What is a Stage in a Journey Map?
By mastering stages, you'll create insightful maps, improving your understanding of customer needs across business teams.
Getting the hang of each stage really helps. Your journey map is like building a puzzle—each piece, or stage, fits together to make a clear picture. Understanding each piece better helps you know what your customers want. Plus, it makes working with your different business teams much smoother.
Introduction
When you build journey maps, you must find a way to present your customer data in a way that doesn't overwhelm your audience. A good practice is to group customer interactions into recognizable stages your audience will immediately understand and to which they’ll relate.
If you fail to use well-defined stages and don’t visually separate them, you’ll lose your audience, and they won't understand your journey map . . . which would be a waste, wouldn't it? So I want to take a moment to explain a customer journey map stage in greater detail.
When you’ve mastered the stages concept, you can create journey maps that resonate with your audience (executive, GTM, product, business teams, etc.).
If you need a quick refresher on journey maps and why they’re essential, I wrote a detailed guide here to get you started.
What is a Stage in a Journey Map?
Who Uses Stages in Journey Maps?
Without exception, anyone building a journey map uses stages to break down customer activities in an experience.
Who Benefits From Understanding Stages in a Journey Map?
The business benefits from understanding customer activities grouped by needs and goals. It helps a company's GTM, product, and general business teams understand what customer journey areas they can impact. Stages spread awareness of customers’ business interactions and help everyone use the same language to describe a customer experience.
What are the Key Elements of a Stage in a Journey Map?
Seven key journey map elements are typically represented in a stage. You can read an introduction to journey map elements here.
- The (individual) stage
- Key moment or moment of truth
- Customer goals
- Customer needs
- Customer task
- Channel
- Touchpoints
What Purpose Does a Stage Serve in a Journey Map?
A stage aims to group customer interactions in an understandable way and reduce the journey map’s customer data complexity.
Where are Stages in a Journey Map Identified or Visualized?
Stages are visualized when the team building the journey map decides what type of journey map template they want to use.
It is important to visually create space around a journey map stage and give it room to expand or contract as your knowledge of that stage’s customer interactions grows.
You will want to avoid lumping your journey maps together as one monolith visual and instead create distance between the stages. I encourage you to visualize your journey maps this way because each stage is a sub-system, and this technique will reduce the complexity of building a journey map.
Where Can Examples of Stages in a Journey Map Be Found?
In my example, I’ll show you a generic customer journey map’s stages. The top ten retailers in America (think Kroger, Walmart, Lowes, HD, CVS, etc.) use this type of journey map to look at ways to improve their customer experience.
As you can see, stages neatly group customer interactions in clearly-defined goal and need “buckets.”
When is it essential to define stages in a journey map?
Defining journey map stages is essential when you know what type of journey map template you’ll build based on the business problem you’re trying to solve. Five standard journey map templates are used throughout the tech industry.
- Generic customer journey
- Buyer journey map
- User journey map
- Omnichannel customer journey map
- Archetype-based journey map
Each journey map template will have defined stages within which you work.
When does a stage in a journey map begin and end?
A journey stage begins with a customer's overarching goal, and it ends when the customer has reached that goal.
Why are Stages Critical in a Journey Map?
- They identify customer interactions and needs.
- They group customer activities by common needs.
- They assess how a business meets the customers’ needs at a given stage.
- They communicate customer interactions across the organization.
Why do Stages in a Journey Map Vary From One Journey to Another?
Different business problems require different types of journey maps. For example, I would use a generic customer journey map template to map a shopping experience at Walmart.
If I were running a salesforce and wanted to understand the gaps in my sales process, I would probably build a buyer journey map to understand how my customers interact with the sales experience.
In short, you’re mapping different customer data that will produce customer interactions, which requires your journey map to display different stages.
Summary
Great journey maps have well-defined stages that tell your business teams a story about how customers interact with your company. You want to present precisely and accurately and use a journey map to communicate customer needs.
Journey map stages help organize your thinking and create powerful narratives about how customers feel and interact with your customer experience.
Written by Leo Vroegindewey, B2B CX Consultant
Get in touch to improve your customer experience and increase sales. Let's talk about how I can help your business grow. Email me.