Creating detailed, customer-led journey maps are a catalyst for driving effective, long-term improvements to the customer experience.
During our CX Masters podcast series, we interviewed Annette Franz, Founder and CEO of CX Journey.
Annette outlined her 6-step process for impactful customer journey mapping and highlighted 5 of the most common pitfalls to avoid.
A 6-Step Customer Journey Mapping Process
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Planning
The first step of the journey mapping process is to ensure the right foundations are in place.
Before you begin mapping the customer journey, you should define what you’re looking to achieve, what success looks like and how you will measure it, the different buyer personas and segments you’ll be mapping, the scope of the journey map, and who will participate from the customer and stakeholder side.
You’ll also need to ensure that you have buy-in from the very top of the organization and the necessary budget and resources to make real improvements to the customer experience.
If a customer-centric culture doesn’t already exist, the journey mapping process will fail to make an impact.
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Empathize
The second step is to carry out a journey mapping workshop to capture what customers are doing, thinking and feeling at every stage of the customer journey. It’s therefore crucial that actual customers are involved at this stage, either through active participation in the workshop itself or through in-depth customer research prior to the workshop.
Adding an additional layer of internal customer feedback data will ensure the map is built on solid qualitative and quantitative insights.
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Identify
The third step is analysing the data to identify and understand:
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Key moments of truth – the stages in the journey where there is the opportunity to “make” or “break” the relationship.
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Pain points – the stages in the journey where customers are likely to experience difficulties or negative emotions.
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Introspect
The fourth step is to look inward and create a service blueprint by outlining the people, tools, systems, and processes that support and facilitate the customer journey mapped earlier in the process.
The service blueprint helps to understand what’s happening behind the scenes to ensure any improvements made to the customer journey address the root causes of a painful customer experience, rather than relying on cosmetic or short-term fixes.
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Ideate
The fifth step is to conduct ideation sessions with customers to create a ‘future state’ map, i.e., defining what the ideal future customer experience looks like.
Similar to the journey mapping workshop stage, the new experience should be designed through the eyes of the customer, and so direct involvement from customers at this stage is critical.
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Implement
The final step brings together everything learnt in the previous steps to build and prototype the new end-to-end customer experience and test it to ensure customer expectations are being met.
Key changes to the experience should then be communicated to customers, and employees should be trained on how to deliver the new and improved customer experience.
The first 3 steps of the journey mapping process are more tactical in nature, i.e., analysing the current state of the customer journey and identifying what needs to be improved.
The final 3 steps are more strategic, i.e., designing and implementing the ideal ‘future state’ of the customer experience.
5 Journey Mapping Pitfalls to Avoid
- Moving forward without a clear and thorough plan
- Not involving customers in the journey mapping process
- Creating a high-level touchpoint map rather than a detailed journey map
- Not creating a service blueprint to understand the internal view
- Starting the journey mapping process without specific personas or segments in mind
Readers of this article also viewed:
- B2B Customer Journey Mapping: An Introduction with Examples
- Spotlight on the Millennial B2B Decision Maker
- Buyer Journey Mapping in B2B Markets
- How to Research, Develop and Activate Buyer Personas in B2B