Journey

Customer journey mapping is usually done using personas. Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.

Creating personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. Creating personas can help you step out of yourself. It can help you to recognize that different people have different needs and expectations, and it can also help you to identify with the user you’re designing for.

Personas make the design task at hand less complex, they guide your ideation processes, and they can help you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group.

To be as accurate and as close to the customer experience as possible, customer journey maps consider key customer questions across various stages or “moments” in the life cycle. It happens in a less staged approach and uses a mix of ways to understand the customer journey.

We then map it in some visual way.

Customer journey maps are not static, they are dynamic representations. They essentially focus on customer experience optimization.

The emotional aspects are virtually always present. There are at least 3 core pillars to the customer experience. Many have documented this. Forrester has done some great work on it as well.

They generally follow this model from the customer’s point of view:

• Did it meet my needs (goal)?
• Was it easy to do?
• Did I emotionally connect? For example, was it fun?

According to Bruce Temkin:

• Only about one in 10 companies is very good at proactively designing for any aspect of customer experience.
• More companies are good at designing for success (completion on interactions) than effort or emotion, but less than half of companies consider themselves good in this area.
• Emotion is the weakest link, as only about one-third of companies think they are good at proactive emotional design.

Source: Epidemic of Emotionless Experience Design | Customer Experience Matters®

Customer journey maps can also be used outside the strict scope of customer experience management.

Tip: don’t overcomplicate or get lost in theory or, worse, fiction.

Having the right numbers is critical. But CEOs are human too, so you should also strive to get them to take CX personally.

One technique that can really help that is similar to journey mapping is to set up a Customer Room and get senior management to hold meetings there. Keep CX top of mind by including not just common metrics like NPS, churn rates and so on, but also journey maps, customer stories, social media feeds, videos and more.

Still, there’s really no substitute for actually spending time with customers, and with employees who serve customers.

Chip Bell of Chip Bell Group:

You can pretend to care,” wrote Tex Bender, “but you cannot pretend to be there.” The key action is to spend time with customers and with the people directly serving customers.

Ian Golding:

Continually citing examples of Disney, Amazon et al to try and convince senior leaders to become personally engaged in CX is not an effective strategy – nor is regularly evangelising about CX and repeating theory over and over again. In my experiences, there are a number of things that CX professionals need to consider when trying to engage senior leaders – and they are not complicated. Get them to TALK about experiences of their own as consumers, and … experience the customer and employee experiences for themselves.

Erich Dietz of InMoment:

The customer must be present in all decisions and discussions, regardless if they are about product, finance, operations, marketing, HR, etc. I mean that both figuratively and literally. Not only in all internal company communications, but to the point of having leaders actually sit down with the customers that buy their products or services over a meal. Consistently humanizing the customer in the eyes of leadership and the employee base is critical to long term success.

Jeanne Bliss of CustomerBliss:

When I worked at really large companies, we’d find a leader of a country and would work with them on embedding this stuff and showing it in a more closed environment, if you will, and work it through. You go back and you can present that information, show the results and show what happened. Their people are happier. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t, but we find that when you’ve got a frustrated CCO, finding an early adopter can help.