How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Health and Wellness Companies
The article "How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Health and Wellness Companies" provides a comprehensive, step-by-step guide tailored to the unique needs of health and wellness businesses, including wellness tech products, healthcare providers, fitness studios, and patient care organizations. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the customer’s experience from initial awareness through ongoing engagement and loyalty, highlighting key stages such as awareness, consideration, decision, engagement, and loyalty or advocacy.
Key stages of the customer journey relevant to health and wellness include identifying customer needs, evaluating options, committing to a product or service, and fostering long-term engagement and advocacy. Essential touchpoints to map encompass digital interactions (websites, apps, social media), in-person experiences, onboarding processes, and ongoing support or care. The article stresses identifying pain points such as user confusion, friction in onboarding, and gaps in continued engagement.
It recommends forming cross-functional teams to build comprehensive journey maps and using a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods, including interviews, surveys, prototype testing, and user observation, to gather accurate customer insights. Tools and templates suggested include visual mapping techniques like swim lanes, post-it notes, and digital journey mapping software.
Real-world examples illustrate how companies have used journey maps to refine product features, improve onboarding, and enhance user satisfaction, such as a baby health tracking app adjusting features based on user journey phases or a health tech product clarifying onboarding through prototype testing.
Best practices highlighted include continuously updating journey maps as living documents, aligning journey mapping efforts with business goals and KPIs, prioritizing improvements based on impact and effort, and fostering empathy across teams by sharing journey insights.
Overall, the article equips health and wellness professionals with actionable frameworks and practical advice to create effective customer journey maps that improve customer experience, drive product adoption, and support business growth.
Business Type
Health and Wellness
Industry
Health and Wellness
Key Stages of the Customer Journey
- Awareness: The patient identifies a need for care and begins searching for care providers.
- Consideration: The patient weighs options to determine if the healthcare system can meet their needs, including referrals, coverage, and reviews.
- Access: The patient decides to schedule services and engages with the healthcare organization through various channels.
- Service Delivery: The clinical care is provided, including visits, check-in/out, admission/discharge, and billing.
- Ongoing Care: Engagement after service delivery, including wellness, care management, and addressing social determinants of health.
Essential Touchpoints to Map
- Awareness: Patient identifies a need for care and begins searching for healthcare providers through online searches, review sites, marketing campaigns, networking, and community involvement.
- Consideration: Patient weighs options, considering referrals, coverage, recommendations, access, and reviews, often interacting with websites, social media, phone, or email.
- Access: Patient decides to schedule services, engaging via phone calls, patient portals, text messages, and emails during scheduling and acquisition.
- Service Delivery: The clinical care stage including the visit, check-in/out, admission/discharge, and billing processes.
- Ongoing Care: Post-service engagement including wellness management, care management, and addressing social determinants of health and population health.
Common Pain Points
- Unanswered questions about users leading to assumptions that cause frustration and low adoption of wellness tech products.
- Complexity of product systems and integration challenges causing user confusion and disengagement.
- Critical moments during onboarding and first-time use where users may feel overwhelmed or uncertain.
- Emotional intensity and anxiety patients experience throughout their healthcare journey, impacting satisfaction.
- Poor online visibility and difficulty finding relevant services or providers at the start of the journey.
- Inefficient appointment scheduling processes causing patient frustration and drop-off.
- Lack of clarity and responsiveness in communication channels such as phone, chatbot, and billing.
- Long wait times and unsatisfactory waiting room experiences.
- Breakdowns in internal processes and handoffs between departments leading to delays and confusion.
- Gaps in patient education and unclear instructions causing uncertainty and non-compliance.
- Inconsistent follow-up care and support reducing patient retention and satisfaction.
- Difficulty aligning cross-functional teams around a cohesive customer journey map leading to fragmented experiences.
Target Audience
- Healthcare professionals
- Patient experience teams
- Healthcare marketers
- Organizational leaders in health and wellness companies
- Stakeholders across healthcare departments
Target Audience
- Healthcare professionals
- Patient experience teams
- Healthcare marketers
- Organizational leaders in health and wellness companies
- Stakeholders across healthcare departments
Recommended Tools for Journey Mapping
- UXPressia
- Qualaroo
- Microsoft Visio
- Gliffy
Available Templates
- Healthcare Patient Journey Map Template by UXPressia
- Patient Journey Map Template by Qualtrics
- Fitness App Customer Journey Map Template by Visme
Real-World Examples
One real-world example is the baby health tracking app Nara Baby. The team conducted surveys and follow-up interviews with existing users to understand their experiences. They mapped out phases of the user journey based on the baby’s age and the priorities that needed support in the app. This research helped design a minimum viable product (MVP) with clarity on key features and design details to create a distinctive experience across different journey stages.
Another example involves a health tech company developing a connected device for point-of-care detection. The team used a mix of fidelity prototypes, including a high-fidelity companion app prototype and a non-functioning physical device version, to test with users. Observations during in-person concept testing revealed critical moments that led to either understanding or confusion. This resulted in a clearly defined onboarding journey that supported users in feeling confident during their first-time use.
These examples illustrate how customer journey mapping in health and wellness companies can uncover user pain points, clarify product value, and optimize onboarding and continued engagement, ultimately improving product adoption and user satisfaction.
Best Practices
Creating a customer journey map for health and wellness companies involves a strategic, detailed approach tailored to the unique needs of the industry. Here are actionable best practices:
- Understand the Customer Journey Stages: Map out key phases such as Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Engagement, and Loyalty. For health and wellness, this includes recognizing the need for wellness solutions, evaluating options, committing to services, ongoing engagement, and fostering advocacy.
- Identify and Profile Target Personas: Develop detailed customer personas based on behaviors, goals, and preferences. Segment your audience to tailor the journey map to different client types, such as fitness enthusiasts, wellness tech users, or healthcare patients.
- Map Essential Touchpoints and Pain Points: Include all interactions customers have with your brand—from digital marketing, social media engagement, website visits, consultations, onboarding, service delivery, to follow-up care. Identify obstacles like confusing sign-up processes, lack of information, or engagement drop-offs.
- Leverage Research and Customer Insights: Use focus groups, interviews, surveys, and user testing to gather real customer feedback. For wellness tech, prototype testing and diary studies can reveal user experience gaps.
- Use Visual and Clear Journey Mapping Tools: Employ templates and software that allow visualization of actions, motivations, questions, and obstacles at each stage. This helps stakeholders understand the customer experience holistically.
- Align Journey Maps with Business Goals and Customer Needs: Ensure the map supports objectives like improving client satisfaction, retention, and business growth. Use the map to identify opportunities for personalized services, community building, and loyalty programs.
- Optimize Onboarding and Engagement: Simplify sign-up processes, offer free trials or consultations, and maintain communication through personalized plans, progress tracking, and exclusive member perks.
- Incorporate Feedback Loops and Continuous Improvement: Regularly collect feedback and update the journey map to reflect evolving customer needs and market trends.
- Encourage Advocacy and Referrals: Design referral programs and social media engagement strategies that turn satisfied customers into brand ambassadors.
- Ensure Compliance and Privacy: Particularly in healthcare-related wellness, ensure that all client data handling complies with regulations like HIPAA.
By following these best practices, health and wellness companies can create effective customer journey maps that enhance customer experience, drive engagement, and support sustainable business growth.
Tips for Aligning Journey Maps with Business Goals
To effectively align customer journey maps with business goals and customer needs in health and wellness companies, consider the following tips:
- Assemble a cross-functional team including marketing, sales, customer service, and product development to ensure a comprehensive view of the customer journey and foster organizational alignment.
- Use a combination of current-state and future-state journey mapping approaches to identify existing pain points and envision ideal customer experiences that support strategic goals.
- Conduct thorough research combining qualitative methods (e.g., interviews, observations) and quantitative data (e.g., user behavior analytics) to deeply understand customer emotions, behaviors, and pain points at each touchpoint.
- Map all relevant touchpoints in the customer journey, from awareness and consideration through access, service delivery, and ongoing care, to capture the full spectrum of customer interactions.
- Prioritize improvements by linking identified pain points and opportunities to your organization’s key performance indicators (KPIs) and conducting impact-versus-effort analyses to maximize ROI.
- Use prototypes and concept testing during product development phases to validate assumptions and refine the journey map based on real user feedback.
- Continuously update the journey map throughout product lifecycle stages—from discovery to pre-launch and beyond—to anticipate user needs, reduce friction, and promote sustained engagement.
- Leverage journey mapping as a strategic tool to build empathy within your team, align around customer-centric goals, and differentiate your health and wellness offerings through enhanced user experiences.
These tips ensure that customer journey maps are not only detailed and user-focused but also directly support business objectives and customer satisfaction in the health and wellness industry. (everydayindustries.com, uptophealth.com, qualtrics.com)
