As companies strive to deliver exceptional customer experiences, storyboarding has emerged as a powerful technique for mapping out customer journeys from start to finish. By visualizing the critical touchpoints and emotions involved, storyboards enable organizations to align around customer needs and identify opportunities to reduce friction.
When done right, customer-centric storyboards encapsulate the entirety of a customer’s perspective – illuminating not just functional requirements but also emotional connections. This article will explore best practices for crafting compelling journey storyboards that speak to the heart of the customer.
Research: Walking in Your Customer’s Shoes
The foundational piece of customer-centric storyboarding is research. This means directly engaging with real customers to uncover 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 probe beyond surface-level features to discover the “why” behind customer behaviors using open-ended questioning. 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 customer insights, the next step is mapping the overarching phases of the customer journey – from initial awareness of a need to the resolution of that need. This high-level sequencing provides the skeleton for the storyboard. Common stages include:
- Trigger: An event sparks a customer need
- Information Gathering: The customer researches options
- Evaluation: Various solutions are assessed
- Selection: The customer chooses a solution
- Onboarding: The customer begins using the solution
- Ongoing Use: The solution satisfies the need over time
- Expansion/Loyalty: The customer enhances or sustains usage
While the stages may vary by industry, it is important to resist the urge to prematurely map the journey based on assumptions, and instead, prioritize foundational research.
Bring the Storyboard to Life
With research insights and high-level phases in place, it’s time to make the storyboard customer-centric. This requires detailing each touchpoint from the customer perspective using dialogue, emotions, environments, specialized vocabulary etc. to capture the customer mindset.
Visually, a storyboarding template with comic book-style frames adds clarity. Descriptions elaborate on critical interactions, breakdowns, motivations, frustrations and delights. Quantifying details like duration of tasks enhance perspective. Pictures, charts, household quotes and slang inject color.
By becoming the customer in this illustration process, blind spots get revealed. Asking “why would the customer feel/say/do this?” for every element encourages empathy and often uncovers conflicting assumptions. Fine-tuning flows until they resonate makes the tool immersive versus generic.
Embrace a Design Thinking Mindset
Approaching storyboards through the lens of design thinking cultivates the type of customer obsession that spawns breakthrough innovation. Core aspects of this human-centric mindset include:
- Empathy – An ability to profoundly understand people by perceiving and interpreting nuanced experiences, thoughts, values, and products the way they do.
- Optimism – Approaching innovation from a standpoint of “what’s possible” thinking versus acceptance of limitations.
- Iteration – Recognizing that initial customer research and storyboard hypotheses will evolve through continuous experimentation and feedback loops.
- Ambiguity – Exhibiting tolerance for uncertainty when exploring unconventional ideas before defining solutions.
All of these traits keep teams tethered to customer needs instead of internal perceptions. They expand both emotional and practical mastery of the user journey for sharper 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 walkthroughs gauge whether their thought process aligns with the depicted experience. Using their vocabulary shows precision. Areas of misalignment signal opportunities to advance understanding.
With each round of modification, the storyboard becomes more rooted in reality rather than speculation. Giving customers license to be constructively critical fosters truth-telling. The goal is to hold their perspective in higher regard than any internal bias. Their endorsement verifies accuracy.
Leverage Storyboards Ongoing
The discovery process is never complete. As customer behaviors, expectations and technologies evolve over time, so too must journey storyboards. They provide living blueprints to examine through an ever-evolving customer lens.
Effective storyboard usage extends into visioning, planning, execution and measurement across teams and milestones. They center concepts, wireframes, MVPs, releases, and campaigns around experiential needs versus isolated outputs. Product roadmaps, launch readiness plans, success metrics and more can stem from storyboard visualization.
By intensely focusing on the customer during research, journey mapping and storyboard testing, companies can deliver exceptional experiences distinguished by empathy. Visual storyboarding develops collective understanding by capturing the customer’s emotional essence at each touchpoint through illustrations and verbiage. Tuning into the customer’s channel motivates customer-centric innovation for years to come. What resonates with customers today provides the compass for ongoing excellence.