As companies strive to deliver exceptional customer experiences, storyboards have become a powerful technique for mapping customer journeys from start to finish. By visualizing critical touchpoints and the emotions involved, storyboards allow organizations to align with customer needs and identify opportunities to reduce friction.
When done right, customer-centric storyboards encapsulate the entire customer perspective, illuminating not only functional requirements but emotional connections as well. This article will explore best practices for creating engaging travel storyboards that touch the customer’s heart.
Research: Walking in your customer’s shoes
The fundamental piece of customer-centered storyboarding is research. This means interacting directly with real customers to discover their true needs, thought processes, pain points, and desires. Techniques like interviews, surveys, persona development, and user testing help companies vicariously experience the customer journey.
The key is to dig deeper than superficial characteristics to uncover the “why” behind customer behavior by asking open-ended questions. The goal is to be able to visualize and articulate the customer’s emotional state as they interact with your company. Maintaining an empowering customer perspective is crucial.
Map the journey
Armed with information about customers, the next step is to map the general phases of the customer journey, from initial awareness of a need to resolution of that need. This high-level sequencing provides the skeleton of the storyboard. Common stages include:
- Trigger: An event awakens a customer need
- Information gathering: The client looks for options.
- Assessment: Various solutions are evaluated
- Selection: The client chooses a solution
- Induction: The customer starts using the solution.
- Continuous use: The solution meets the need over time
- Expansion/Loyalty: The client improves or maintains use
While the stages may vary by industry, it is important to resist the temptation to prematurely map the journey based on assumptions and instead prioritize fundamental research.
Bring the storyboard to life
Once the research ideas and high-level phases are implemented, it’s time to focus the storyboard on the client. This requires detailing each touchpoint from the customer’s perspective using dialogues, emotions, environments, specialized vocabulary, etc. to capture the customer’s mindset.
Visually, a storyboard template with comic-style frames adds clarity. The descriptions delve into critical interactions, crises, motivations, frustrations and pleasures. Quantifying details like task duration improves perspective. Images, graphics, everyday quotes and slang inject color.
By becoming a customer in this enlightenment process, blind spots are revealed. Asking “why would the client feel/say/do this?” because each element fosters empathy and often uncovers contradictory assumptions. Adjusting flows until they resonate makes the tool immersive rather than generic.
Adopt a design thinking mindset
Approaching storyboards through the lens of design thinking cultivates the type of customer obsession that generates breakthrough innovation. Core aspects of this human-centered mindset include:
- Empathy – The ability to deeply understand people by perceiving and interpreting nuanced experiences, thoughts, values, and products the way they do.
- Optimism – Approach innovation from the point of view of thinking about “what is possible” versus accepting limitations.
- Iteration – Recognize that initial customer research and storyboard hypotheses will evolve through continuous experimentation and feedback loops.
- Ambiguity – Show tolerance for uncertainty by exploring unconventional ideas before defining solutions.
All of these traits keep teams tied to customer needs rather than internal perceptions. They expand both the emotional and practical domain of the user journey to gain more precise insights.
Test and validate with customers
Once an initial version has been created, the storyboard should be validated through customer feedback. Phone or in-person tours assess whether your thought process aligns with the experience depicted. The use of your vocabulary demonstrates precision. Areas of misalignment point to opportunities to advance understanding.
With each round of modification, the storyboard becomes more rooted in reality than speculation. Giving clients license to be constructively critical encourages truth-telling. The goal is to keep your perspective above any internal bias. Your endorsement verifies accuracy.
Take advantage of ongoing storyboards
The discovery process is never complete. As customer behaviors, expectations, and technologies evolve over time, storyboards must evolve as well. They provide living models to examine through the lens of the ever-evolving customer.
Effective use of storyboarding extends to vision, planning, execution, and measurement across teams and milestones. They center concepts, frameworks, MVPs, launches and campaigns around experiential needs versus isolated results. Product roadmaps, launch readiness plans, success metrics, and more can emerge from storyboard visualization.
By focusing intensely on the customer during research, journey mapping, and storyboard testing, companies can deliver exceptional experiences that are distinguished by empathy. Visual storyboarding develops collective understanding by capturing the emotional essence of the customer at each touchpoint through illustrations and verbiage. Tuning into the customer channel motivates customer-centric innovation for years to come. What resonates with customers today provides the compass for continued excellence.
Categories: Technology
Source: vtt.edu.vn