“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”
- Zora Neale Hurston
The first stage of the Journey Map is often the hardest. In Research, you’ll need to have a good understanding of what you’re looking for before you go find it.
You’ll have to make some hard strategic decisions about what objectives to pursue, which Personas to define, and say "no" a lot more than you say "yes".
A Note on Personas
The first stage of the research is a little “chicken and the egg”, as you don’t want to run off and do a ton of research that’s unrelated to the Persona you choose.
But, you also don’t want to lean on biased thinking and assume who your key Persona should be, before giving the data a chance to speak.
In the Research stage, stay open to the story the data is telling you. The purpose of this phase is not to find the answers. It's to define research objectives, understand what already exists, define key questions, and understand what gaps exist.
To-Do:
- Define your questions: Research is only as good as the questions you ask. As the saying goes, “Ask better questions to get better answers.”
- Discover: Find what existing research exists around your customer, their thoughts, feelings, preferences, and how they interact with your touchpoints. Although it may not all be pertinent, you’ll often find that inside big organizations, there’s lots of historic data that you can leverage.
- Identify gaps: Based around the questions you defined in step one, and the historic research you dug up in step two, you should be able to identify where you need to do additional research to fill in the gaps.
- Perform additional research: Once your knowledge gaps are identified, you’re able to start the process of observation, quantitative analysis, and quantitative research to fill in those gaps.
Resources:
Where to find data
Here’s a list of common sources to find existing data for your Journey Map:
Involve the broader team
A key mistake in research is limiting key team members to marketing. Make sure to include sales, analysts, finance, IT operations, and even front-line and support staff in your research. Anyone who interacts with your customer or their data is key when exploring the customer experience.
Social media, product reviews, and call center logs
This is where your customers give you straightforward opinions about your brand. If there’s something you’re failing on or common roadblocks, they’ll become obvious through customer support channels.
Marketing research
Existing research is invaluable. But it’s not the only source for data. In fact, you’re better off combining several data and research sources to avoid cherry-picking or confirmation bias. This is where quantitative data is key. If you notice something in qualitative, see if it’s supported at scale. If it’s a one-off comment from a focus group participant that’s not found in the data, it may not be applicable to your final Journey Map.
Online customer journeys
Analysis tools like Google Analytics and Adobe are great starting places if one of your key channels is online. This isn’t always the case, as some industries may have digital touchpoints that aren’t often used by customers in their “most likely” journey.
But, depending on how robust your data is, you’ll find this is a key resource for other brands and sites your customer frequents. Brands without digital touchpoints aren’t common.
Usage and relevance of these digital touchpoints can vary, but most brands will need to consider an online component in their Journey Map.
Customer interviews, focus groups, and surveys
Who knows your customers better than they know themselves? First-person research is a critical data source. In particular, interviews can help you test your Persona hypotheses about their goals, values, needs, and pain points.
Guiding Questions
Although you’ll have your own research questions specific to your organization or client, I’ve included a few common Guiding Questions below to get you started.
We’ll create the Persona, Path to Purchase, and Think/Do/Stop sections later, but for now these questions will help you understand what to look for.
Persona:
- Is your core customer male, female or an even mix of both? If even, why did you choose a man or woman as your target (and does it matter)?
- Is your persona single, married, or co-habitating?
- Do they have kids now? If so how many and what ages? If not, are they planning on having kids soon?
- How old are they?
- What’s their income level?
- How much expendable income do they have to buy your product? Do they have to make trade-offs to be able to afford it?
- What are their 5 favorite sites, social networks, and brands?
- If they could describe your customer experience in three words, what would those words be?
- What kind of environment do they live in? Are they living with roommates, renting, or own their home?
- What responsibilities and recurring costs do they have? Pets, a car, a mortgage, going out every Saturday night with friends, pedicures, etc.?
Path to Purchase:
- What are all the ways a specific customer interacts with your brand, product, or service?
- Have you looked at non-owned channels, such as retailers that stock your products, customer reviews, and Google results?
- Have you asked your customers as well as looked at the touchpoint data? Are they saying one thing but doing another?
- Are your answers based on assumptions, or on research and data?
- Have you included qualitative as well as quantitative data in your research?
- Are you treating all your findings as hypotheses, and trying to prove them wrong (instead of right)?
Think, Do, Stop:
- Are you stopping at what customers say, or digging into what they are actually doing?
- Have you identified those key Moments of Truth where your customer is forming their most impactful opinions around your product?
- Are your answers based on assumptions, or on research and data?
- Have you dug into the places where your customers go for reviews, feedback, unboxing, or product previews?
- If your customers are saying one thing and doing another, can you identify why?
- Are you treating all your findings as hypotheses, and trying to prove them wrong (instead of right)?
- Are you a victim of confirmation bias? In other words, are you just seeing the data that confirms what you already believe to be true or are you letting the data tell the story?
- Have there been any big changes in your customer experience (such as the introduction of new sales channels) that may be impacting your customer’s actions?
- Do you have a good understanding of the customer pain points that exist? Do your customers agree or disagree with what the data is saying?
- Have you included qualitative as well as quantitative data in your research?
Deliverables:
- List of key research questions and objectives
- Research inventory that helps you understand what available research already exists and what it tells you. This should also fill any knowledge gaps between what you want to know and what you need to know.
- Additional research plan for filing those knowledge gaps.
Key Stakeholders:
Defining and analyzing your key stakeholders is very important as you look to get cooperation from other groups in the organization. This will be different for every engagement, but the following are a good place to start:
- Marketing
- IT
- Digital, UX/UI Designers
- Usability Testing and Design
- Product Management/Design
- Brand Management
- Customer Support and Call Centers
- Retail Employees and Management
- Customer Experience groups inside the company
- External research vendors and consultancies
- Operations
- Legal
- Agency strategists and accounts/client services
- Leadership across the organization
Once you identify who your key stakeholders are and what they need, the next step is to analyze them. Categorize the people you’ll work with during this project on the following axes:
- Latents: These are the people who are high up in the organization but don’t really care about the project itself. They may know it’s happening, but it’s not on their day-to-day radar. These people won’t need to be contacted much, except maybe a cursory email from the client project lead, sharing the final product. It’s unlikely that you’ll interact with these people much.
- Apathetics: These are the people who have little power and no interest in what you’re doing. There’s no need to update these stakeholders or keep them in the loop as they don’t care what you’re up to, and they have no power with which to help or hinder you.
- Defenders: These are the people you’re more likely to work with on a day-to-day basis. They’re likely Project, Marketing, or other general business Managers (depending on the title structure of the company) or below. They might be a little junior, but they are very invested in the outcome of your project. You’ll communicate with this group this most, as you’re likely to work with them the most as well. Keep them in the loop, they’re your army of allies inside the company.
- Promoters: These people are your calvary. They have significant clout in the company, so they’re able to pick up the phone to help you get over a sticky roadblock during the project. But don’t call them for every little favor. They’ll get key updates during the project, and will need to be sold into your final Journey Map, so keep them in the loop and make sure they feel heard. The final product will live or die on their say-so.