So how does customer journey mapping work?

In this somewhat simplified example, we map the customer journey of somebody signing up for an online course. If you want to follow along with your own use case, pick an important target audience and a customer journey that you know is problematic for the customer.

1. Plot the customer steps in the journey

Write down the series of steps a client takes to complete this journey. For example “requests brochure”, “receives brochure”, “visits the website for more information”, etc. Put each step on a coloured sticky note.

2. Define the interactions with your organisation

Next, for each step, determine which people and groups the customer interacts with, like the marketing department, copywriter and designer, customer service agent, etc. Do the same for all objects and systems that the client encounters, like the brochure, website and email messages. You’ve now mapped out all people, groups, systems and objects that the customer interacts with during this particular journey.

3. Draw the line

Draw a line under the sticky notes. Everything above the line is “on stage”, visible to your customers.

4. Map what happens behind the curtains

Now we’ll plot the backstage parts. Use sticky notes of a different color and collect the persons, groups, actions, objects and systems that support the on stage part of the journey. In this example these would be the marketing team that produces the prod brochure, the printer, the mail delivery partner, web site content team, IT departments, etc. This backstage part is usually more complex than the on stage part.

5. How do people feel about this?

Now we get to the crucial part. Mark the parts that work well from the perspective of the person interacting with it with green dots. Mark the parts where people start to feel unhappy with yellow dots. Mark the parts where people get really frustrated with red. What you’ll probably see now is that your client starts to feel unhappy much sooner than employees or partners. It could well be that on the inside people are perfectly happy with how things work while the customer gets frustrated.

What does this give you?

Through this process you can immediately start discovering and solving customer experience issues because you now have:

A user centred perspective on your entire service/product offering
A good view on opportunities for innovation and improvement
Clarity about which parts of the organisation can be made responsible to produce those improvements
In a shareable format that is easy to understand
Mapping your customer journey is an important first step towards customer centred thinking and acting. The challenge is learning to see things from your customers perspective and that's exactly what a customer journey map enables you to do. Based on the opportunities you identified from the customer journey map, you’ll want to start integrating the multitude of digital channels, tools and technology already in use into a cohesive platform. In short: A platform for digital experience management! That's our topic for our next post.