The Top 10 Rules of Customer Journey Mapping
Developing a customer journey map is important if you’re going to improve an existing service or launch a new product. It’s an exercise in visualising and documenting the customer’s experience from end-to-end. It should include all the major steps, channels and interactions a customer might go through. You might want to include emotions, feelings and how the business reacts behind the scenes. After years of practice there are many things I’ve learnt about journey mapping. Here’s my top 10 tips!
- Start low fidelity
Go easy on developing and generating journey maps that are high fidelity. Clients always wanted a finished and highly polished deliverable but it can cause issues. Of course the end visual should be nice to look at and more importantly easy to interpret but avoid a situation where you end up with a client trawling Google for a perfect image to replicate. By starting low fidelity you bring people into the process and give them room to share their opinions. If you go for high fidelity straight away you risk alienating people. They’ll attend your journey design workshop thinking you’ve just invited them to rubber stamp your work. It puts people off taking a red pen to something that looks well developed.
2. Spend time on taxonomy
Words matter. You might have an organisation where descriptions for business units, customers and process steps are very different and not consistent. If you decide that ‘select’ is a good word to use for a customer journey stage make sure it works across the business. One part of the business might believe that negotiation is a better term that ‘select’. Again consistency isn’t a hard and fast rule. A lot of businesses are complicated and have various segments and internal business models. Just make sure that when you choose the language you intend to use in your journey maps it is backed up with rationale. Think carefully about what you want to show on your map whether it’s channels, steps, milestones etc. Be careful with using words interchangeably such as channels and touchpoints.
3. Constantly update & re-fresh
Build a customer journey or service design unit. Make it a dedicated space where you showcase journey work and encourage others to take part in critiquing and validating it. Avoid beautiful PDFs that go stale over time. Hold regular design session with people across the business. The map should look very different 6 months from now.
4. Open source it
Build your journey maps so that there is room for adaptation and change. Give people digital copies they can amend and play with. Don’t design in an ivory tower. It’ll be much hard to implement designs when few have had a stake in developing them.
5. Ignore digital at your peril
Journey mapping is cross channel. Avoid at all costs showcasing a customer journey with significant digital elements when they haven’t been engaged. From my personal experience it will cause ructions and stall progress. Push colleagues to engage with large stakeholders right from the beginning.
6. Build internally, validate and improve externally
Get teams together to build journey maps collaboratively. Spend time exploring each journey in detail. Identify how journey stages dovetail together. Explore ‘as is’ journeys and how they could be improved in the future ‘to be’. Once you’ve done this bring customers into the room. They will have had input already from customer feedback the business has gathered. Their role during validation is to mark your work, pull it apart and improve on it. It’s hard getting customers to think from a blank sheet. Doing it this way will give you richer contributions as customers have something to react to.
7. Put journeys into context
Never start a journey mapping workshop with a template, post it notes and expect everyone to get it. Some will have seen images on Google. Others may have been involved in previous incarnations of maps before. Appreciate that many coming to a workshop might be totally fresh to what journey mapping is, what it’s for and how it fits into the wider business context. I always start workshops with a short accreditation masterclass. By the end of the 30 minute interactive session everyone is on board, enthused and ready to start.
8. Make your efforts sustainable asap
You should aim to be self-sufficient in customer journey mapping as quickly as possible. If you work with a good consultant or agency they should be aiming to get you to a self-service position relatively quickly. Get yourself into a situation where you have a suite of tools you can use. Work with the consultancy or agency to build a train the trainer model. You want to avoid running regular expensive mapping sessions with external suppliers.
9. Quick wins are everything
Once you have designed your future journey map work quickly to get some initial ideas off paper and into reality. Take some small ideas and run them as pilots and experiments. It’s a great way to build and sustain momentum. People like to see change happening right before their eyes.
10. Enjoy it and have fun doing it!
It’s one of those rare moments that you get to stand back and look at things from the customer point of view. Run a creative and interactive workshop and above all have fun with your colleagues and customers during the process.
To learn more about customer journey mapping or to receive a free on-site Masterclass of 1 hour visit us at www.strategyactivist.com
To learn more about the author of this piece and the founder of Strategy Activist check out LinkedIn. https://uk.linkedin.com/in/strategyactivist
