Customer journey mapping workshops and design that reduce effort, improve experience and treat customers as humans.
Research
Understanding what your customers value and where to improve.
Workshop
Engaging, cross-departmental journey mapping workshops.
Design
Visualising the experience your customers want.
Customer journey mapping that creates actionable change
From building in-depth personas to blueprinting, developing and live-testing new customer journeys – you’ll see better user experience and more effortless experiences for your customers.
Our customer journey mapping gives you clear, actionable insight that improves your customer interactions, supports departments in continuous improvement and helps create seamless journey. From diagnosing improvements through your customer experience to developing new solutions to old challenges – our approach works in every area of your business.
Types of customer journey
Defining the customer journey mapping that fits
It’s worth considering the kind of journey you want to create. Are you using it to understand where you are now or do you want to reimagine what’s possible? Generally there are three types of journey to work on:
The journey as it stands (current state): This type of journey mapping allows you to see where you are today. It’s an effective tool to use as a snapshot for where future improvements could be made and bring some clarity to how customers experience your service today. It’s especially useful if you’re starting out on mapping your customer experience and need to establish a benchmark for what things look like. It’s also an excellent way of sense-testing what you think happens vs what actually happens for customers.
The journey that could be optimised (future state): Time, resource and technological resources can often mean a leap from what you are to the ultimate service isn’t possible. That’s where a future state journey map can be useful. It looks at where you are today and explore the improvements you can make quickly to optimise what you have. Often customers really appreciate the little things and this type of journey is excellent at highlighting the small changes that could have a big impact.
The journey that should ultimately be (ideal state): Often used as part of a wider service design or improvement programme this type of journey mapping involves designing the optimum service vision based on what matters most to your customers. At its basic level it’s useful to set a way forward but it’s most useful when combined with wider operational improvements and some work has already happened on the current journey.
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Approach to customer journey mapping
Collaborative, human-centred and focused on customer value
There are countless ways to work through a customer journey mapping exercise – it’ll vary depending on the size and scope of the project, what you’re looking at, who’s involved and, often, the appetite for change in the business. Having said that, most journey mapping follows a similar process.
| Discover | Start by understanding and exploring the current “as is” customer journey for customers. This will involve listening to and shadowing customers to get a clear idea of what it actually feels like to be a customer (not just what your process or workflow says it should be). It’s critical to benchmark where you are today so you have something to measure following implementation. |
| Blueprint | From what you know work with the right stakeholders (and ideally customers) to build a blueprint/revised customer journey. This will highlight and showcase where you can make changes and what the impact could be. |
| Design | Turing your revised customer journey into a new way of delivering the service. Starting with your new, optimised journeys. This will likely involve changes to internal process, technology, communication and may involve team skills training or operational changes. |
| Evaluate | As you begin to implement changes – which will likely be through a staged approach you can start to evaluate the changes vs impact. This is often when a lean or agile project methodology is useful as it helps implement and review in quickly cycles. |
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Areas to explore
Choosing the focus that fits with the journeys your exploring
Getting customers from here to there in the best way possible
Customer steps: Exploring the steps a customer has to take to get what they need is fundamental to any journey mapping. It helps you see which stages are customer driven (by their need) or internally driven (by process or policy). It allows you to question each stage. Is this stage needed? Is there overlap? Is this stage clearly defined? What’s the outcome? It also allows you to quickly see where potential issues are or where there’s uncertainty about what should actually happen for customers.
Emotional journey: Our behaviour is driven by our emotions. That means how your customers feels when using your service will directly impact how they behave and, very often, the perception they have of your organisation. Steps which cause frustration, irritation, duplication or being ignored will all impact poorly on how customers feel about your service. It’s useful to look at each step or interaction and explore how different scenarios will make your customers feels.
High effort hot spots: Customer effort (the amount of energy they have to put in to get something out) should be treated as a valuable currency in every customer experience. As such it’s useful to explore each stage looking at the level of effort your customers are having to put in to get something out. What are the opportunities to reduce effort and create a simpler experience?
Moments of truth: There will be points in every journey where you have the opportunity to make an impression – positive or negative. These moments of truth are a great place to set your experience apart from others. Not every journey needs to delight – and very often customers are just looking for the simplest, easiest experience you can give them. Very often is the little stuff that really makes a difference for customers.
Multi/Omni-channel: It’s likely your customer journey may be experiences across multiple channels. It might, for example be part on the ‘phone, part online or part face. This can often be jarring for a customer if the experience isn’t consistent across each channel. For example, if you contact centre agents are warm, welcoming and helpful but your communication is cold and robotic . It’s also worth reviewing which channel is most suitable – although there’s a push to put everything online there are times when a human voice can be far more useful/suitable than a automated bot.
Improvements & Opportunities: As you work through any customer journey you may also come across feedback that points to improvements and feedback about your products. Equally you’ll be looking at points where you can further educated or upsell to customers. What are the potential upsell and marketing opportunities? What’s relevant and useful for customers and what will they engage with?
Touchpoints/Communication: The touchpoint between you and your customers are a critical part of any customer journey mapping. Whether it’s email, text, online or on the ‘phone each interaction has a profound impact on the overall experience. For a customer journey exercise it’s worth having examples of these touchpoints to hand so they can form part of the review. Look for things like the way information is delivered, the tone of voice and the type of language used.
Process and people: A key part of customer journey mapping is understanding and documenting the changes needed to help teams deliver a better experience. This may involve looking at internal process or workflows to see how they could be adapted. If the journey is owned by multiple departments or teams it’s also useful to follow the information flow between teams and how the customer is passed from one to the other.
It’s worth asking what changes could be made to process to simplify things for customers. Is the stage clearly owned? Are teams trained properly? If multiple teams are involved – is handover simple? What are the systems and processes that underpin this? Are the fit for purpose? Do we have the data we need? Are we using the data effectively?
The above are a good place to start but they’re not definitive. Every customer journey mapping exercise will look slightly different and be driven by what kind of journey it is, what you want to achieve and the potential scope.
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