How to run a Customer Journey Mapping Workshop?

Jack wanted to buy a Fujifilm Instax Mini Camera so, he went to the nearby Croma store. He had heard of it before but never visited. He found the staff welcoming and when he told them about his interest, one of the dealers showed him the product and began to tell him its features, cost, etc. Jack was quite satisfied with their pitch and also liked the product. So, he bought it.?

On the other hand, there was another customer in Croma, John. He had been coming to Croma for quite some time now. Every time had had to buy any electronic item, he visited. This time he wanted to buy OnePlus Nord 2T smartphone. But he liked another smartphone and bought it.

The personas of Jack and John are entirely different but they both are customers of Croma. And the journey they went through from knowing about Croma to buying a new product and coming back for something else is called CUSTOMER JOURNEY.

An ideal customer journey has four stages, awareness, consideration, decision, and loyalty. Each stage has its challenges and an opportunity for the brand to get to know its customers better and their experiences with the products and services.?

Now, how will the brand get to know from where the customers have come from, what journey they have followed, and how was their experience across their entire customer journey? Here Customer Journey Mapping comes into the picture.?

Customer Journey Mapping gives you a visual representation of customers’ sentiments about your product/services at all the touchpoints across the customer journey.?

But, mapping the customer journey is not a piece of cake. It requires creativity, brainstorming, and team effort.?

So, how can you do it?

Let's begin by looking at what you need before the Customer Journey Mapping workshop.?

What do you need before the Customer Journey Mapping workshop??

1. Define the objective

If you don’t know what is it that you want to achieve then you won’t be able to move forward. So, know what is your aim and make sure it should be measurable so that you can know where you are heading.

2. Define participant groups?

Create small groups of 4-6 participants if you’re an enterprise with huge participants and want to capture feedback at multiple touchpoints and of various personas. And one moderator should be there in each group.?

But, who should participate in the customer journey mapping workshop??

Across the customer journey, everyone who is involved at any touchpoint should participate.

3. Talk to the participants

Here are a few things that you should share with the participants before beginning the workshop.

• Remind them of the objective of your workshop.
• Tell them if the mode of the workshop you are conducting is either online or offline.
• Inform them of their roles and how their active presence matters
• Communicate your role and actions in the workshop
• Make sure they’re available on the workshop day

4. Create a repository?

For the first-time participants create a repository that includes prep materials such as blogs, presentations, podcasts, videos, etc share it with the participants. This will give them a glimpse of what’s going to happen in the workshop.?

Understanding what your business research is saying is crucial for all the involved participants. Some participants could be unaware or might not be aligned with your business metrics. So, sharing your research data including reviews, pain points, revenue numbers, etc would bring all the participants together.

5. Collect all the workshop material

If you are conducting the workshop OFFLINE, then you must have?

• Location, comfortable seating capacity, wall charts, big screens, laptops, markers, pens, snacks, etc

And if you are conducting the workshop ONLINE, then you must have

• Customer journey mapping tool, tool accessible to all the participants, online meeting apps like Zoom, and so on.

6. Finalize the customer persona

Now it's time to finalize the customer persona because if you don’t know which customer persona you should focus on then how will you begin the workshop??

But, there can be many personas. So how to choose the ideal one? You should choose the customer persona that gives you the most business value. Ask this question to yourself- “Is this the customer I cannot afford to lose?”

If the answer is YES, then that’s the persona you should choose. Your persona should be aligned with your product’s goal and the company’s vision.?

If you still don’t know the right persona, worry not! Getting into your customer's shoes is a key to understanding your customers better.?

Here’s how you can define a persona.?

This is what the ideal customer persona looks like. You need to find customers’ goals, industry, challenges, company size, buying motivation, buying concerns, etc.?

After that, give them a name, and a picture and add the following points.

• Make it inspirational.
• Know and understand your persona in-depth
• Add its demographic, type, goal, description, motivation, frustrations, music, and so on.
• Don’t forget to add a suitable quote about the persona as it will add sentimental value.

Now that we have created the persona, let's move to the actual workshop day.

What will happen during the Customer Journey Mapping workshop day?

The workshop is divided into three parts:?

• 30 minutes for everyone to get on the same page
• 90 minutes for the Current State Journey Mapping of the persona
• And 45 minutes to an hour, for brainstorming ideas

Sounds interesting?

Let’s look at the first step.

Step 1: Align everyone on the same page

It's time to bring everyone together on the same page as not all will come prepared for the workshop. So, it is your job to share the prep material again. You can make them comfortable and ready by following these four points.

• Set an empathetic tone by sharing a video, or quiz about the customer. Communicate why everyone’s here, what is the objective, and whether it has been shared with everyone or not.
• Share the customer persona by telling them about their motivations, pain points, frustration, goals, requirements, etc to understand the customer better.
• Show the research outcomes about the existing pain points and the actions you have taken. Take all those into consideration while conducting the workshop.
• Inform them about your role of being just a moderator to guide all the participants to drive the workshop and ask them to role-play a profile in such a scenario.??

Step 2: Time to do the Current State Mapping!

Getting familiar with the customer journey mapping toolkit is crucial. Being a facilitator, you should make your participants aware of the CJM tool such as why it is important, what function it has, etc. It could be online or offline.?

Afterward, identify the touchpoint across the customer journey and make a draft of the current state journey. It will enable you to map the customer life cycle from the Discover to the Renewal stage.?

Here’s what a typical customer lifecycle looks like.

If you have invited your customers to this exercise then validate the journey from them.?

Below is an example of all the touchpoints across a traveler’s customer journey.

1. Start mapping your customer journey stages horizontally and actions vertically. Here,? the traveler's journey stages are horizontally mentioned as, desire, research & planning, booking, arriving, stay, and checkout. And vertically all the actions are mentioned like goals, touchpoints, experience, quotes, pain points, etc.?
2. Map what you know in each box. You, being a moderator, only have to guide the participants to fill the actions and journey stages of the persona. If your participants are unable to fill the boxes, then do more research to understand the customer.?

3. After mapping everything, identify the touchpoints where the customers are most frustrated and vote on which pain points should be prioritized. Make sure that the aim is to achieve customer satisfaction and the company's goals.?

In this case, voting plays a crucial role as there can be 100 pain points but you cannot solve them all at once. That’s why you need to prioritize them. Choose 5-6 that have more impact on the customers’ emotions, which your team agrees collectively so that you can solve one at a time.?

4. IDENTIFY those gaps that are causing problems be it external or internal.?

5. After that, VALIDATE those pain points and gaps with your involved customers (if any).?

Step 3: Generate IDEAS?

Know the most voted pain points and think of the exclusive ideas to solve those issues. You have to be creative and wild at the same time to try different approaches to meet and exceed customers’ expectations.?

Now, prioritize the ideas based on the time and effort they will take to execute, and know which one is more effective. Once you have got the top ideas, start discussing their implementation with the respective teams in the coming 1-2 weeks. Set a timeline, and give ownership to the people to begin the process. And don’t forget to measure its impact.?

At last, add all these to your VOC program so that you can analyze the progress. By using this you can assess your progress and see where you are heading either in the right way or wrong.?

Moving forward, let us finally look at what you should do after the customer journey mapping workshop.

What you should do after the Customer Journey Mapping Workshop?

Follow these four things that you should do after the workshop.?

1. SHARE the discovery, new ideas, and findings with the team. So, that everyone can come on the same level.
2. Do additional research and conduct customer interviews before validating the idea.?
3. Schedule quarterly or monthly meetings to TRACK the progress of the improvements with the necessary people.?
4. After its implementation, keep your eyes on the progress of CX or business metrics.?

Furthermore, measure the impact of these actions. It can be either directly related to your business or customer metrics, such as your NPS and CSAT scores, website performance, or app reviews. All these will help you to know whether your actions have produced any outcome or not!?

So, bring some patience, diligence, and imagination to the table and start mapping your customer journey now!?