Homework answers / question archive / Brief:  Following your active participation in the journey mapping workshop, please reflect on your experiences and answer the following questions: 1

Brief:  Following your active participation in the journey mapping workshop, please reflect on your experiences and answer the following questions: 1

Management

Share With

---

Brief: 

Following your active participation in the journey mapping workshop, please reflect on your experiences and answer the following questions:

1. What were your 5 key learnings from this workshop? What was your more surprising insight from the JM session?

2. Describe an experience you would like to map based on something that happened to you during the last 12 months.

3.  How would you start to implement the CX Hypothesis your team created during the exercise?

4. What would you like to add to this JM workshop?

5. What activity of the workshop would you have liked more inputs on?

Grading:

10 marks for each question (total assignment weight = 50 marks)

Total course weight: 5 marks

Cover page

Contents

Font size 12, Arial 

Each answer 200-250 words

Brought to you by In association with

Customer journey mapping: A 2019 guide

 

 

2

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

CONTENTS

Foreword 3 Chapter one: What is customer journey mapping and why is it so important? 4 Chapter two: How to create a customer journey map 11 Chapter three: Best practices for building a customer journey map 19 Chapter four: How to use a customer journey map 23 Chapter five: Where customer journey mapping commonly goes wrong 27 About iperceptions 31 About MyCustomer 32

 

 

3

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

FOREWORD

Pascal Cardinal President and CEO

iperceptions

Now, more than ever, you truly need to understand your customers’ journey.

Because customer experience is the main differentiator on which brands compete, every interaction with your customers is crucial. Your customers demand experiences that help them move further along their journey, quickly and easily.

To design these experiences, you need to place yourself in their shoes. What goal do they want to accomplish with your company? What steps do they need to take to reach that goal? What goes through their mind at each step?

Customer journey mapping places you in those shoes. It brings this insight together in one place. It helps you organise the different interactions between you and your customers at every step of their journey. It makes you think of the pain points (and wins) they might encounter along the way.

Most importantly, customer journey mapping helps you find opportunities to deliver exceptional experiences.

Naturally, having a customer-centric mindset when mapping out a customer journey is critical to its success. Do you know what’s inside your customers’ minds at every step of their journey, on all your touchpoints? You need to understand their perceptions, their emotions, what drives them to act the way they do, and how you can act on these insights – all things iperceptions has made its mission to deliver to the world’s largest brands since 1999. It’s the reason why they prefer iperceptions’ expert-guided approach and technology over other options.

The best practices in this guide will provide you with the know-how to create positive experiences your customers will remember.

To learn about iperceptions’ expert-guided approach to customer experience management, visit iperceptions.com.

 

https://www.iperceptions.com/

 

4

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Customer expectations of companies continue to grow, year on year. And those organisations that cannot meet these soaring expectations are paying the price.

“US brands lose approximately $1.6T every year due to poor customer service,” says Pascal Cardinal, president and CEO of iperceptions. “With 67% of customers saying that their standards for good experiences are higher than ever, the need for brands to deliver exceptional experiences across the customer journey has never been higher.

“To optimise the customer experience, brands must first understand their customers and their needs, at every step of the customer journey.”

CHAPTER ONE: WHAT IS CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING AND WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT? By Neil Davey, managing editor, MyCustomer

 

 

5

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Consumer behaviour is changing at such a rate that many businesses find it difficult to gain an accurate picture of their customers and their activity.

When customer journeys consisted of fewer interactions with organisations and were conducted on fewer, distinct channels, businesses were able to achieve deeper customer insights by focusing analytics and feedback programmes on a single channel.

But with a growing number of channels, and customers interacting with companies in multiple ways at multiple times, it is now difficult to draw insights from a single channel that are reflective of what customers are thinking and doing.

This presents a challenge, because if organisations miss a link in the customer journey they can find it difficult to understand what influences customers’ decision-making processes, and what their mental state is (for instance, their likelihood to purchase or engage with a business).

The traditional purchase ‘funnel’ is now a complex matrix of cross- and multichannel activity, making it challenging to identify when and where a customer was won or lost, and to understand all the points of influence along the journey. And this is further complicated by organisational silos within businesses.

Companies will never fully understand their customers if they continue to look at them through the lens of individual departments, rather than achieving a transcendent view of the customer. Businesses need to evolve their customer insights beyond interactions with discrete departments to examine their behaviour in the context of what they are doing in totality.

For this reason, businesses have been turning to customer journey mapping in an effort to fully understand their customers in a holistic way.

“With 67% of customers saying that their standards for good experiences are higher than ever, the need for brands to deliver exceptional experiences across the customer journey has never been higher."

 

 

6

Touchpoint mapping

Efforts to visualise the customer journey traditionally involved the mapping of customer touchpoints. Touchpoint maps have been in use for decades, exploring where organisations are touching the customer with a particular touchpoint, and how the customer perceives that interaction. However, this kind of mapping overlooks the fact that customers often have many other interactions on their journey beyond that touchpoint, some of which may not include your organisation at all.

For instance, if a travel firm utilises touchpoint mapping at the point that a customer books a flight with them, they will miss insights from the wider journey. This could include that they like to coordinate travel with colleagues, for instance, a set of interactions that have nothing to do with the company but that are crucial to understanding the traveller's decision-making process and how to serve them in the future.

With channels such as social media playing an increasingly important part in the customer journey, it is becoming vital that businesses understand the wider pathway to purchase outside of just the consumer’s touchpoints with the company.

Therefore, with touchpoint maps only being able to provide an internal focus of understanding customers, it is unsurprising that an alternative discipline has emerged that provides companies with more of an external view of how customers view the company. This is customer journey mapping, a process of looking at customer goals, emotional states, objectives and pathways, and how interactions with a company sit within particular journeys.

"It is becoming vital that businesses understand the wider pathway to purchase outside of just the consumer’s touchpoints with the company."

 

 

7

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

“The customer journey mapping process engages stakeholders and leaders to create a clear, cross-functional understanding of what happens to customers across the organisation and encourage consideration of processes from the customers’ point of view,” says Andy Green, director of The Customer Framework.

“It begin's with the customer’s start point, motivations and desired outcomes rather than the organisation's and recognises that what the organisation offers is not always the entire customer journey. It addresses emotion in the design, rather than only focusing on the functional elements of the steps – what you want the customer to think, feel and say as they progress through the journey as well as what you want them to do.

“It provides a framework and set of guiding principles to apply to customer interactions as they evolve, rather than a rigid and inflexible set of processes that fail when the customer need does not conform to the design. The output, the customer journey map itself, is a practical and visual document.”

Continuing the example of the travel company, customer journey mapping would view the business traveller’s journey as being how they get to a business meeting, feel comfortable at the meeting and return in time to see their children play football at the weekend, for instance. The travel firm would therefore need that customer journey map to cover what it is they want, how they feel, what their objectives are, and then examine in what ways the company helps them reach their goal throughout the journey, and how they interact with them across that journey.

Pascal Cardinal notes: “Journey mapping allows CX professionals to easily visualise every possible way a customer can interact with their brand as they travel across their journey. It helps organisations create positive experiences consistently.

“Attitudinal data (customer feedback) and behavioural data (what customers do) help identify bottlenecks, suboptimal paths and holes. Ultimately, maps lead to process improvement and better alignment between functions within an organisation, and lower customer churn.”

“Journey mapping allows CX professionals to easily visualise every possible way a customer can interact with their brand as they travel across their journey."

 

http://www.thecustomerframework.com/

 

8

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Strategic design consultant Dea Kacorri, summarises some of the benefits of customer journey mapping:

• Deliver a seamless streamlined experience that allows you to see the bigger picture during small company-wide projects.

• See and approach things from a customer’s point of view.

• Identify what customers are being confused by and/or are having trouble with.

• Identify gaps and opportunities within the current offering.

• Bring teams together with a shared vision.

• Provide relevant, timely and accurate information.

• Develop a consistent roadmap and experience strategy.

• Help you anticipate what needs to be considered so better business decisions are made.

Matt Oakley, strategy director at Taxi Studio, adds:

“Ultimately, it helps to paint a holistic picture of each interaction and then ensures negative experiences are mitigated, while positive ones contribute to greater customer satisfaction and therefore their lifetime value to the brand.”

“The devil is also in the detail here. Take buying a night in a hotel through an affiliate, such as Expedia - the customer journey is for all intents and purposes with Expedia, but the customer experience sits with the hotel. Repeat purchase will be driven by check-in experience, room comfort, food, etc. Expedia owns the customer in a sense - but it cannot influence the customer experience.”

With all of this taken into account, organisations can potentially resolve some of the challenges presented by the rising complexity of the modern customer journey.

“More and more companies understand that each customer interaction is part of a bigger experience and are working to engage with them in a relevant way.”

 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/deakacorri/?originalSubdomain=uk

http://www.taxistudio.co.uk/

 

9

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

And journey mapping is enabling organisations to plan responses to certain behaviours.

“More and more companies understand that each customer interaction is part of a bigger experience and are working to engage with them in a relevant way,” notes Susan Binda, head of loyalty at Merlin Entertainments. “Brands with great trigger strategies are examples of this: abandoned basket emails, welcome back campaigns, lapse prevention campaigns and know-me campaigns are just a few. What customer journey mapping can do is predict likely future behaviours and needs, and set up journeys ready for consumers to follow.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the discipline is now becoming well-adopted, and when MyCustomer surveyed 250 CX professionals in 2018, it found that 67% of businesses undertake some form of journey mapping – with 85% reporting that it was delivering a positive impact.

Oakley has identified several factors that he believes is behind this growth:

• Challenges in demonstrating ROI and the proliferation of marketing channels means understanding the customer journey has never been so important.

• The growing necessity to ensure that there is a positive total customer experience - i.e. there has to be a consistent cross-channel experience.

• The rise of dedicated customer experience professionals and their place in the c-suite is becoming more prevalent.

• Likelihood to recommend companies is higher amongst those firms with higher Customer Experience Index (CXi) scores.

William Braün, director of analytics at iperceptions, notes: “With the rise of various data collection methods, multiple stakeholders within organisations often come to the table with different and conflicting pieces of information. It is not enough to simply collect data; a proper customer experience management strategy is necessary in order to develop research methods that are cohesive, coordinated and comprehensive. Customer journey mapping is the framework that will effectively feed a 360 degree view of all interactions with brands.”

Andy Walker predicts: “Customer journey mapping will continue to grow in popularity as the customer touch points multiply and the data becomes more disparate.”

“Customer journey mapping will continue to grow in popularity as the customer touch points multiply and the data becomes more disparate.”

 

https://www.mycustomer.com/resources/customer-journey-mapping-research-report-2018

 

10

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Nonetheless, customer journey mapping isn’t a panacea in and of itself, and organisations that are keen to embrace customer journey mapping need to be aware of a number of challenges:

• Investment is required (time and cost if external partners are used) to capture the current customer journey/experience.

• The complexity of the journey and not knowing where to start can create confusion.

• Businesses may not have the appropriate skillset to capture the required data.

• It needs to be updated and validated to keep up with constantly changing user needs, behaviours, technologies and developments in an organisation’s proposition.

• There may be pressures on the business to deliver customer initiatives that can be more readily measured in terms of impact on bottom line.

A more fundamental barrier to customer journey mapping adoption is the mindset of the business itself.

"67% of businesses undertake some form of journey mapping – with 85% reporting that it was delivering a positive impact."

 

 

11

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Majid Shabir, founder and CEO at Instinct Studios, explains:

“Customer mapping activities can only add value in an organisation where the management and leadership recognise the benefits of placing the customer at the heart of their business. This has to be embedded in an organisation’s culture and not just in specific departments in charge of customer experience and satisfaction.

“Some organisations are reluctant to embrace customer mapping activities because an activity of this type will expose serious weaknesses in their business, which for whatever reason they are reluctant to address. Uncovering weaknesses doesn’t mean they all have to be rectified at once; on the contrary, a strategy needs to be adopted which gains some initial quick-wins, followed by a roadmap of incremental improvements, with a long-term view to improving the customer experience as a whole.”

So, whether your organisation is yet to adopt customer journey mapping, or is doing so but feels it could improve the way it conducts its mapping and uses the insights, the following chapters will share some best practices that will be invaluable.

 

http://www.instinctstudios.com/

 

12

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

The output of the customer journey mapping process is the map itself – a practical and visual document that should be able to communicate a number of things.

These include:

• The steps the customer takes, their expectations, concerns and state of mind and the outcome they are seeking at each stage.

• What success looks like from their perspective and from the organisation’s.

• What the organisation can influence and how their policies and processes affect customer experience, engagement and value.

• Moments of truth – the points in a journey that define the overall experience; positive and negative.

• The moments that present an opportunity to delight the customer.

CHAPTER TWO: HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP By Neil Davey, managing editor, MyCustomer

 

 

13

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

• The things the customer expects and does not notice unless they are absent - these are the hygiene factors, or the opportunities to dismay.

• What the organisation needs to do to deliver the desired outcomes.

“A good journey map should be something the organisation could share, without embarrassment, with a customer,” notes Andy Green. “It should be possible to hand it to those responsible for delivery of the journey and have them recognise the steps and be immediately clear what is expected of them and why.”

However, there is no standard blueprint for a customer journey map. If you want to build one utilising high-quality design principles, that’s fine. If you’d prefer to use smiley faces, that too is fine. It can be a work of art or something fairly rudimentary.

But beyond the cosmetics of the map, there are various ingredients that good quality maps will possess.

The elements of a customer journey map

Arne van Oosterom, owner and strategic design director at DesignThinkers Group, suggests that customer journey maps (as used by front-office employees) in their simplest form should contain the following elements:

1. Context or stakeholder map We list all stakeholders and we order the hierarchy in circles of influences around the centre, where you are. When working with customers you’ll have the customer in the centre. Describe all relationships on the map by answering the question: what do we do for them; what do they do for us? This map shows you the landscape or force field you are dealing with. And you can discuss how this influences the quality of your work and how a customer benefits or suffers from it.

2. Persona We need a rich customer profile or persona. Describe his/her personal and business situation now (present situation) and in the future (ambitions).

3. Outcomes A description of his/ her desired outcome – what is he/she trying to achieve?

4. Customer journey We list all actions (as far as possible) the customer has to take to reach the outcome (placed in a horizontal line). Don’t start listing actions when the customer uses your service the first time. Start before the moment he/she decided to use your product or service. This way we visualise behavioural patterns.

 

 

14

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

5. Touchpoints Underneath every action we list all channels and touchpoints the customer encounters. Not just yours! This way you’ll discover the landscape you are in from the customer’s perception.

6. Moments of truth Then we identify the moments the customer encounters your touchpoints and channels. We start focus on those (you can move them down a bit). Identify the most important ‘moments of truth’.

7. Service delivery Underneath every touch point, we write down who delivers the service. Who is directly responsible for it (e.g. front office personnel)?

8. Emotional journey Then give every vertical line a grade for the experience (Actions -> touch point -> who delivers the service -> grade). Don’t grade the functionality, grade the work. For the emotion, how do you think the customer felt at that moment? Use a scale from 0 to 10. The higher the number, the better the experience. This can be visualized (e.g. by a line going up and down), and is very effective as a conversation starter. It can often be a real eye-opener.

“A good journey map should be something the organisation could share, without embarrassment, with a customer.”

 

 

15

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

9. Blueprint Now, to make a long story a bit shorter, we can go on listing the organisation underneath, writing down who supports the people delivering the service (back office), and in turn who influences the back office (we link back to the stakeholders map), until we have a complete organisational blueprint, a complete picture of the working of an organisation and emotional journey, from the outside in.

10. Improve and innovate Use creative, brainstorming and any other ideation techniques for the service opportunities you identified (low grades) and/or design complete new and ideal journeys or services. This usually is the moment people have the most fun. People are usually a lot more creative than you realise, they just need to be put into the right situation, with the right mood.

With the ingredients of a basic map in mind, how can organisations take a systematic approach to building a map?

Here is a rundown of the tasks you need to undertake as part of a typical map building process.

Define your objectives

Identify what it is that you want to accomplish – for instance, do you want to fix current problems or build a new experience? Be clear on what it is you want to achieve.

“Customer journey maps are excellent at showing the gaps between customer expectations and perceptions of the actual experience at key steps along the journey. They also help identify improvement opportunities and communicate the ‘why’ and ‘how’ with employees across channels, silos and functions,” says Michael Hinshaw, president of McorpCX. “In journey mapping, as in so many things, beginning with the end in mind will define the path for getting there. So know what you want and keep your strategic goals at the forefront to guide your journey maps.

Clarify ownership

When MyCustomer conducted research into customer journey mapping practices in 2018, little consensus was reached regarding who in the business should take ownership of journey mapping.

Around a third of practitioners told us that their customer journey mapping programmes were run by a head of customer experience or equivalent role. But the remaining two-thirds of practitioners have programmes led by CEOs, COOs, heads of customer service, CMOs, insight teams or indeed any combination of the above.

 

https://www.mcorpcx.com/

 

16

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Lior Arussy, founder and president of Strativity Group, suggests that there needs to be commitment to the journey mapping project from across the business if insights are to be translated into action. “From the start, you need to know who will own what part of the outcome,” he explains. “Ownership should not be arranged afterwards. Each department must assign empowered managers to own the required changes and outcomes.”

While the findings of the MyCustomer research were inconclusive when it came to the most common owner, the data did indicate that those programmes without any project leader at all were most likely to deliver no value. Meanwhile, those projects led by the CEO were most likely to report extremely positive results. And this demonstrates a further point – the importance of having executive buy-in.

Engage your executives

Make sure that relevant executives are bought into the objectives and are engaged in the process.

“Board-level sponsorship is mandatory in order to get the best results,” says strategic marketing professional Matthew Fairweather. “If not, then individuals who have influence and leadership that covers the complete range of departments or business units and functions that contribute to customer touchpoints. Ideally organisations need to represent both the customer and the organisational lenses.”

 

https://strativity.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattfairweather/

 

17

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Lior Arussy adds: “If the end goal is improving your customer experience, obtain commitment and a budget to do so. If management refuses to commit, you know your customer journey mapping is nothing more than a fishing expedition.”

Define the scope of the project

Identify the specific processes and target what customers are to be examined as part of the journey mapping procedure. It is advised that organisations create a journey map for every important customer segment, even if some of the segments follow the same journey. These can always be combined. But it is important that journey maps are not an amalgamation of multiple segments, as this will merely deliver generalities and less-than-useful insights.

Hinshaw echoes the importance of knowing whose journey you are mapping. “The power of a journey map is its ability to effectively illustrate the journey of a customer as they work towards achieving their goals,” he says. “To do this, you need to look through the eyes of a single customer, most effectively represented by a research-based customer persona that represents a broader segment’s unique wants, needs, and objectives. Without this context, the map cannot effectively represent the relationship.”

Conduct internal research

Revisit customer insights and speak with internal stakeholders the length and breadth of the business to gauge their opinions about the existing processes. Hinshaw recommends: “Build an internal view of the relationship. Bring together a cross-functional, customer-facing group to map out their view of the journey, including touchpoints, opportunities, transitions, and issues. Internally driven maps are a great step to mapping the relationship and for identifying key interactions, inputs, and outputs.”

Draft your customer journey map

This draft should be a high level outline of the key stages and interactions in the customer’s journey. This can be either for an entire lifecycle of a customer (such as the multi-year journey of car ownership), or for a specific stage (a family vacation in the car).

“If the end goal is improving your customer experience, obtain commitment and a budget to do so. If management refuses to commit, you know your customer journey mapping is nothing more than a fishing expedition.”

 

 

18

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Conduct customer research

William Braün, director of analytics at iperceptions, says: “Organisations that are taking their first steps into customer journey mapping will unwittingly incorporate their own biases and viewpoints into the design of the various customer flows. This happens because the individuals driving the mapping exercise are often the ones who work directly in the impacted departments. In order to properly map journeys from the customer’s perspective, it is beneficial to leverage exploratory research in an effort to measure and understand the true user profiles and segments, and then design the customers flows from these learnings.”

Speak with different segments in your customer base to ensure that your mapping is accurate, does not miss out any steps and reflects their perceptions. Without this contribution, you could make decisions based on incomplete or flawed information. Listen to their feedback to understand how they view the overall journey, validate the stages you have proposed, and find out further information about specific interactions and steps within those stages.

The best journey maps are almost always created based on ethnographic research, contextual interviews, and, increasingly, analysis of social data.

“Make sure to prioritise the proposed improvements to your customer experience so that the actions you take have impactful results.”

 

 

19

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Identify those interactions, steps that should be prioritised and opportunities for improvement. “Not every ‘broken’ touchpoint is critical to customers,” says Arussy. “In fact, some are not important at all and customers are still satisfied without those interactions being great. Every organisation has limited resources, so make sure to prioritise the proposed improvements to your customer experience so that the actions you take have impactful results.”

Build the final customer journey map

Update the map to incorporate the insights that you have gathered from your customer research. This should pull together all the steps that customers go through, their emotional states throughout, identifying places that are key moments of truth where customers have a strong emotional response (either positive or negative) to what you’re doing, and highlighting opportunities to really improve.

Remember, mapping is being conducted to uncover specific insights that can be used to fix problems, improve customer experiences and/or establish measurement tracking systems.

Hinshaw notes: “A journey map is a widely shared artefact. There are dozens of ways to approach it depending on your goals, your brand, the depth of data displayed, and the breadth of the journey mapped. It should look and feel important to your organisation. Use ‘your’ language and ensure it is easy for the people who need to use it to understand.”

 

 

20

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Journey mapping has become increasingly common to help companies understand existing pain points not unearthed in traditional quantitative surveys. To translate this into a competitive advantage, it’s not just about understanding the present, it’s about identifying opportunities to innovate when designing the future experiences.

It’s not as simple as to leap into customer journey mapping and think it will deliver an answer. You need to start with a clear hypothesis about customer behaviour, a defined journey and set of customers that are relevant to your hypothesis and most importantly, a supportive leadership team.

CHAPTER THREE: BEST PRACTICES FOR BUILDING A CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP By Clare Flitton, creative consultant at Fluxx Ltd.

 

https://fluxx.uk.com/

 

21

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Only your customers can truly tell you what your customer experience is like. You need access to customers to have in-depth interviews about their experience. Ensure the questions you define are aligned to your hypothesis and will yield the data you expect. At a major UK retailer, for instance, this meant riding with delivery drivers to ask customers about their delivery experience, and at a train company this saw the team riding on trains, speaking to customers mid-journey.

Important considerations

• Just having journey maps is not enough. You need to use them to communicate the current experience to the rest of your business and build momentum and a case for change. You’ll need to run workshops involving everyone who has the power to change the customer journey, from operations to finance; not just the marketing team. It’s important to get this commitment from across the business at the outset.

• Journey mapping isn’t an overnight exercise. You’ll need enough people to interview customers and map out their journeys. A lot depends on how many customers you’re going to interview, and this will be based on the size of your company and the problem you want to address. As a rule of thumb, an experienced journey mapper can interview and map-out 20 customer journeys in a week.

• Journey mapping should not be seen as a one-off activity. Journeys should be mapped frequently to create regular loops of actionable insight. Customer expectations are constantly shifting, and this regular insight can be used to develop customer experience designs that consistently delight.

• The simplest approach is to develop linear journey maps. A linear maps flows from left to right following the standard stages of the marketing funnel. Unfortunately this approach can have one major drawback: customers do not just move left to right, they go back and forth. They switch between different channels and they interact with all sorts of different people, media and content in one journey. For example, if you want to buy a new tablet you may research online, read reviews, go into lots of different shops, talk to a friend about their tablet and then make a decision before buying online or in store.

"Just having journey maps is not enough. You need to use them to communicate the current experience to the rest of your business."

 

 

22

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Customer

Sales

Repair Shop

Parts Development

Purchasing

Jeep Parts Supplier

Customer requests a repair to their jeep

Work order prepared

List required parts

Make up order for parts

Make purchase order for parts

Ship required parts

Check parts shipment

Perform repair

Update database, parts received

Prepare the invoice

Customer pays invoice

Order closed

Verbal

Completed work order

Parts request from

Parts order

Parts

Parts

Parts received from

Work completed form

Invoice

Payment

Purchase order for parts

An example journey map

 

 

23

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Human behaviour is complex and multifaceted and this requires a whole new way of doing mapping. For instance, train travel is more than going from A to B, it’s loaded with emotion; be it the excitement of a weekend away with friends or the comfort of a trip to see the parents. A good journey map captures more than touchpoints - it shows how the customer was thinking and feeling.

Here’s a simple six step guide to how to use journey mapping to create experiences for customers that surprise and delight:

1. Collate the data Visit your stores. Call your customers. Invite them for a coffee. Ask them to describe their end-to-end experience using open-ended questions because you want rich detail. Don’t go in blind – have some key questions lined up. Remember you want qualitative insight, so ask about their needs, wants, and motivations along the way.

2. Map their journeys Visually illustrate each individual customer experience. Create customer personas to bring themes to life to help your colleagues understand their customers on a personal and emotional level.

3. Cost the touchpoints The senior leadership will soon pay attention to customer experience if you provide a tangible cost to pain points and opportunities. You can do this by adding a ‘cost to serve’ to key touchpoints. For example, a telco’s customers frequently called their contact centre because of an issue with their phone signal, and by placing a cost on each call the impact of this negative touchpoint was made real.

4. Develop qualitative insights Deep dive into the journey maps you’ve created. Overlay multiple customer journeys to spot common pain points and opportunities. Look to determine your customers’ motivations, wants, needs and preferences.

5. Design Here’s where the real fun begins. Draw out design ideas that could create amazing experiences that exceed your customers’ expectations. Ban words! Just draw ideas. The reasoning behind this is to ensure people do not get too stuck in the detail and think about the ‘big picture’ behind the customer journey.

6. Prototype Map out these end-to-end customer journeys onto blank journey maps using the new design ideas to ensure the to-be CX would be consistent across all channels. Then to bring the to-be customer journeys to life, draw cartoon strips and storyboards.

 

 

24

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Although a great deal of time and effort needs to be invested in building a customer journey map, the value is not actually in the map itself. The value of customer journey mapping is in the insights you learn along the way, and the ways in which you are able to make improvements based on that.

As Dwight D Eisenhower once said: “Planning is everything, the plan is nothing.”

One of the biggest journey mapping mistakes that businesses can make is to only complete a map as part of a strategic exercise. Journey maps are intended to be used, and should be part of the day-to-day focus on the customer needs, solving their problems and making the customer experience the best it could possibly be.

So once you have the map complete, how can you put it to good use?

CHAPTER FOUR: HOW TO USE A CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP By Neil Davey, managing editor, MyCustomer

 

 

25

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

With that in mind, here is a useful to-do list after a customer journey map has been built:

• Share learnings across the organisation Ensure that you are sharing data internally so that everyone from the board room to the shop floor has a grasp on performance, as well as areas that need improvement. “Sharing results across the organisation should be both smooth and exciting if the right buy-in and expectations were set from the beginning,” says Lane Cochrane, chief innovation officer at iperceptions.

Customer journey maps are typically used in three ways:

1. To identify where parts of the experience are ‘broken’ and then fix them.

2. To identify places where there are opportunities to innovate and create new experiences that are different.

3. To use as an internal education and training tool for people to understand what the customer goes through.

“Journey mapping will invariably be a cross-departmental exercise. Results will be challenged, but that is positive, as journey mapping is essentially a change management opportunity that requires active implementation.”

• Identify opportunities to fix problems and then prioritise and act upon them “Share the design with each function and engage them to identify what is stopping them delivering the desired experience,” recommends Andy Green. “This turns the thinking into behaviours and attitudes that staff and suppliers understand and can act on. Those things within their direct control, they can adopt and own immediately. Things requiring broader organisation support for the basis for the transformation plan.”

“Journey mapping will invariably be a cross-departmental exercise. Results will be challenged, but that is positive."

 

 

26

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

• Identify opportunities to wow customers and then prioritise and act upon them. As well as identifying problems to be fixed, maps can also identify opportunities for innovation. Taking our previous example of a travel firm that has identified that a customer likes to coordinate his travel with colleagues, awareness of this opens up the opportunity for the firm to innovate on its offering to potentially support customer collaboration and coordination to make itself more valuable to its customers.

• Define metrics and track performance. “When changes are made, it’s important to capture and share customer reaction to the changes in order to recognise contribution, refine the implementation and sustain momentum,” advises Andy Green.

“When changes are made, it’s important to capture and share customer reaction to the changes in order to recognise contribution, refine the implementation and sustain momentum.”

 

 

27

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

• Embed learnings about customers through training and communications. Some organisations find that the most valuable use of customer journey maps is for training. This can be to help train new recruits, or to teach existing staff to see beyond their internal siloes and understand the wider customer journey and how they can better contribute to an improved experience.

• Create journey maps for other customers and other areas of the business. Organisations should create multiple customer personas and build journey maps for each of them to understand how each different segment has different requirements and interactions.

• Repeat customer journey mapping every 18-24 months or when something changes. “Keep it up to date to reflect constantly changing technologies, consumer behaviour and business proposition,” recommends Dea Kacorri.

"As well as identifying problems to be fixed, maps can also identify opportunities for innovation."

 

 

28

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

Unless businesses can drive change based on the outputs of the customer journey map, the process can be a costly and time- consuming exercise. And there are no shortage of obstacles to success that organisations will experience along the way.

So what are the biggest pitfalls that companies must ensure they avoid?

1. Thinking of customer journey mapping as only a strategic exercise

Brief employees properly about customer journey mapping and its purpose to ensure that they don’t view the process as more of a workshop exercise rather than a practical tool.

To help set the correct expectations, educate employees about customer journey mapping and its purpose, and set pre-workshop exercises such as mystery shopping, to encourage staff to think like customers.

CHAPTER FIVE: WHERE CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING COMMONLY GOES WRONG By Neil Davey, managing editor, MyCustomer

 

 

29

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

2. Mistaking a customer journey map for a touchpoint map

Touchpoint maps look at individual interactions or ‘touches’ with customers. The problem with this approach is that it often loses the broader context of how that touchpoint fits within the overall goal and objectives of the customer.

Whereas touchpoint maps detail all the interactions that a customer has with an organisation, a customer journey map outlines the entire pathway to purchase, including all the important steps that may not involve the business at all. This is an important distinction as it allows companies to discover pivotal points in a customer’s journey where they may yet have a presence but where they can add value in the future.

3. Only speaking to like-minded colleagues

When employees are workshopping their views on the customer journey, there can be a tendency to gravitate towards views that reflect common wisdom or our own opinions. However, it has to be remembered that employees are often expressing personal views, rather than views backed up with hard evidence. This can be particularly dangerous if these opinions are then accepted as hard fact. For this reason, it is important to seek out a range of opinions from a range of different groups of employees.

To ensure there is a common view of the customer journey it is important to seek out opinion across each team within the business, such as creating

stakeholder interviews to capture the whole business perspective rather than just your own definition or thoughts on what the customer journey is.

4. A lack of clear governance

With customer journeys often cutting across different organisational structures, it is useful to form a cross-functional group to accurately reflect the different departments and their experiences of the customer’s journey.

However, for this to be a success, it is important to have the proper governance in place. Without a good group in place to govern the process, things can get messy internally and the wider company won’t want to buy-in and believe in it or be a part of it. Therefore, it is important to set up a cross-functional group in advance.

“The majority of issues organisations face when attempting to implement customer journey maps have their root in the way they are created."

 

 

30

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

5. Failing to involve all stakeholders in the creation of the map

Just as it is crucial to involve all parties who can contribute to understanding the customer journey during the research process, it is also vital to involve any part of the business that will need to participate in any way when the map is being created.

Andy Green says: “The majority of issues organisations face when attempting to implement customer journey maps have their root in the way they are created. A core failing is an ‘Ivory Tower’ development, that presents a design as complete without involving the people responsible for delivery in its creation. How many times we have heard the phrase, ‘if only they had asked us, we would have told them what was needed’.”

And of most importance is ensuring that there is strong support from senior leadership for the project. Without executive sponsorship, an initiative as extensive as customer journey mapping will struggle.

 

 

31

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

6. Not speaking to customers

While taking on-board the opinions of your employees is a good starting point for customer journey mapping, you must validate these internal views by speaking with the customers themselves. Don’t fall into the trap of believing you know more about your customers than you actually do.

Dea Kacorri adds: “Don’t create a customer journey map without conducting customer research. Creating a customer journey map without user insight can lead to business decisions based on assumptions that are not validated by your customer. When compared to real customer insight, these assumptions can be surprisingly different.”

7. Spending too much time in the research phase

While not doing enough research can undermine the entire customer journey mapping process, it may surprise you to know that problems can also be caused by doing too much research. Sometimes organisations create enormous research projects that drag on and become unnecessarily complex and expensive. The most important thing with the research is to uncover opportunities to improve. And it doesn’t have to take vast amounts of research to achieve that.

“Don’t create a customer journey map without conducting customer research."

 

 

32

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

About iperceptions

iperceptions is a global leader in Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions, helping the world's most respected brands become customer-centric organisations.

iperceptions' platform and experts help you understand the intentions, needs and expectations of your customers.

Our tried-and-true method of collecting and analyzing customer feedback ensures that you get an accurate and representative view of how your customers feel about your brand, on all channels.

With an experienced team that has managed 1000s of VoC programs since 1999, iperceptions offers a full range of services including survey design, deployment, reporting and analysis.

www.iperceptions.com

 

http://www.iperceptions.com

 

33

The Guide to Customer Journey Mapping 2019

About

Europe’s leading online resource centre for customer management professionals.

MyCustomer.com is the largest customer-centric marketing portal, providing access to key decision makers across marketing, customer service and IT roles.

We offer credible engagement of senior professionals and influencers from across industry via our leading content and social reach. Core themes include Marketing Technologies and Customer Experience. Marketing Managers and C-level directors make up nearly half of the total readership.

www.mycustomer.com

 

http://www.mycustomer.com