In a previous post, I described one form of qualitative research, in-depth interviews<\/a> (IDIs). They deliver a level of detail and customer understanding that helps you gain true empathy for your service or product users. Journey mapping is another way to obtain valuable qualitative information from customers.<\/p>\n For years, design teams have used journey mapping exercises to help build customer empathy. The resulting journey maps allow them to enter the customer\u2019s shoes and follow their footsteps as they complete tasks along the road to a purchase or other interaction. That makes it easier for cross-functional teams to help customers navigate common experiences such as:<\/strong><\/p>\n For the best customer experience, researchers and designers must understand where friction and pain exist within each task, and you must hold your team accountable for removing it. As a customer understanding<\/a> method, journey mapping accomplishes this by providing a qualitative assessment of a series of combined activities that culminate in a particular outcome. Journey mapping also makes orchestrating those steps simpler, more relevant and more rewarding.<\/p>\n Over the past five years, journey mapping has evolved dramatically by incorporating analytics and automation. These modern journey-mapping tools have grown alongside customer self-service tools and digital interfaces, which provide new ways of solving old problems or completing the same activities.<\/strong> One way to analyze tasks in today\u2019s environment is visualizing them as \u201cJobs to Be Done\u201d and \u201cJob Statements.\u201d To illustrate, consider two everyday day tasks, paying bills and listening to music:<\/p>\n In both examples, the task remains the same (pay a bill or listen to music). However, the process to accomplishing the task is very different. That\u2019s why journey mapping is still a much needed and relevant insights methodology.<\/p>\n Journey mapping can also be a powerful strategic vehicle for shaping your overall customer engagement model. By understanding how, what, where, when and why people perform activities, organizations can focus on \u201cmoments that matter\u201d for customers, technologies, operations or teams. This allows you to imbed customer centricity into the operational construct of your organization.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, journey mapping is rarely used as a strategy mechanism. Instead, it is often and mostly used only as a design tool that provides a point-based approach to solving known problems. It\u2019s OK to start there, but a better use of journey mapping is as an ongoing learning mechanism that removes the risk of problems altogether.<\/strong> This is the biggest opportunity you have to truly harness the power of a journey mapping capability.<\/p>\n Case in point: Large U.S. retailers have done a great job of addressing the ongoing supply-chain issues by increasingly pushing customers to their websites. One chain in particular used journey mapping to discover that a significant customer pain point was traveling to their store to pick up an online order, only to find the product was not in stock after all. To address the problem, they transitioned to \u201conline order integration,\u201d allowing them to limit disruption for customers, increase the volume of orders, better manage their inventory, and decrease disruption in their stores.<\/p>\n This retailer is also using journey mapping across the merchandising and product assortment architecture to identify patterns of behaviors that help simplify operations and maximize various attributes of the business:<\/p>\n For this organization, journey maps provide a visualization of the customer experience, and the company is rallying around how the customer interacts with the brand across all channels to maximize each step of the journey. For example, everyone from cashiers to order fulfillment personnel and web designers know their role in the process and appreciate how much easier their jobs have become \u2014 and how much happier customers are.<\/strong> The maps themselves have become a strategic blueprint for creating a shared goal and vision for who does what, why and when throughout each customer\u2019s journey to meet their needs.<\/p>\n Another useful strategy is analyzing moments that matter and placing them into three simple options based on business objectives:<\/p>\n This retailer met its need by assigning people within each product category (clothing, sporting goods, and so on) to focus only on their areas. That approach allowed them to carefully analyze how to change the moments that matter more carefully. For example:<\/p>\n While this is obviously a very mature organization, their experience is a great example of how you can use a form of customer understanding as a strategic activation vehicle.<\/p>\n Of course, this company didn\u2019t start with this process, and neither should you! Most organizations perform journey mapping when a known issue arises.<\/strong> At Centric, we hope that once you conduct your first mapping exercise, you will continue to use this methodology to create a baseline experience you can operationalize around. In some organizations, a specific group like Customer Experience<\/a> will own this process, while others will embed the roles and capabilities into the functional teams themselves, much like this retailer did.<\/p>\n When developing your journey mapping capability, it\u2019s also important to understand the myriad options available for visualizing the map itself. You should prioritize your visualization method by what are you trying to learn, because some techniques are better than others for viewing your customer journey through different lenses.<\/strong> As an organization, you need to decide if your goal is to:<\/p>\n By seeking visualization methods that address your business\u2019s journey mapping goals, you will begin moving toward a more strategic approach to journey mapping rather than simply using your hard-won journey maps as simple design tools.<\/p>\n When you use journey mapping as a strategic analysis mechanism rather than a design tool, you can meet your customers\u2019 demands for modern fulfillment to alleviate pain and friction. In addition, you can visualize how changes in your processes will affect the current state of your organization, operations and technology. This is critical as you determine the best way to deliver any customer experience change you define in a future state journey.<\/p>\n With journey maps in place as a strategic vehicle, your customer experience can then evolve.<\/strong> Naturally, this will affect things like front-office orchestration and tooling. The team\u2019s job then shifts to reducing the cost to serve the customer as opposed to adding cost and bloating the operation.<\/p>\n You will then need a broader team to help identify risks and solutions around orchestration and delivery. This technique is called Service Design, and it leverages journey maps to understand the vertical slices of each of moment that matters, allowing you to map the varying layers of activities and execute against your customer-interaction goal.<\/p>\n\n \n
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Journey Mapping as a Strategy \u2014 Don\u2019t Miss Out!<\/h2>\n
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Improving Experiences with Journey Mapping<\/h2>\n
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Align Your Map\u2019s Visualization to Goals<\/h2>\n
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From Journey Mapping to Service Design<\/h2>\n