The customer journey is something everyone can imagine. A customer journey is the experience a customer has from A to Z with your company. Everyone also knows the good examples such as a Amazon that you get a pleasant experience with, from Google to the webshop, service and delivery. With a Use Case you can map out which steps a customer needs to take, for example to order, to return it or to ask a service-related question. The smoother a customer moves through these processes, the more positive the experience.
What is a use case?
A Use Case is a simple way of showing what a system (a piece of software) should do from the user’s perspective. As in the picture above, you see the relationships (what and who does something) across multiple scenarios.
Use Case originated in the 1980s to register the functional requirements of a system and is part of the object-oriented analysis method UML. UML has several forms of diagrams to design systems. To much to blog about here…
And how and when do you use this?
Nowadays, your customers are inextricably connected with internal systems through a webshop. With a use case you can gain better insight into which actions a customer must take (in the system the webshop) and which other users, such as a support desk, administration, sales and logistics, must do in order to ultimately deliver the customer.
You can use it effectively for optimizations in advance in the webshop or in the linked systems. It is of course advisable to use Use Cases when drawing up an eCommerce plan, especially if you are going for custom software. (See also the blog about drawing up an eCommerce plan)
You can also use the scenarios again in the test scenarios to test the software.
