Are You Ready To Up Your Journey Mapping Game?

There is a significant difference between a process and an experience. Many companies confuse their internal processes with the experience the customer really has. To find out the experience your customers actually have today, you need to participate in some form of Journey Mapping. 

Journey mapping is not a new idea. It describes looking at the customer journey. The definition of a customer journey is the steps that a customer would take from the beginning to the end. However, it's what the customer does, not what the organization thinks the customer should be doing or the process the company intended for them to do. 

When it comes to Journey Mapping, we would argue that it is not only critical to look at the customer journey but also to look at it from a customer’s perspective. By observing people and what they do, you learn the essential parts of your customer journey. We call Journey Mapping that uses this approach Behavioral Journey Mapping. 

One of the listeners of The Intuitive Customer Podcast, Brian from New York, wanted to understand a bit more about some of the sort of practical applications around our type of Journey Mapping. We talked about how to undertake customer Journey Mapping using Behavioral Science in a recent podcast to give people some ideas and thoughts on what they should do and how they should go about it.

Often, people working on Journey Mapping wonder, where does the Customer Experience start? Companies think it begins with the process, or when they first interact with a customer. However, from a customer perspective, when they first communicate with you is not when they perceive the experience starts. It is typically long before that when they first had the idea they had a problem that your product or service might solve. 

Therefore, how the experience starts is effectively outside of your control. For example, I was staying in a hotel, and after arriving from a long international flight, I decided I would ring up the hotel’s shuttle to come and pick me up at the airport. Unfortunately, an hour later, I was still waiting. 

I realize that a shuttle service isn't the hotel’s core job. Their core job is to provide me with a hotel room. However, they decided to extend their experience into picking me up at the airport. When they didn’t for over an hour, it made me exceptionally annoyed at them and I was disappointed about that part of the experience with the hotel.

What Most Organizations Get Wrong

Many organizations still don't do the Journey Map correctly. They typically only look at the rational parts of an experience. So, the rational parts of my shuttle example are, I am calling the shuttle; the person asks me questions about my location; the shuttle comes to get me, and other thoughts like these. 

However, when you're designing an experience, you must consider not only the rational things but also emotional things. From a Journey Mapping perspective, you need to understand how your customer is feeling coming into that experience. In this case, I was feeling particularly ratty because I was tired. No one wants to wait an hour, of course, but people who aren’t worn out from a long international flight are a bit more understanding when it takes a while.

Over the last few years, organizations have started to talk about emotions, which is excellent. However, they're not talking about it in the correct manner, which is to say, they talk about it in general terms, e.g., this is positive and that is negative. 

You have to get into specifics. So, in other words, be specific about which emotions you evoke. Generally, it was negative that the shuttle took so long, but specifically, I felt frustrated and annoyed. 

When we do Behavioral Journey Mapping, we try to correct what organizations get wrong by including the emotional moments and getting specific about them. We would be looking at the subconscious messages customers receive. 

For example, when you go into a bank and they have chains on their pens. That says, “We don’t trust you lot with our pens. Thieves, all of you!” It is not a desirable subconscious emotional message from a customer's perspective. After all, most of us steal pens by mistake, not intentionally. 

Another part of mapping the customer journey for us in our global Customer Experience consultancy is to consider the psychological part of the experience. For example, when you get the bag of food from the drive-thru, what is the first thing you do? I’d wager it is that you check to make sure your food is there. Many of us don’t trust the food order is correct, so we automatically check. Drive-thru restaurants have trained us to think like this over the years. 

When it comes to undertaking Behavioral Journey Mapping, you must remember these two things. Firstly, you must consider it from a customer perspective, not a process perspective. Secondly, you must determine how your process relates to the rational, emotional, subconscious, and psychological aspects. 

We take the following five steps in Behavioral Journey Mapping:

1.  We would do what we call “walking the experience.” It is effectively acting as a customer going through the process. Ideally, it would be best if you choose somebody that's never experienced your journey before. A fresh pair of eyes is critical. 
2. Doing some form of research. Undertake some analysis from a customer perspective. One of the ways we do this is with, what we call, The Experience Wall, a very detailed visual aid for each step in your Customer Journey. Each step is a large brown piece of paper on the wall, with a series of notes on it for what happens in each step. This exercise is for what we call the “as is” experience. 
3. Participate in ideation. Now, you come up with some suggestions of what we can do for what we call the “to be” experience. You want unusual and different ideas. If you're doing this well, you can come up with a couple hundred ideas. Our record is six hundred and seventy-seven different ideas for one day!
4. Filter through the ideas. You have to prioritize. Sort through the ideas with a mind on the impact on the experience, the ease of implementing it, the cost of it, who would be involved in it and what part of the journey it addresses. (To be honest, it's a huge spreadsheet when you are done.)
5. Design the new experience.  It is essential to design the experience from the four different aspects: 

• Rational: What's the customer doing? 
• Emotional: How is the customer feeling walking into this new part of a new step of the Customer Journey, and what do you want them to feel walking out? 
• Subconscious: What subconscious things do we want here that would reinforce our desired experience?
• Psychological: How are these new experiences going to be processed psychologically by our customers? 

A word of caution here about the Behavioral Journey Mapping process: Teams come up with all these new ideas and new ways of doing things, but they don’t cut anything. However, it’s vital that you also list out all the things that you are going to stop doing as well to make room for the new experience you designed. Often, it's the bit about what are we going to stop doing that gets lost.

Another critical factor here is that Behavioral Journey Mapping needs the entire organization to participate. So, the process is not something that two or three of you should do in isolation from the rest of the organization. It should be an inclusive process. If you haven't included people throughout the organization, then when it comes down to doing it, everybody will not buy into the change and participate.

The outcome of this Behavioral Journey Mapping process is typically an extensive document that describes in detail what than what the “as is” experience is like and what the “to be” experience will be. Each step of the “to be” experience also has a detailed look at what emotions they're trying to evoke and what they need to be doing (i.e., specific actions) at this step to evoke it.  

Furthermore, you must then train people on how to deliver the new experience. Up until then, the document is all theoretical. The people who interact with customers are who make it live. If you do all of the research, brainstorming and designing but nothing changes at the front end, then you will change nothing at all in the as-is experience.

Behavioral Journey Mapping requires you to take your customers perspective and actively work at it. We think you’ll find that looking through your customer's eyes is harder than it seems like it's going to be, so, take that seriously, or it won’t work. 

So, just to reiterate for Brian in New York, we use five steps for customer Journey Mapping using Behavioral Science. First, you walk the experience to see it from a customer’s perspective. Second, you do research about customers. Third, you brainstorm ideas about how to improve it (and what you should cut), followed by a filtering process that helps you prioritize your changes. Finally, you design your new experience and prepare to train the team on how to deliver it.

Most companies only scratch the surface on customer Journey Mapping. However, with Behavioral Science leading the way, you can do better—and do better by your customers with your new experience. 

Hear the rest of the conversation on Customer Journey Mapping Using Behavioral Science on The Intuitive Customer Podcast. These informative podcasts are designed to expand on the psychological ideas behind understanding customer behavior. To listen in, please click here.

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Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of six bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX