Customer journey map – start here: CX Mini Masterclass – E18

This CX Mini Masterclass is the first of a 3-part installment on the topic of the customer journey map. Show host and CX expert Julia Ahlfeldt provides an overview of the different types of maps, the kind of information that is normally included in a journey map, and how maps can be utilized to help organizations achieve their customer-centric goals. This episode will help you cut through the confusion and prepare for the first step in creating a customer journey map. The first step to creating a customer journey map Customer journey mapping is a major buzz word in the business world, and for good reason. Journey maps are an important strategic focal point for businesses that are looking to affect customer-centric change. Why? Well, because in order to improve customer experience, you have to understand the experience so that you can clarify what’s working and what’s not. It’s also important to establish a common language so that teams can effectively collaborate around solutions, and journey maps help with just that. In my previous CX Mini Masterclass episode, I explored the definitions of touchpoints, experiences, and journeys. If you are interested in the conceptual theory behind journey maps, I’d highly suggest that you check out that episode and the accompanying shownotes, here. This episode takes you through the first step towards creating a journey map, which is clarifying which type of map is best suited for your needs. The different types of maps There are many different kinds of maps. I’ve broken them down into 3 main categories and highlighted the potential use for each: Customer lifecycle map – This is the highest level of customer journey map. It explores a customer’s experience fulfilling a need in their life, and the various stages of doing so. Ideally, a lifecycle map should fit on one page and be something that anyone in the business can pick up and easily understand. If an organization has never mapped the journey before, or is documenting the customer experience as part of launching a new CX function or rolling out a new brand-wide customer strategy, I typically suggest that they start with the customer lifecycle. The sub-journey map – These journeys are essentially a zoomed-in view of 1 or 2 phases of the lifecycle map. These maps can become a bit more granular and may ultimately extend onto a couple of pages, but it’s important to keep the detail under control so that the final output isn’t overwhelming for readers. For teams that have already mapped the customer lifecycle, are looking to understand a specific sequence of experiences in more detail or trying to pinpoint opportunities to improve customer interactions, sub-journey maps are a great option User experience map – These maps are the most detailed and granular of the experience visualizations. User experience maps help you define your taxonomy and interface with a customer by understanding the “flow” of the various tasks the user will undertake through different touchpoints. I’ve included UX maps as a category of journey maps, but this is where experience visualizations can become more inward looking. They are often used when a team is launching a new experience and can be a great reference point for wireframes, functional specifications and content strategies Choosing your map Before you and your team dive into journey mapping, it’s important to clarify your motivation for creating a customer journey map. Reflect on why you want to create the map and how you think it will be used. There is often a temptation to dive into sub journey maps or UX maps, but if your organization hasn’t clarified the high level journey, think about doing this first. It will help set the tone for future mapping efforts. If your organization has already made a lifecycle map, think about the purpose for your next level of map and that will help you steer things in the right direction. If you are curious about what to do next, stay tuned — these topics are covered in my next 2 mini masterclasses: Prepare for customer journey mapping (E19) and How to map the customer journey (E20). Transcript Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript. Click to expand full transcript [Intro music] Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thank you for tuning in. This episode is the first in a three-part installment on customer journey mapping that I’m doing during the month of December. These weekly episodes are part of my CX mini masterclass series, which is something a little different from my typical CX expert interview shows. My aim with the mini masterclass is to provide an overview of theories and concepts that are central to the customer experience profession through a short and easily digestible format. So whether you are new to the field of customer experience, preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics… …this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional. If you’re busy putting up holiday decorations or jogging off all that delicious eggnog you’ve been enjoying recently and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Just go to the episodes tab and look for episode 18, which is this one. Today we’re going to kick off the topic of journey mapping with an overview of the different types of journey maps… …the kinds of information often included in journey maps, and how they can be utilized to help organizations achieve their customer-centric goals. Assistance with journey mapping is one of the top requests that I receive from clients. Yes, journey mapping has become an increasingly popular buzzword in the business world, but for a very valid reason. Journey mapping is a starting point for many customer experience management strategies. If you want to improve your customer experiences to drive retention, you first have to understand what’s broken. If you want to implement customer experience metrics and dashboards, you need to understand what you’re measuring. And if you want to drive customer-centric culture change, you need to foster a common awareness of the customer experience among employees and teams. And the list goes on and on, but the point is that journey mapping is a central building block for those and many other customer experience strategies. Before we dive into the nitty gritty of journey mapping, let’s first clarify what we’re talking about. Episode 16 of my mini masterclass series covers the difference between touchpoints, experiences, and journeys… …so if you haven’t listened to that episode already, I’d encourage you to hit the pause button on this one and quickly go back and check out episode 16 before continuing with this one. I think it provides a really nice baseline understanding of the concepts that we’re going to talk about today. Right, so, customer journey map is a term that gets thrown around, and I’ve seen a lot of different interpretations. Some of them echo the intention and purpose of maps as customer experience tools, and others, not so much. If you Google “what is a journey map”, the search returns a surprising diversity of responses, so I’ll give you mine. A journey map is a visualization of a customer or consumer’s emotions, perceptions, and their sequential experiences as they fulfill a need. You’ll notice that I haven’t said anything about a company or brand yet, because that’s actually not what journey maps are about. The journey is about the customer or consumer doing what they need to do to address a perceived gap in their consumer ecosystem. Some people refer to this as “jobs to be done”, and the concept is applicable to individuals, households, even enterprise-level or B2B clients. The consumer or customer is trying to achieve something, whether that’s addressing a transport need by purchasing a car or meeting a connectivity need for their small business by upgrading their broadband internet service. People are out there constantly fulfilling various needs in their life or for their businesses, and through this process, they interact with a lot of different organizations and brands. I’m stressing this point because it’s an important one. When we start documenting journeys, we really have to approach the exercise from the perspective of the end user. The moment that we start looking at things from the company’s perspective, we’ve lost the plot. Now that we’ve covered what we mean by the concept of a journey map, let’s talk about what journey map structure looks like. A journey map usually visualizes the customer experience as a series of events broken down into phases. These phases could be things like identifying a need, exploring my options, buying something, I go to sign up, getting help after I purchase something, etc. For the very highest level journey map, which I and many others refer to as the customer lifecycle, these phases sound pretty generic, but that’s okay. Some of these journey phases or stops along the journey are incorrectly referred to as touchpoints. The term touchpoint typically refers to a specific channel of interaction. So if you’d like more information on the definition of touchpoints, again, go back and check out episode 16. I cover that in a lot of detail in episode 16. So what does a good journey map look like? The answer is it depends, and this is where we get into a discussion of where to begin, or rather, what to do before you start your journey mapping exercise. Maps are a means to an end. They are tools to help organizations realize customer-centric goals, but they aren’t the goal in and of themselves. A flawless map that dies a sad and lonely death on someone’s laptop is way less effective than an imperfect map that is widely used and at least serves the purpose of a starting point for socializing the concept of customer-centric change. I typically group maps into three different categories: customer lifecycle maps, sub-journey maps, and user experience maps. Each has a different use, and the type of map informs the mapping methodology and the structure of the output. So it’s important for anyone who finds themselves responsible for orchestrating journey mapping to clarify the intended use right off the bat. Let’s quickly run through these maps and talk about how they’re often used. The customer lifecycle map is the highest-level map and the least granular of the three I’m going to talk about. If an organization has never mapped the journey before or is documenting the customer experience as part of launching a customer experience function or rolling out a new brand-wide customer strategy, I often suggest that they start with a customer lifecycle map. These maps include a consumer’s entire relationship with a brand and their interactions beyond brands. They’re often used as tools to create organization-wide awareness for the journey or to rally teams around a common understanding of a customer promise. So they look at things from a very strategic high level. Since lifecycle maps are tools for communication and alignment, the objective is to keep them simple and easy to understand. This means keeping the visualization to one page. I know that sounds impossible, but it’s not. It’s totally possible and in a future episode we’re going to talk about just how to do that. The next category of map is the sub-journey. These journeys are essentially a zoomed-in view of one or two phases of the lifecycle map. For teams that have already mapped the customer lifecycle and are looking to understand a specific sequence of experiences in more detail or trying to pinpoint opportunities to improve interaction, sub-journey maps are a really great option. These maps can become a little more granular and may ultimately extend onto a couple of pages, but it’s important to keep the detail under control so the final product isn’t overwhelming for the readers. Remember, as customer experience professionals, we’re always thinking about the end user and what their needs are. These maps may include information about customer actions, expectations, emotions through the different stages of their experience, things like that. These visualizations could also possibly incorporate details about various touchpoints and maybe a little bit of information about how the business delivers the customer experience. The third and final category of journey map that we’re going to talk about today is a user experience map. These maps are the most detailed and granular of the experience visualizations. User experience maps help you define your taxonomy and interface with a customer by understanding the flow of various tasks that the user will undertake through different touchpoints. Now, I’ve included user experience maps as a category of journey maps, but personally, I think this is where experience visualizations can and, to be honest, sometimes have to become a little bit more inward-looking. I find user experience maps are most frequently used by teams that manage digital touchpoints, often when a new experience is being launched or an existing touchpoint is being overhauled. They are a great reference point for wireframes, functional specifications, and content strategies. So when the teams are getting more tactical, often times they’ll use a user experience map. So, that’s my overview of the three main categories of journey maps and how they can be utilized to help organizations achieve their customer-centric goals. For those of you that have been tasked with journey mapping, remember that your work can become the focal point for customer-centric change. And while that’s a big responsibility, it’s also an amazing opportunity to engage with colleagues and to step into the customer shoes. I’ll be back next Thursday with another CX mini masterclass episode that will cover how to map the journey and some planning considerations before you get started. That’s where the rubber really meets the road. So if you have journey mapping on your to-do list for 2019, you won’t want to miss this next episode. I hope that you enjoyed this CX mini masterclass. If you’d like to get in touch before next week’s episode, you can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My contact details are listed on my website. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll be back next week. [Outro music] Want to keep learning about CX? If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast. Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including journey mapping workshops!) or get in touch via email.