come up in a standard interview. We might notice things like a step they struggle with or a clever workaround they’ve created that no one else has seen before.
After gathering all this qualitative data, we translate it into a visual journey. This can be done in whatever format fits the project best, whether it’s old-school post-its on a wall, a digital board on Miro or Figma, or even a specialised tool like TheyDo. The journey we create brings together several key elements: the phases of the journey, the steps users take, their actions, the touchpoints where they interact with the service, and, of course, their pains and gains along the way.
Once the journey is laid out, we take the time to validate our findings. We analyse the pains and gains we’ve identified to really get a sense of where users are struggling and where they’re finding value. This analysis leads us to uncover opportunities for improving the overall experience, which we plot into an opportunity matrix together with the involved stakeholders.
From there, we can take it a step further. These opportunities often inspire a new journey, a “to-be” version of the experience, where the pain points are addressed and the gains are amplified. This “to-be” journey becomes our roadmap for building a better product, one that feels intuitive and effortless for the people using it.
Customer Journey Mapping is an essential tool for building better digital products and services.
We’ve applied our approach to great effect for our client Hertek, a company specialising in safety solutions. As part of our work with them, we focused on streamlining their internal processes as well as enhancing the customer experience of their products.
As per our process, we started by interviewing Hertek’s internal stakeholders to understand the core of their product. This helped us quickly identify a valuable area of improvement: the process of registering a new fire alarm installation. By diving deeper through research, focused interview and shadowing sessions, we gained a complete picture of the process. One interesting insight was how enhancing the employees’ experience, by reducing time spent on manual tasks, minimising email exchanges and automating repetitive tasks, could directly benefit Hertek’s customers as well. These improvements not only would streamline the internal workflow, but also create a smoother and more user friendly experience for clients who will initiate their fire alarm installations.
By mapping out the "as-is" journey, we were able to highlight these pain points clearly. With that insight, through a joint session together with internal stakeholders and the development team, we gained buy-in from Hertek to design a new "to-be" journey. This revised process made things much lighter for the internal team, by cutting down the time spent, reducing email overload, and significantly lowering the chance of mistakes. At the same time, it resulted in a far smoother and more user-friendly experience for their customers.
This will result in a new process that takes half the time for both employees and clients, while being much more stable and secure. It was a win-win, and was possible by using Customer Journey Mapping to turn insights into actionable improvements.
Customer Journey Mapping is an essential tool for building better digital products and services. Whether you’re creating an app, a website, or even an entire digital ecosystem, understanding how your users navigate through it can lead to insights that drive real change.
Customer Journey Mapping is powerful because:
At the end of the day, it’s all about making things easier for your customers, making sure to provide that seamless experience you were aiming for. Plus, it’s a great way to align your team. When everyone, from developers to marketers, understands how users experience the product, it’s easier to focus on what really matters: a user centred product or service.
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