What is the "as-is" situation of your user and what is the best alternative they have currently. Your customer journey map should also offer you an opportunity to position your product as the best alternative in the market and help create that unique differentiation in the minds of your users.

Customer journey is made up of touchpoints that a customer takes achieve an outcome. Therefore as a PMM it is imperative to first identify these touchpoints and formulate  a strategy to engage with the customer at each such touch point

To achieve this it is important to breakdown the customer journey into manageable segments.

I broadly like to segment them into

The touchpoints within these segments would depend on multiple factors and your business objective

For the sake of simplicity lets look at the customer journey map from a user's perspective:

Designing a customer journey mapping is critical for your product success but it is not without its own pitfall and challenges. Some of the critical things to note while you design your customer journey map are:

Typically a customer journey will have multiple personas playing critical roles within the decision tree, including that of a product user(ICP). The journey starts from the time you have mapped each of these customers into a  customer value map and then drive then into your user journey ecosystem wherein they go through the three stages of the user journey: Namely, pre purchase, purchase and onboarding and post purchase journey.

I recently did a poll online and found that 45% of the respondent felt that product manager and product marketing managers jointly owned this process. While this may be true in most organisations including startups.

The role of the product marketing manger is critical in ensuring that the customer journey map is comprehensive and accurately reflects the user experience across each touchpoints.

From a business perspective, a PMM is closest to a user and is primarily responsible for user advocacy within the organisation and for product promotion amongst a user base.

Hence product marketing manager needs to address "the how to",  "where to" engage and with "what to" engage the customer in the journey map

Product marketing manager's role in customer journey mapping is about identifying the key touchpoint and then formulating the content strategy for each of these touch points to effectively engage the target users.

Product marketing manger should see the customer journey from the users perspective and anticipate the potential path a user would take while interaction with their product in order to bring them into your campaign ecosystem.

Product marketing managers are the voice of the customers with an "outside in" view of business starting with the user need. Their role can be broken into three core segments

With these, the product marketing manager will work with internal stakeholders at every stage and influence the way the customer journey is mapped and us used to influence users.

PMM need to give importance to user behaviour, experience, feedback etc at every stage which will enable them to craft better product message, improve touch point experience and leverage content to influence user decisions.

Designing a customer journey mapping is critical for your product success but it is not without its own pitfall and challenges. Some of the critical things to note while you design your customer journey map are:

Typically a customer journey will have multiple personas playing critical roles within the decision tree, including that of a product user(ICP). The journey starts from the time you have mapped each of these customers into a  customer value map and then drive then into your user journey ecosystem wherein they go through the three stages of the user journey: Namely, pre purchase, purchase and onboarding and post purchase journey.

Customer journey can be used to achieve various objectives. It will depend on what stage of your business you are at, who are you targeting ( new users, existing user, loyal user or at risk users ).

The Product Spotlight : How Zoom improved customer experience using AI and saw a 93 % increase in self service rate and had more than 13 Million USD in cost saving.

The Objective:

Improve the self serve opportunity for customers, to find answers they need and when they, hence improve the overall user experience

Challenge:

Zoom was rapidly growing and millions of users were seeking support to get answers to their questions. Their legacy technology and chatbot was not adequate to service the growing customer demand

User pain point: 

Zoom's user research found that 59% of users are willing to leave a brand once they have a negative experience and one of the key areas where users are dissatisfied is with customer service and getting instant and right answers to their issues or questions.