5 Tips for Creating a World-Class Customer Journey Map
Revenue Growth Guide - August '23
Around here, we love a good map.
Roadmaps? Check.
Now, let’s talk about customer journey maps, which are a way of visualizing the customer journey, in detail, from end to end. Specifically, these are the 5 things we’d recommend to any team looking to be more customer-focused.
Look for Opportunities to Create Peak Moments
In their book, The Power of Moments, Chip & Dan Heath use a day at Disney World as an example of how much more peak moments color people’s overall perception of an experience. In the graphic below, you’ll see a breakdown of a day at Disney where each moment is given a score from 1-10.
If you were to take the average score of all these moments that made up the day, you’d get a 6.5–a mediocre score. But if you were to ask the parents who experienced this day, you’d be more likely to get a score of 8 or 9.
Why?
Because those 7, 8, and 10 moments impacted their overall perception of the day more than the neutral moments.
By finding ways to exceed our customers’ expectations, even in seemingly small ways, we can increase loyalty and retention over time. As you’re going through the journey mapping process, think about ways to create these peak moments throughout the customer lifecycle.
Make Your Customers Part of the Mapping Process
Maybe this seems like an obvious talking point, but it’s not always easy to figure out how to bring your customers into the journey-mapping process. Plus, even if you do figure it out, things like scheduling or incentivizing can present their own challenges. Here are some effective methods we’d recommend trying:
Regular surveys, broken down by journey stage
Customer interviews to validate your mapping
‘Shadowing’ customers through different interactions & processes
Quarterly more informal chats with customers over coffee/lunch/etc.
Do Competitive Analysis
Sometimes the best way to eliminate blind spots is to look at how your competitors are doing things.
Are there moments they’re creating that you’ve been overlooking? Have they found a way to make a specific process easier or faster? Even if what you find is that you’re doing certain things better, there’s plenty to learn from this kind of competitive research.
The most immersive way to do this is through a secret shopping-type exercise, but if that seems like too much, you can get similar data by simply talking to people who have gone through the customer journey–preferably with different outcomes:
Became a customer recently
Didn’t become a customer
Churned customer
Happy long-time customer
Don’t Forget About Feelings
If you’re familiar with Design Thinking frameworks, you’ve most likely heard of an Empathy Map. It’s often used by Product and UX/UI folks to better understand their users and optimize the experience they’re delivering through their product.
Particularly in the world of Operations, it’s easy to get bogged down in the internal mechanics of the processes that take place throughout the customer journey. Because we’re always looking for ways to make things more efficient, sometimes empathy gets lost in translation.
To truly understand your customer journey, you need to determine not only what they’re experiencing on a process level, but also what that experience is making them feel, think, say, and do.
Adding this human layer to your journey-mapping process will give you extra context and nuance with which to make operational decisions.
Asana has a good breakdown of empathy maps and how to create them here.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
I didn’t really know what to call this section, so excuse the cliche heading. Basically, what I want to talk about here is the fact that sometimes we think we have the full puzzle when really there are pieces missing.
A while back, we decided to run our Customer Journey Workshop internally. We have a small revenue team and felt overall aligned, but here’s what we learned:
While we had processes in place for leads coming in through our contact form, chatbot, etc., what about leads who came in through social selling efforts or direct emails to someone on the team? (By the way, those big red circles are gaps we identified, and, spoiler alert, there were more than the 3 you see up there.)
When everyone is doing their jobs and nothing is falling through the cracks, there’s no reason to look more closely at what’s actually happening at non-traditional handoff points. That’s why it’s so important to make customer journey mapping a cross-functional exercise and ask questions about what might be happening in the moments you aren’t necessarily a part of.
Have questions, thoughts, or feedback on this letter? Send me an email!