015 Design Thinking Techniques, Customer Journey

Leaders, Students, Designers, Startups

Ok, so whether you’re a Leader interested in strategic innovation or a Student or Designer interested in learning to innovate with speed and simplicity or whether you’re a startup interested in learning your value and opportunity in the market place, then this is for you.

Design Thinking Series

Bernard Schokman here and I promised to bring you a bunch of videos on Design Thinking. I’m located on the east coast of Australia in an area between the Gold Coast and Northern Rivers. Today I'm coming to you from Tweed Heads and I'm talking about the very first technique in Design Thinking Billboards - The Problem Matrix.

The User & Customer Journey

Ok, so there's a User Journey and a Customer Journey and I've always distinguished between the two. The User Journey is documenting the journey through a singular offering such as a mobile app, website, application, customer service centre, inbound email etc. A Customer Journey is documenting the journey across multiple offerings. Some might not differentiate the two this way and instead call them it all the one thing.

So What is a Customer Journey?

A customer journey is a vivid structured view of the sum of complete experiences as a customer goes through an interaction of your company. So what we're generally talking about here is channel touchpoints and pain points

We're not talking about specific channel touchpoints we're talking about all of them and how a customer would typically interact with multiple of your channels to create the one experience. Okay let's go a little bit deeper. You're generally looking at a customer experience from the perspective of a particular persona and personas should be data-driven (meaning they should come from data you already understand about your customers or consumers). Now if you don't have any personas or data, we talked about a proto persona.

The Advantage

The big advantage of looking at your customer experiences - the sum of all those experiences across all your channels (web, mobile, customer service department, email) is now you're creating one flavour or one type or one sentiment of experience across your entire level.

With user experience, we're actually zooming in on a particular service on particular touchpoints on particular pain points and looking at those specifically. When we're looking at a customer experience we're zooming right out and we're getting a much bigger birds-eye view on all the different channels and services and websites and mobile apps etc and how our customers are experienced then across multiple channels.

Where Do I Start?

A really great way to do this is to just jump on Google do a search on customer experience or user experience. Read the top five articles or look on Google images and look at the top one or two or three images that looks simple and doable to you. Go and read how they're doing it and go and replicate that.

Where Will It Go Wrong?

So where it goes wrong is typically when you're trying to mix the two together and you're not being specific on whether you're doing a user experience or a customer experience and you're creating some sort of hybrid version so the rule. This is why I like to differentiate between the two.

Always just keep it simple! Whenever you're getting into complexity and it starts to get confusing, difficult or heavy - you're either going down the wrong pathway or you're thinking of things in a way too complex manner. Everything good is simple, so keep it simple okay!

Wrap Up

So to wrap up, a Customer Journey is zooming out and looking at the sum of all experiences a customer has when interacting with your company when it comes to channels, touchpoints and pain points. It's about moving towards one single, unified experience so that whether they are emailing, on the web or mobile or whatever...it's the SAME type or flavour of the experience.

And there you have it. That’s part of the dynamic, creative, problem-solving toolset known as Design Thinking and Design Sprints. And that's a simple yet powerful technique called the Persona.

Stay Tuned!

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