What are the best practices for identifying areas to outsource with journey mapping?

1 What is journey mapping?

Journey mapping is a tool that helps you visualize and understand the experiences and emotions of your customers as they interact with your products or services across different channels and stages. A journey map typically consists of a timeline that shows the steps, actions, and goals of your customers, as well as the pain points, opportunities, and feedback they encounter along the way. Journey mapping can help you identify the gaps, inefficiencies, and frustrations in your current processes, as well as the expectations, needs, and preferences of your customers.

2 Why use journey mapping for outsourcing?

Journey mapping can help you evaluate your outsourcing potential by providing you with a holistic and objective view of your customer journey. By mapping out your customer journey, you can see which touchpoints are critical for creating value, building trust, and ensuring satisfaction, and which ones are less essential, repetitive, or mundane. You can also analyze the complexity and risk of each touchpoint, and how they affect your operational efficiency, quality, and compliance. This way, you can prioritize the areas that need your internal attention and expertise, and identify the areas that can be outsourced to external partners who can deliver better results, faster, and cheaper.

3 How to use journey mapping for outsourcing?

To use journey mapping for outsourcing, you need to first define your scope and objectives, such as the customer segment, product or service, and journey stage you want to focus on. Additionally, decide on your goals and criteria for outsourcing. Next, create a current state journey map by collecting data and feedback from customers and employees. This map should include the existing touchpoints, actions, emotions, pain points, and opportunities in your customer journey. After that, evaluate each touchpoint based on its value, complexity, and risk for your business and customers. Finally, identify which touchpoints are suitable for outsourcing and which ones are not. Create a new journey map to show how your customer journey will change after outsourcing. This should include the expected benefits, challenges, and risks of outsourcing as well as how you will monitor and manage the performance and quality of your outsourcing partner.

4 What are the benefits of using journey mapping for outsourcing?

Using journey mapping for outsourcing can bring a variety of advantages, such as improving customer experience by outsourcing touchpoints that are less relevant, more tedious, or more difficult. This can lead to greater convenience, satisfaction, and loyalty from customers. Additionally, businesses can optimize their processes by outsourcing touchpoints that are more costly, time-consuming, or challenging. This can reduce operational expenses and increase productivity while allowing the business to focus on their core competencies. Finally, journey mapping for outsourcing can help mitigate business risks by outsourcing touchpoints that are less prone to errors, complaints, or legal issues. This can minimize exposure to quality, compliance, and reputation risks while transferring some of the responsibilities, liabilities, and contingencies to the outsourcing partner.

5 What are the challenges of using journey mapping for outsourcing?

Using journey mapping for outsourcing can also pose some challenges, such as finding the right partner who can understand and deliver your business goals. Establishing a clear contract and SLA with your partner is also important. Additionally, you need to ensure that your outsourcing partner can represent your brand values and build trust with your customers. Furthermore, you should track and evaluate the performance of your partner, manage any changes or risks that may occur, and have contingency plans and exit strategies in place.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?