Creating a Customer-Focused Customer Experience Journey Map

Jim Tincher, [email protected]©2013 Heart of the Customer

Creating a Customer-Focused Customer Experience Journey Map

Presented by: Jim TincherPrincipal Consultant, Heart of the Customer


What is a Customer Journey Map?

• Customer journey maps go by different names, such as customer experience maps, journey maps, and touch point maps.

• Journey maps serve as a visual means to identify the steps your customer goes through as they experience your product or service and the impact of each.

• Customer journey maps chart your customer’s experience and help you target improvements with the greatest return.

• By identifying those steps in yourcustomer experience with the greatest impact, your journey map becomes a centerpiece of your customer experience planning process.


2 common reasons to use a Customer Journey Map

1. Identify all the touch points that make up your customers’ experience, in order to improve your company’s impressions at these touch points.

2. Understand the emotional impact of interactions in your existing customer experience.


Identify all the touch points that make up your customers’ experience

Touch Point Maps show each customer interaction within a larger experience. A primary goal is to understand which touch points are used, and how each assists or interferes with your customers’ goals in the process.

Many experiences include touch points outside of your direct control, such as friends and family, social media and third-party websites. Each has an impact on the journey and needs to be understood.


Touch Point Map Example


Understand the emotional impact of interactions in your existing customer experience.

Every journey has an emotional impact on your customer, even in a business-to-business relationship.

Emotional Impact Maps target a specific phase or interaction in your experience and how each interaction builds or destroys value in your customers’ eyes.


Emotional Impact Map Example


Ten guiding principles of a customer-focused journey map

1. Represent your customer’s perspective2. Measure your brand promise3. Start with qualitative research4. Zero in on your customer segments5. Include your customer goals6. Communicate your customer emotions 7. Document your touch points8. Highlight your moments of truth9. Show your customer time progression10. Ditch the PowerPoint


1. Represent your Customer’s perspective

Your journey map needs to represent the interactions as your customer experiences it. Is most of customer education complete before they ever visited your website?

If so, this impacts how you go to market. If so, how can you influence these other sites’ content to improve their chances of winning?


2. Measure your brand promise

A journey map begins with your brand promise, and identifies how it is supported by your customer experience. If your brand promise is to have an experience that is effortless, highly customized, or unique, then your journey map needs to show whether your customers feel you are meeting that goal.


3. Start with qualitative research

Qualitative research allows you to understand the “why” of your experience.

Depending on the scope, the mapping process can involve journaling, interviews or ethnographies.

Quantitative surveys provide a critical role to provide more certainty, but require a strong qualitative process first.


4. Zero in on your customer segments

Different segments experience your products and services very differently. In a service company one segment could spend two hours researching the category while another segment spends over six weeks doing the same, using very different tools.

Trying to combine these very different experiences creates a diluted map that applies to no one.


5. Include your customer’s goals

A great journey map shows what your customer is trying to accomplish at each stage of the process. Goals change as your process unfolds, and interactions need to be designed to address the goals at the current stage of the process.


6. Communicate your customer’s emotions

Emotions are critical to any experience, whether B2B or B2C, and the best customer journey maps clearly communicate these emotions and how they change as the experience unfolds. Some maps use happy and unhappy faces to communicate the customer’s emotional state. Instead you can use satisfaction scores and colors to show the relative state of your customer’s emotional responses.


7. Document your touch points

Many customer journey maps are built primarily to demonstrate the order and type of touch points.

The best maps show the emotional impact of each touch point.


8. Highlight your Moments of Truth

We define a Moment of Truth as a touch point with high impact to the rest of the process.

Some interactions matter more than others. Great maps identify those critical Moments of Truth. For example, a bad clinic check-in taints the rest of the patient experience.

You can document the Moment of Truth with a Plus Sign (the check-in process on this map highly influences the rest of the journey).

Different providers use this term to mean different things.


9. Show your customer’s time progression

The length of your customer experience can vary depending on the customer segment or the context, which is critical to understand. Does your customer’s typical call last 30 seconds or 10 minutes? Did shoppers spend 20 minutes or 40 hours deciding on a product?

How does this vary by segment? And what might be causing this variation?


10. Great maps don’t use PowerPoint!

Why limit yourself to PowerPoint for something as important as your customer experience? You don’t need to purchase expensive mapping software – desktop publishing software can work fine. But use something with the flexibility to create a great map.Your map should be an oversized creation that can become the focal point for conversations – not something projected in a dark room.


Four optional principles of a customer-focused journey map

Break the experience

into phases.

Bring in Customer

Verbatims.

Include Non-Customers.

Incorporate your other

Voice of the Customer

components.


A. Break the experience into phases

In a longer experience, customers accomplish different things at different stages.

For example, early shopping phases typically involve trying to understand what criteria is important, whereas later phases are more transactional. Shorter transactions may not require phases.


B. Bring in customer verbatims

While not strictly required, verbatims bring the customer experience to life. If not used in your journey map, then definitely include them in the surrounding education.


C. Consider including non-customers

In a pre-sales journey, non-customers may be following a different path to make a decision.

In one case non-customers might be far more likely to use in-person meetings to make a purchase decision – if your company doesn’t offer that, it would be good to know about this gap. It will directly impacts your customer experience strategy.


D. Incorporate your other Voice of the Customer components

Rather than being separate from other research, the journey map should reflect components of your Voice of the Customer program to link it to your other efforts.NPS, Satisfaction, the Customer Effort Score or any other common metrics should be used here to link to existing customer research used by your company.For more on the Customer Effort Score, visit www.heartofthecustomer.com/customer-experience-score-how-hard-is-it-to-be-your-customer/

http://www.heartofthecustomer.com/customer-experience-score-how-hard-is-it-to-be-your-customer/

http://www.heartofthecustomer.com/customer-experience-score-how-hard-is-it-to-be-your-customer/


For more detail

Download the white paper on this topic at:

http://www.heartofthecustomer.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Creating-a-Customer-Focused-Customer-Experience-Map-White-Paper1.pdf






About the Author - Jim Tincher

Jim is the Principal Consultant at Heart of the Customer. Jim has more than 20 years of experience in driving customer engagement and intimacy from small business to Fortune 500 companies.

Jim’s Voice of the Customer expertise has led to engagements as far-reaching as developing consumer tests at Best Buy, creating a Customer Insights capability at UnitedHealth Group, and consulting with clients ranging from global fast food companies to utilities to international manufacturing and service companies. Jim is a dynamic keynote speaker, passionate about building a world-class customer experience that results in customers who come back time and again.

Contact Jim at [email protected] or 612-747-4021.

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Creating a Customer-Focused Customer Experience Journey Map