Mapping the Customer Journey and Customer Centricity

This is a cut down summary from a section in my new book, 'Customer Experience Innovation: How to get a lasting market edge', coming out around March 2018 through Emerald Publishing.

Customers have interactions with many different parts of your business. They receive marketing communications, surf your website, visit your locations, talk with staff via phone, email or chat, meet team members in person, purchase and return products, and | or select and consume services. Sometimes they share their experiences with other customers and other times they will share them with your employees. Typically organisations try to influence these sharing interactions, though often not from a customer centric perspective.

Customer centricity is based around a philosophy that organisations are more successful when they activate customers to become advocates. Few organisations are actually truly customer centric however because of a basic conflict around value: Any value that is given to the customer is potentially value that could have been captured by the organisation. When value is narrowly measured as transactional profit, organisations evolve to deliver company centric experiences instead of being focused on customer value. Over the long term this is damaging for the firm. The value of advocacy (which is hard to measure) is often ignored. Long term considerations like building brand equity are deprioritised. Most importantly the long term risks from new competitors and industry disruptions are often overlooked.

The first step on the road to customer centricity is simply to workshop what it might be like to interact with your organisation and how this compares to competitor firms. The workshop should include staff that interact directly or indirectly with customers. The workshop objective is to infer what steps a customer takes to deal with companies in your industry. Collectively the steps define the theoretical journey that a customer takes when they purchase from you or a rival. At each new step the customer does something significantly different. The overall journey starts before the customer may be aware of your firm, products and | or services and continues beyond purchase to use and potential referral.

Journey maps are typically presented as linear processes, but often customers can move backward and forwards between steps. They can also jump steps in either direction. For example a customer can try to find a product in store only to learn it is not suitable and then go back to searching for other options online. Additionally after using a product, a customer may become aware they need other products – jumping back to the start of the journey.

The process for mapping your customer experience is based around individual interviews, generally conducted face to face or by phone. It takes around an hour of semi-structured discussion with a customer to find out what it is really like for them to interact with your business. There are organisations that convene focus groups instead of individual interviews, but this creates the potential for group think and other ‘herd effects’.

Mapping a customer journey can be as simple as interviewing some of your customers and summarising the findings. The basic steps that you need to take in order to create a customer journey map are listed below, but the quality of the results is critically dependent on sample composition and research approach.

1.      Investigate the customer context

2.     Interview some customers

3.      Analyse the results

4.      Summarise findings in a customer journey map

Most customer experience mapping focuses on how customers interact with the business sponsoring the research. This is because it is often easier accessing your own customers for interviews. Ideally the interview participant sample should include both your firm’s and rivals’ customers. One way to achieve this is to find some of your customers who also deal with your rivals. This group can explicitly compare your firm and rivals, which is an advantage because of how people make purchasing type decisions.

The research summary below involving speed dating events reveals insights about purchasing related behaviours. The key finding is that people do not make decisions in isolation against some objective standard. Instead choices are made by considering the relative benefits of the available options. This means decision making is only quasi-rational.

E+ Speed Dating Choices

In his book the Logic of Life (2010), Tim Hartford reveals the results of experiments involving the speed dating choices of more than 3,600 men and women. Each speed date lasted four minutes. Afterward both participants were asked to discretely choose if they would like to meet their speed date again. The idea was to determine if people decided on a potential partner based on some objective scale or set of criteria, or via some other means. The findings confirm some stereotypes about people and romance, but refute others…

Women opted to meet only one in ten (on average) of their speed dates again, confirming the popular stereotype of them being quite selective. Men were twice as open to women on average for a follow up meeting. This suggests men are less discerning than women, but potentially disconfirms the stereotype that they are easy, with eight out of ten potential follow up dates rejected. Other stereotypes also were supported.

Both genders tended to prefer non-smokers and educated professionals. In line with popular stereotypes, women tended to prefer richer and taller men. Also men tended to prefer younger and slimmer women[1]. However the most remarkable results relate to follow ups requested on nights when the speed dating pool was full of less attractive candidates.

On nights where pickings were somewhat slimmer, the follow up rates did not change. Women still chose to meet 10% of their speed dates again whether the room was full of tall, well-to-do gents or short, working class men. Similarly men still chose to meet 20% of their speed dates again even when the all available women were more mature or voluptuous on average. Take up rates were constant even if there were lots of smokers or fewer professional people in the room. On these nights where the field was seemingly less attractive, it was the relatively attractive participants who tended to get selected. This suggests, even for something as important as a potential romantic partner, we don’t make decisions using objective criteria – we simply compare our available options.

The case above highlights why it is important to collect customer journey data about how your company's customer experience compares to your rival's CX. But most companies are only asking customers about the interactions with their own brand. This provides only part of the story. That's why at Coriolis Innovation, when we help clients map their CX journeys we include comparisons to rivals whenever possible.

Please get in touch if you would like to know when the full text is released, or if you would like to know more about how CX innovation might change the way your business performs.

[1] Interestingly, additional speed dating research has shown that women tend to prefer men of the same racial type and discriminate more on intelligence than physical looks. The exception here is Asian women who don’t discriminate against Caucasian men, though they do discriminate against Negroes and Hispanic males. Men don’t seem to care about racial type, but are less likely to opt for a partner that they rate as smarter. They also care more about physical beauty.