How can you map customer experience to your business?

1 What is a customer experience map?

A customer experience map is a diagram that illustrates the steps that a customer takes to achieve a goal or complete a task with your business. It shows the customer's perspective, needs, expectations, and emotions, as well as the touchpoints where they interact with your business, such as websites, apps, emails, calls, or physical locations. A customer experience map can help you identify gaps, opportunities, and improvements in your customer service, marketing, sales, and operations.

2 How to create a customer experience map?

To create a customer experience map, you must first define your scope and objectives. Consider the purpose of your map, your target customer segment, and the specific goal or scenario you want to map. Next, research your customers by collecting data and feedback from surveys, interviews, reviews, analytics, or observation. Analyze this data and organize it into themes, insights, and patterns. Create personas that represent typical customers and their characteristics. Then, outline the stages from awareness to loyalty that your customers go through and describe the actions, thoughts, feelings, and touchpoints of each stage. Visualize this using a storyboard, a table, or a software tool. Finally, validate and refine your map by testing it with real customers and stakeholders; make changes based on their feedback.

3 How to use a customer experience map?

A customer experience map is not just a document, but a dynamic and collaborative tool that can be used to improve business performance and customer satisfaction. To leverage the full potential of this tool, you should compare your map with your business vision, goals, and value proposition. This will help you identify and address any weaknesses or threats. Additionally, you should look for pain points, friction, and inefficiencies to streamline or automate your processes and systems. You can also use the map to innovate and differentiate your products and services by exploring unmet needs, desires, and emotions. Lastly, it's important to define metrics and indicators that reflect customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, and advocacy. This will help you collect and analyze data from the map and other sources to track and report your progress.

4 How to integrate a customer experience map with other business architecture tools?

A customer experience map is not only a tool, but a part of a larger business architecture framework that connects the customer perspective with the internal perspective. It can be integrated with other business architecture tools, such as a value stream map that shows the end-to-end flow of value creation and delivery for customers. A capability map defines the what, how, who, and where of your business capabilities to deliver value. Lastly, a stakeholder map shows the relationships and interactions between your business and its internal and external stakeholders. This includes roles, interests, expectations, and influence of each stakeholder group. By aligning all three maps with your customer experience map, you can ensure that your value streams are customer-centric, capabilities are relevant and effective, and stakeholders are engaged and aligned.

5 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?