When figuring out the best way to build or boost your guest satisfaction in your hotel, following your guests on an emotional level is a crucial step.
NB: This is an article from GuestJoy
Despite emotions being known as a relative aspect, an emotional journey map provides a clear understanding and data of your guests’ feelings throughout their stay. Learn how to upgrade your customer journey map with this innovative technique.
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What is an emotional journey map?
The emotional journey map is a UX research technique to visualise and map customers’ emotional experiences through their interactions during various actions of their stay.
It is an extension of the usual experience journey map that visualises the process that the guest goes through to accomplish a goal, but an emotional journey map gives this some more closure.
Simply said, it allows you to know how your guest feels at each touchpoint with you during their whole hotel experience.
The emotion can be represented by a graph from moments of frustration to delight or by adding pictograms or emoticons to the specific steps of the journey.
The goal of emotional journey mapping is to understand customers’ emotions and improve the quality of your guest experience, providing consistency and a smooth experience at all touchpoints on the journey.
Why do you need an emotional journey map?
An emotional journey map allows you to add another objective dimension to your customer journey map to see the emotions your customer goes through at every stage of the experience. This can help your team to make sense of and have a visual aid of the systems and learn to improve the quality of your guests’ touchpoints. An emotional map will increase your customer satisfaction, positive feedback and reviews, bookings and revenue.
It helps your hotel team to
How to create an emotional journey map?
1. Create a user persona – to get started with creating the map we need a user. User persona will represent an average guest or one type of guest (if you would like to create a map for each customer group) of your property. Each user has different expectations and needs so it is good to be comprehensive and create multiple maps to understand different personas present on your property.
- Draw a simple picture of your user.
- Give them a name.
- Make sure to specify who the user is.
- Use the standard user story format: As a… I need… so I can
Example: As a young 32-year-old mother of 3 children…
2. Create a scenario – going forward we need a scenario that addresses their expectations and what they need to accomplish their end goal. The scenario could be about experiences with events, processes or objects. Use scenarios that are likely to happen or have already happened in your hotel.
Example: As a young 32-year-old mother of 3 children I need a hotel that has child care and entertainment facilities so I can relax and rest after a long work year without always taking care of the kids.
