#3: Customer journey mapping - how to get started and keep going

“If you want radical results, you cant be using the same strategy and expect different result.

Change requires new capabilities. New capabilities requires deeper understanding of your customers wants, needs and ecosystem.

Fortunately, we have a way to understand and adapt to customer’s needs and expectations. customer journey mapping.

This design approach involves taking a step back, assessing the situation, and devising a future state based on the expectations of your customers. By using customer journey mapping, you can engage both customers and employees in the process of defining your transformation, ultimately leading to improved business results.

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey map visually represents all the interactions between customers and your brand from the time they recognize a problem to becoming an advocate of your product.

Investing in optimizing every customer touchpoint is necessary for becoming an experience-led business, as understanding the customer journey can help B2B companies lead customers on the path to a great experience and quality product or service, according to Blake Morgan, a customer experience futurist.

What are some of the advantages of having a customer journey mapped?

Are you looking to gain a competitive edge in your industry and improve your customers' experience with your brand? Look no further than customer journey mapping.

Investing in mapping out your customers' journey is an initiative that yields numerous advantages for your business. Not only does it bring siloed teams together in a more customer-centric way, but it also visually communicates the journey your customer persona is taking, sharing the stories behind their frictions and pain points with your brand. By inspiring your stakeholders with a compelling customer story, you can more easily align them towards the shared goal of improving your customers' experience.

But let's be clear: customer journey mapping is not just another deliverable. It's a catalyst for change. The journey behind the journey map is rigorous and challenging, but it's an undertaking that can surpass the results of the investment made. The real question is, how can we make sure the journey enables our team to speak the shared language of customer-centricity?

The answer is simple: prioritize your customers' experience. 68% of customers say they’ve switched service providers because of poor customer service. Moreover, if your customers are having a frustrating experience with your brand, there's a 95% chance they'll tell about it to others.

By mapping out your customers' journey and addressing pain points and frictions, you can ensure your customers stay loyal to your brand and keep coming back for more.

Investing in customer journey mapping is not just about improving the customer experience - it's about setting a foot in the door for customer-focused change. By getting buy-in from your business partners and aligning everyone towards a shared goal, you can make sure your brand stands out in a crowded market and attracts loyal customers who will stick with you for the long haul.

Recommended reading -

I've outlined the steps, according to the book I was reading for the right way to map your customer journey.

'How hard is it to be your customer' by Jim Tincher and Nicole Newton.

Step 1- Identify the business problem or opportunity

If you take the holistic journey, the initiative may not work but if you are granular enough to take up the problem that is not conducive to your business right now, then you will be able to visualise the solutions once we are ready with the journey.

Which business problem is keeping you awake at night?

Is it customer churn? Is it the low NPS score? Is it low adoption of your product?

If you have the data to back these problems up, great - pick that problem.

For the sake of our example here, I’m going to select less adoption of product as a business problem.

Step 2: Select the right journey to map.

There will be several ways your customers would be interacting with you, prioritise the journey that is the most impactful for your brand.

Some of the journeys to map could be onboarding journey, product service/ usage, purchase process, customer support journey, pre-sales or awareness, etc.

Either take the end-to-end or the sub-journey to map out.

For the example here, let’s take the journey of after sales process - onboarding of our customers. On boarding or the first 2 months could something be of critical item period for the customers because that will define the rest of their journey with us.

Step 3: Select the right customers.

According to Jim Tincher, if you haven’t involved your customers in creating this customer journey map, then they are, at best, your internal guesses about the customer journey, and not the customer journey.

Most of the companies skip this step, but to avoid any assumptions that we are making, we will go ahead and speak to our customers. Speaking to the customers who closely represent our persona and are going through the journey that we prioritise would be the ideal customers to speak with.

Some of the considerations of selecting the right customers include double checking the factors involved in separating your user segment.

For example, what’s the demographic or firmographics of your customers. Customers who work with a start up will have different decisions than who work with enterprises.

Which customer is likely to stay invested with your firm?

From where your customer would be hailing?

Which touch points have they regularly interacted on?

Which vendor did the customers come from?

For the sake our example, let’s take a customer who has not logged in to our system for more than 6 months. Who haven’t been using our product since the last one year, where as his company is investing on our solutions for long period of time.

Things like how long has he been working with our client, from where is coming from? Did he use our competition’s product, how many times have he interacted with our customer support etc, will be taken into consideration.

How to recruit the customers?

• Speak to your customer service executives and get a list of all the customers who have given low scores after a service call.
• Create an opt-in form in your survey for the customers to speak with you. More importantly, keep the survey responses handy with you in case you want to bring that up when speaking to your customers.
• Create an opt in form in your website and seed that form to get more people to talk to.
• Outreach the people who you think would be interested to talk. Keep an outreach email ready with you for this.

We make sure to select the right customer in order to avoid boiling the ocean.

We will include the customers in the immersion phase of mapping the journey.

Step 4: Select the right team:

As we have said earlier, customer journey map is mean to an end. It involved solving the right problem for the right team.

Which means, the team has to be included when we are creating the journey.

The right team with add in an extra layer of accountability to the system when we are trying to solve for the customers pain points, that will surface out when plotting the journey.

For the example, our product management team, marketing team, documentation team and after sales- service team would be the best team to talk to and co-create the journey with.

Step 5: Map the journey -

Involving the right cross functional team is one of most crucial factor in journey mapping. Now that you have the information required for you to get started, you could go ahead and map the stages your customers are taking in the journey you prioritized.

The three stages of mapping the journey are-

1. Discovery - is where we discover the hypothesis and existing knowledge on the journey. The current status (as-is).

2. Customer immersion is where we listen to the voice of the customers.

3. Action is when we immerse the teams in the voice of the customers and driving action on the results. This is where we look to plot the future state.

Choose the critical steps:

During the immersion phase, try and map out the journey that your customers will be telling you when you ask them your questions.

While creating the map, write out the customer steps - the top row.

Is it awareness? Consideration? Loyalty?

Remember, there’s no one-size fits-all approach to mapping this out. Each customer and each problem will have different steps.

You can start by asking the participants what does she goes through while interacting with the brand. Keep the sticky note ready whenever the customer calls out “I“ “ I drive to the store,“ “I google the prices.“ etc.

Write out all the critical steps that your customers would be taking in order to interact with your brand.

Each participant could have 6-8 steps in the journey.

Here comes the time where all the stakeholders will gather to vote for the critical steps.

Secondly - Select the moment of truth:

A moment of truth refers to a critical point in a customer's journey or interaction with a business, product, or service that can significantly impact their perception of the overall experience. These moments are characterized by the customer's heightened emotional state and can be positive or negative.

For example, a moment of truth for a restaurant might be when a customer receives their food - if the food is delicious and served promptly, it could be a positive moment of truth that enhances the customer's overall experience. On the other hand, if the food is cold or takes too long to arrive, it could be a negative moment of truth that diminishes the customer's perception of the experience.

Identifying and understanding moments of truth is crucial for businesses as it allows them to prioritize and focus on areas that have the most significant impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Action phase of customer journey:

Workshops and interventions with your stakeholders:

During the workshops, debrief about the findings you had while mappng the customer journey. Often more than not, these debriefing sessions helps get everyone on the same page about the moments of truth and pain points.

The action phase of the journey is where you will talk about and take concrete steps regarding the future state of the journey.

While workshopping, the customer journey would emerge with all the phases and the moments of truth - which can be used to create themes that are regularly occuring.

Thematic analysis would help you in creating the initiatives that would further help to involve the cross-functional team. Use the governance model or set up a regular cadence to decide on the initiatives and check the progress with your team.

Governance of customer journey map

Governance is a crucial aspect of customer journey mapping that ensures the actions and interventions planned actually come to fruition. The journey mapping process itself is just a means to an end, and governance is necessary to see the identified opportunities through to completion.

Establishing a governance committee with result-oriented metrics and action items is an effective way to monitor the changes being decided upon and to ensure they align with the desired outcome.

The governance team plays a vital role in keeping the journey maps current and relevant by tracking internal awareness and customer-focused changes.

Internal marketing and spreading the word about the customer experience team's work are critical steps in creating a shared language among team members, removing silos, and aligning everyone towards a customer-focused priority. This helps to increase adoption of the journey maps and ensures everyone is working towards the same goal.

Functional priorities and service design thinking come into play when it comes to implementing customer-focused changes. The governance team can help answer questions Are you looking to gain a competitive edge in your industry and improve your customers' experience with your brand? Look no further than customer journey mapping.

Investing in mapping out your customers' journey is an initiative that yields numerous advantages for your business. Not only does it bring siloed teams together in a more customer-centric way, but it also visually communicates the journey your customer persona is taking, sharing the stories behind their frictions and pain points with your brand. By inspiring your stakeholders with a compelling customer story, you can more easily align them towards the shared goal of improving your customers' experience.

Having a living and breathing document of the map with the right team priorities is key to answering these questions and ultimately succeeding in reducing customer pain points.

Disclaimer -

These steps are but a very condensed version of what it would look like if you are to map out the journey. There are specialists who do this day-in and day-out and it takes years to build the map for an organisation.

this is an attempt to make you understand what does it take to build the map from scratch, taking example from my own understanding and volunteering activities that I've done till now.

If you want to start building your customer journeys, then I highly recommend reading "How hard is it to be your customer?."

Reading the book and using the templates that comes along with it will help you get all the head start you need to activate your journey mapping journey (you see what I did there? ;))