Customer journey mapping to drive change

What counts for our customers is a consistent experience delivered across all touchpoints.

Many of our customers don’t know or care who does what in our business. To them we’re one brand and their perception of our brand, and their experience as a customer, is the cumulative effect of the end-to-end interactions they have with it, across all channels.

Customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is understanding the brand-customer relationship from the customer’s perspective – so seeing how our customers view us. They are visual representations which help tell the story of our customers’ experience at every interaction with us. The crucial difference between these maps and regular process maps is they take into account the customer’s thoughts and emotions as they move along their journey.

They are useful for lots of reasons including;

• drawing out pain points

• exposing issues with internal processes

• highlighting where channels perform poorly

Customer journey optimisation

Customer journey optimisation (CJO) is the science of evaluating the existing customer journey with the goal of making every interaction along the journey relevant, seamless and the best it can possibly be.

The first step is to highlight those ‘moments of truth’ (MoTs), which can make or break the customer relationship, before drilling down into the dirt to the root of issues and developing plans to improve the experience.

Get the right people involved

Journey mapping and optimisation require the right people to be involved in the creation and improvement process. Sometimes it’s difficult to get the right people to spare the time, but you need the knowledge and support of those people if you want to create better customer experiences.

5-step customer journey optimisation

1. Preparation – set objectives, define personas, gather integrated insights and data, and get the right people involved

2. Map the journey – All interactions, channels, internal dependencies, time frames, and customer emotions

3. Spot and rate the MoTs – identify the make or break moments, internal ownership and responsibilities, metrics to measure success by

4. Develop the improvement plan – get the right people together in a hot team, to imagine solutions to optimise and reshape the journey

5. Implement, measure and iterate - design fast, prototype, test and implement. Then measure, and repeat as necessary