Moving People Along the Customer Journey

Part 2

Mapping the Journey

The solution, which is to look through the lens of the customer journey, understand what stage your customer is in and define all the touchpoints that belong to each stage. This is the process of customer journey mapping. Not only will this help you understand your customer better, but it will give you the ability to prioritize the importance of the experience at each touchpoint. Not all touch-points have the same value to the customer and not all are equally important to the brand.

The idea of a customer journey map is nothing new. It has been popularized by analysts, consultants and agencies for more than a decade. It can be used by a wide variety of groups within an enterprise and can be used to understand and map quite varied experiences. Airlines use journey maps to simplify the process of checking in for a flight. Online retailers are trying to figure our why so many people abandon shopping carts and telcom providers document the role that customer service plays in customer loyalty and retention. Each of these purposes are valuable and well worth investing the time, resources and effort to reduce the points of friction that so often characterize customer experiences.

From an all up customer experience perspective though, the biggest value obtained from customer journey mapping is understanding what’s working, what’s not and where to expend your limited resources to get the biggest return. The output won’t just be a map, but a roadmap to become customer centric, to deliver lasting value to your customers and to contribute measurable and repeatable contributions to the business.

The steps are fairly simple and straightforward. You start at the top and map out the end- to-end customer journey, beginning the first time a person hears about or sees your brand, product or company. It doesn’t end until they are either no longer a customer or they’ve become an advocate, an evangelist, or buy your company. You get in a room and with the help of a facilitator and you document every interaction a person has with the brand. Typically this ranges from seeing an ad, hearing from a friend, learning about the company online, comparing the product to its competitors, finding the best place to buy, making the actual first purchase, using the product for the first time, contacting customer service for support, telling their friends about the product and experience and so on. Some people write sticky notes describing each interaction, each touchpoint. Others use whiteboards. Each circumstance will be different, the important part is not the how you collect the information, but what you do with it.

If mapping the lifetime customer journey sounds like boiling the ocean, it can be. For every interaction or touchpoint, you will find processes and sub processes, an infinite number of combinations and pathways. The important part is not to get caught in the weeds unless and until you’re ready to tackle each weed on its own. Some companies devote entire teams and commit to months to map all their customer journeys, not unlike the mapping of the human genome. Even once you’ve finally completed the job, you realize you’ve only just begun.

Don’t despair, it's possible to stay out of the weeds and it's possible to get a lot of benefit out of journey mapping without creating a new business unit and without breaking the bank. The real importance of journey mapping is not solve every problem, but to understand where to start, what to tackle first and what will pay off the biggest dividends.

Once you’ve drawn your map and identified each touchpoint, the next step is to evaluate the performance. For every interaction with a brand, a person, prospect or customer chooses to interact for a very specific reason. It may be to buy something, get support, research or learn about the product or company, or it may be as simple as interacting with the brand to be entertained. Coke spends millions every year just to get people to notice them. Yet a few years back, a couple of guys with a few big plastic bottles of Coke and a couple of packages of Mentos, produced more brand interactions around the globe than most advertising campaigns could ever hope to. Though they never released figures, it can be readily assumed from the number of copy cats who went out and bought Coke and Mentos to conduct the experiment for themselves, there was a direct and immediate impact on sales.

For every touchpoint, determine if the customer was able to accomplish their task and how well they believe the experience went. There are various ways to measure this. In some cases, it's just the consensus of the executives in the conference room participating in a customer journey mapping workshop. But for others it's using their insights and analytics teams to measure customer satisfaction, effort or success. At Tahzoo, we use our proprietary Flow Index, to measure how “in the flow” a person feels during the interaction.

But touchpoints aren't just for customers or prospects’ benefit. Since there is a cost to a company to generate a brand engagement, there must be a benefit that accrues from that interaction. While this may not be as easy to measure, companies need to spend the time to both evaluate how well each touchpoint is performing and what is the payback. If for example, every customer service call costs a company $10.00 a minute, and the average call lasts 5 minutes, then the cost of that touchpoint is $50.00. Whereas if for every time a B2B prospect attends a webinar, there is a 50% chance they will sign a deal and the average deal size is $10,000, then the value of the touchpoint is $5000.00.

It's simply a matter of lining up the cost and benefits to both the consumer and the business for each touchpoint. It should quickly be clear as to not only which touchpoints are not performing, but the relative contribution, plus or minus of each touchpoint. From there, improvement projects can be prioritized based on cost, impact and sensitivity. And out of that prioritization, a roadmap can be created laying out a plan that will result in improving the experiences for customers and the business impact of those experiences for the company.

A customer experience roadmap should consist of several key components. First, it must clearly describe the goals, desired outcomes and metrics for determining success. A map won’t do any good unless it's clear where you’re going and why you’re going there. If you aren’t clear on the reasons and the outcomes then you’re not ready to start the journey.

Secondly a roadmap should cover key elements affecting people, processes, and technology. Too many programs have jumped too quickly to technology that they’ve ended up spending millions on with very little return to show and a lot of software that nobody really knows how to use or why it doesn’t produce what it promised when it was purchased.

“People” refers to customers, prospects and influencers who have the experiences. But “people” also refers to the employees, the members of the organization, who are responsible for creating, developing, deploying, supporting and measuring those same experiences. Even if your organization is ready, if it’s not customer centric in both design and practice, no matter how much advertising is used or how much technology is implemented, the outcomes will be poor. Just look at the cable industry and ISPs. Every year they appear on the bottom of every customer experience index. They are consistently singled out, no matter how much they invest. The simple truth is that until they look at the world through their customers’ eyes and become customer centric, they will continue to come up short.

Process, in this case, is how people work, how the technology is configured and how the user experience design meets expectations. For example, if a marketing organization wants to engage people via the social networks or “honey pots” where they already reside, but the compliance department requires every Tweet, post or piece of web copy to go through an exhaustive review process prior to publication, then the brand will never be able to keep pace with its own customers. If the IT organization requires a comprehensive design and development process to build and launch a two page microsite, the marketing department will simply go rogue with usually less than stellar performance and with no ability for IT to support it.

When it comes time to consider technology, there’s a big difference between business requirements, functional requirements, and technical requirements and there’s a big difference between custom and off the shelf functionality. But in the end, for the business owner, there’s usually no difference that matters except does it work and does it deliver what the expectations are. Everything else is sausage making. We love to eat the end product, but we really don’t want to know how it's made.

Success or failure of any customer experience initiative hinges on the integration of three key elements: people, process, and technology. The roadmap serves as a guide, detailing how these components interconnect, the sequence in which they should be implemented, the milestones to be monitored, and, importantly, the estimated cost and timeline. These are the components of a customer experience roadmap.

Once you have a roadmap it's time to begin the journey to enable, deliver and measure customer experiences that will delight customers and the company’s bottom line.

Next up, we will cover planning the customer experience.