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How to set up a Customer Journey in 4 easy steps

Learn how to make a journey you can manage.


A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer journey. TheyDo helps you map customer insights, opportunity areas, solutions, supporting processes, and more. This helps ensure that every part of your business is aligned around your customer journeys, instead of the other way around.

In this guide we will go over the 4 key steps of setting up a customer journey in TheyDo:

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Step 1: Creating a new Journey

There are two ways to create a journey:

New Journey 3


From the journey overview: Click on the purple ‘new journey’ button in the top right.


New Journey 1New Journey 2


From a journey board: Hover over an empty cell and click on ‘add a journey’ to create a new journey instantly. That way, you can quickly break up a customer lifecycle into individual journeys.


Journey wizard

When you create a new journey, it takes you through a wizard where you can choose a template, personas, and add basic information. You can also skip this wizard to edit this information later under

Tip: The best journey titles are made by capturing your customer’s goal in their own words. Try to use this format: ‘I [most important customer job they accomplish in the journey]’. For example: ‘I get groceries’, ‘I learn a new skill’, or ‘I assemble a chair’.


Journeys can be linked anywhere

Every journey you create is stored in the journey repository. Any journey you create can be linked to multiple frameworks, boards, or even other journeys as journey links.


Step 2: Creating a journey outline using steps and phases

After creating a journey, the first step is to create an outline for your journey.

Customer journeys can have various scales and scopes. Before you start mapping, it is worthwhile to consider where your journey should start and end, and how ‘detailed’ it should be.

●    If you want to focus on a high-level overview of a process, macro journeys are what you need. They provide a high-level overview of an end-to-end experience or even a full customer life cycle. Every step in a macro journey often includes multiple interactions. More on Macro Journeys.

●    If you want to focus on one step of a higher-level journey, you can build a more detailed journey map using Micro journeys. They provide a detailed overview of a step-by-step process. They are quite detailed and often only describe one interaction per step. More on Micro Journeys.

Tip: If you’re unsure how detailed a journey map should be and how many steps it should include, start with a high-level journey map to get an overview of the entire journey.


Adding steps and phases

After choosing a scope for your journey, create an outline using phases and steps:

●    Steps: A step is any experience the main actor or persona has. It can be an interaction with a digital interface, a machine or a person. Steps can also be activities like walking or waiting. The level of detail of each step depends on the overall scale of your journey as described above.

●    Phases: Various steps can be grouped into a phase. To add or change phases, click on the cogwheel on the left of the journey and select ‘phases’.

Tip for starters: In order to get started with steps, decide what the core part of the experience is and then ask yourself what happens before this and what happens after. This will help you get going in building out each step. As a general rule of thumb, we recommend limiting journeys to 15 steps. If you end up with more, consider splitting the journey into two or more smaller journeys.


Step 3: Adding insights to your journey

After creating a journey outline, use lanes to add different layers of content to structure information within your journey. Use the Purple + button to add any lane type and drag it to it’s right place. There are many lane types to choose from:


Basic Lanes

Basic lanes are used to create content in a journey. Think about these lanes as insights that are specific to this journey.

●    Text can be used to add basic copy and notations.

●    Images like photos, screenshots, or illustrations help tell your persona’s story. Not only does this make your journeys more attractive, it also makes them easier to understand. There are many license-free resources you can use to add images: We can recommend Undraw, Storyset, and Illu-Station.

●    Gifs can be used to add gifs to your journeys. Is it necessary? Perhaps. Is it fun? Definitely.

●    Links help you to use journeys as a base to find information elsewhere, such as research reports with extensive findings, pages in your flow, or quant data dashboard links.

●    Comments help you to leave observations about what you have you observed that people do, or what do you want others to know about a step.

●    Channels can be used to illustrate what channel a step takes place in.


Linked elements

TheyDo allows you to connect things across journeys. This is what you can do with linked entities: create them once and link them across journeys by adding them to any step of any journey. Linked elements include:

●    Personas can be used to indicate how different customer segments experience your journey steps differently. Use the text fields to summarize what a person does, and what they feel or think while doing that.


personas
To change an empathy arc, click on the emoji on the top right of he persona text box.

●    An Experience curve displays the emotional experience per step, and is automatically added when you add a persona. Use the toggle icon in the topbar to switch between the average score of all personas, or to show individual scores.

●    Opportunities can be used to identify and prioritize the core problem areas in your journeys. You can add existing opportunities from the opportunity repository, or create new ones.

●    Solutions can be used to identify solutions to solve your customer’s core problems or pain points. You can add existing Solutions, or create new ones.

●    Tags help to cluster content together. If you tag a Step in a journey, a persona and a Solution with the same tag, it will be easy to later on search for this tag and find the respective content.

●    Journey links can be used to link other journeys to a step. This comes in handy if you work with macro and micro journeys: A single step in the macro journey can actually be a (micro) journey on its own.

●    Insights can be used to note down detailed customer needs, pain points, and gains. They can also be used to add a customer quote. Use the smiley icon to indicate if a quote is positive, neutral, or negative.

●    Step links can be used to link to other journey steps. Use this to indicate how steps in journeys of different stakeholders might intersect. You can also use this to indicate how people might flow between different journey steps, for example when they have to take a longer route through an ‘unhappy flow’.


Creating customer journeys, service blueprints, and more.

You can use the lane types above to create all kinds of journeys. For more inspiration, start by having a look at our journey template overview.


Step 4: Using journey settings to explain and tag your journey

Finish your journey by adding background information, selecting journey owners, and more. You can do all of this and more under journey settings. Elements include:

●    Title: Give your journey a title. The best journey titles are made by capturing your customer’s goal in their own words. Try to use this format: ‘I [customer job]’.

●    Journey description: Add additional information about the journey, such as how it was created or how to use it.

●    Journey owner: Assign a journey owner to delegate responsibility for it, while also making clear to everyone in your organization who’s working on what.

●    Journey status: Pick the journey status. For example, is it still unmapped, being researched, live, or a prototype?

●    Journey type: Is this a macro journey, micro journey, a service blueprint, or something else altogether?

●    Journey group: Define what internal team or department a journey belongs to.

●    Global tag: Specify what global tags a journey belongs to. Global tags are often used to tag different channels, countries, brands, or scenarios.

●    Detail color and background color: Changing the color of details and background to match your organization’s color scheme.

●    Persona: Add personas to indicate how different customer segments experience your journey steps differently

●    Logo: Adding your logo to the journey.

When you export a journey, this journey information will be included in the export as well. For more on this, read our guide on exporting journeys. For more on setting up journey status, types, groups, and global tags, have a look at our guide on taxonomy.