What is a Customer Goal in a Journey Map?
Dive into the role of customer goals in journey mapping. Discover how understanding goals can help a business achieve its business objectives.
What are Customer Goals?
Examples of customer goals in various industries:
- At Starbucks, the customer aims to order and enjoy a coffee.
- At McDonalds', customers want convenient meal options while traveling.
- At Lowe’s, the customer seeks professional advice and/or materials for home renovation.
- At John Deere, customers seek timely maintenance and repair services for their current John Deere equipment.
- At Zimmatic, customers aim to improve irrigation efficiency on their farm.
Customer Goals Within a Journey Map's Context
Grouping your customers becomes essential because if you group them based on their common goals, you can determine the type of experience in which to invest to support those goals.
The Triangle Offense’s post Focused Customer Segmentation describes how you can conduct focused research on a specific group of customers who share similar goals and successfully expand into that segment by creating a customer experience that meets those needs. This strategy will pay off when you’re able to achieve your own business objectives.
Differences Between Goals, Needs, and Wants
To find the customers’ goals, we have to talk to them and ask what they’re trying to achieve.
- Customer goals: What is the customer trying to achieve? The goal is the final state the customer wants to reach.
- Customer needs: A customer's needs are everything they must do to reach their goal.
- Customer wants: A want is a customer's desire, which adds to their goal. For example, a customer plans to buy a phone but may wish for one with the best camera. Could the customer afford the iPhone 14 Pro with a better camera, even though the iPhone 14 and Pro are almost identical? (Enter the marketing team to fan the flames of customer wants. . .)
Why Are Customer Goals Important?
When you understand your customers’ goals, you can group those customers who share similar goals and work to provide a seamless customer experience for that particular cohort.
Importantly, the CX must tie in with business objectives. For example, imagine you’re running McDonald's (MCD) growth strategy, and you want to:
- Increase customer visits
- Boost average transaction value
McDonald’s understood that a traveling family’s goal is to eat somewhere convenient. Therefore, they prioritized being a convenient meal option for traveling families and designed a customer experience to meet a traveling family’s goals by creating restaurants with the following attributes:
- They’re safe, well-lit, and the bathrooms are usually clean.
- The meals are consistent; you know what you’re going to get.
- They’re located in strategic locations near the interstate.
- Their parking lots can typically accommodate larger vehicles and RVs.
- They have provided indoor play areas where the kids can release pent-up energy.
McDonald's ensured that it can reach its business objectives by creating a customer experience that meets the goals of the traveling family customer segment.
On top of that, it has considerably improved its app UX, so customers can order ahead of time and not have to sit in the drive-through. I would call that a winning experience. 🍔🍟
Where Do Customer Goals Fit in a Journey Map?
Customer goals are few and universal, which means a typical journey map doesn’t display a large number of them. In this Triangle Offense post, I discuss journey map stages, which can display many customer moments.
As customers make their way through their moments, they strive to complete their goals. If this concept is confusing, I've added an image to help explain it. Suppose a regular journey map has around five large stages that have grouped customer interactions. Typically, only two or three customer goals are present in a stage—sometimes even fewer.
When Should Customer Goals Be Identified?
A business must continuously track these goals based on customer feedback and market changes. You’ll need to identify customers' goals proactively, and you can do this by conducting the following CX research methods:
- Customer interviews
- Customer feedback
- Voice-of-the-customer (VOC) programs
- Customer satisfaction surveys
You’ll also want to conduct UX research methods to figure out customer goals for using your software products:
- Contextual interviews
- Scenario and task analysis
- Cognitive walkthrough (following the user as they verbalize every step through your software product)
Who is Concerned with Customer Goals?
The short answer to this question is: everyone. If you work in a business, getting familiar and comfortable with journey mapping is essential, especially when you’re figuring out customer goals. This step is especially important if you’re not a product team member and work in marketing, sales, customer support, or operations.
General Business Teams
- In operations, you may want to optimize specific processes over others if you've identified that they support essential customer goals for important groups that generate a lot of revenue.
Go-To-Market Teams
- If you’re in sales, you’ll want to frame your sales pitch in a way that helps your clients reach their goals.
- As a marketer, you’ll want to understand which customer group’s specific goals you want to market to and influence.
Product Teams
- The product team works to link their product metrics to business objectives. Customer goals drive users’ software product expectations, and the product team will need a solid understanding of those goals and the different circumstances that can change them.
Journey maps show a business where they can invest money and time in the customer experience to retain customers. Therefore, if you can read journey maps and understand journey map elements like customer goals, you can create value for your business and its customers. Your leaders and teams will appreciate your thought leadership and solutions the next time you plan your roadmap or operational strategy.
Journey Maps
When I was a principal designer focused on customer experience (CX) strategy, I spent a lot of my time figuring out businesses’ CX and what makes their customers tick. One of the most potent CX methods I use is the journey mapping method.
When I journey map, one of my top priorities is understanding customers' goals. Once I know their goals, I can link them to business objectives and start figuring out how to create a seamless CX and UX (user experience).
If you want to brush up on the importance of journey maps, I've written an introductory guide to journey maps, explaining why they matter to a business. In the guide, I introduce the journey mapping process, standard journey maps, and journey map elements.
Conclusion
When you understand your customers’ many different goals, you can create a great customer experience and an even better user experience. Leverage research to understand customer goals, and use the powerful journey mapping method to capture those goals, build the right experience, and achieve your business objectives.
Written by Leo Vroegindewey, B2B CX Consultant
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