The many ways of mapping the customer journey

Do you know what customers go through to buy your product? Do you consider your business process human friendly?

Here’s a video version of this article.

I’ve seen companies, full of bright people too focused on internal processes and technology and this is evident when customers interact with their various products, services and employees. These companies and teams need a change in viewpoint — they need to step into their customer’s shoes, and understand the forces that shape their preferences and decisions.

Steve Jobs once said:

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology”.

The notion of “starting with the experience and working back toward the technology” is a key part of being a human-centered business. You need to understand the way customers approach your product, the touch points, their frustrations, and the pain points. Customer journey maps & Service blueprinting gives you a scope to fine-tune your product’s experience.

Front stage and back stage

We need a little context in order to understand the difference between customer journeys and service blueprints. “The stage” consists of three perspectives: the front stage, the backstage and the behind-the-scenes.

We can take theater as an example.

• The front stage is where the action takes place and what the audience can see. Customer journey depicts mostly the front stage and customer’s behind the scenes: customers’ touch points, actions that occur directly in view of the customer, his experience with the product or service.
• Back stage are steps and activities that occur behind the scenes to support onstage happenings: the lights, the sets, the crew, all of which should be invisible to the customer.
• Then there are the behind-the-scenes, things that the organization must do to make both the front and backstage possible. Internal steps, and interactions that support the employees in delivering the service.

In other words, these are the parts of the service that will be visible or invisible to the customer.

Customer journey map

“The Theater Begins With the Cloakroom”

— this phrase is attributed to one of the founders of the Moscow Chekhov Art Theater; Konstantin Stanislavsky. It is believed that he wrote in a letter to the cloakroom staff of his theater that: “…our theater differs from many others by the fact that performances start the minute members of audiences enter the theatre. You are the first to greet them…”.

I would add, that the whole customer experience starts even earlier when customer starts to plan his evening. The whole journey of choosing the act, buying the tickets, parking the car, hanging his coat, finding his chair, watching the performance and exiting the building — all those things are his customer experience journey.

A journey map captures what the user does, thinks and feels, and what they are interacting with overtime. It’s the front stage of the service experience from their point of view. It tells you what they went through. Like a story, it comes with a narrative, and the highs and the lows of user’s emotions.

Storytelling and visualization are essential aspects of journey mapping as they are powerful tools for conveying information in a way that is entertaining, intuitive and that creates a shared vision. The goal is to create a shared understanding of what is the customer experiencing during the journey among the whole organization, be it designer, engineer or salesman

I need to emphasize, that Customer journey map & Service blue print could reflect not only current state but the blueprint for the future improvements.

5 key components of the customer journey map:

1. Goal

Define the specific experience that you want to map. What process you want to map. Is it usage of your product, buying, on-boarding, anything where mapping will uncover positive and negative moments within that current experience, or a “to-be” experience, where the mapper is designing a journey for a product or service that doesn’t exist yet.

2. Actor

First you need to choose the “actor” of the story. Who is this journey map about? The most common solution to this is to create user personas.

Personas are narrative descriptions of user archetypes reflecting common patterns of behavior, needs, and emotions. They reflect details about a target group in a way that is easy to grasp. I’ve created a step-by-step guide how you can create user personas.

3. Stages

Your personas should give you a pretty good idea of the process that customers go through from their first landing to an eventual purchase and subsequent interactions. Customer stages consist of goal-oriented user actions. You can visualize it as a multi-step sales funnel.

The 5Es is an acronym and checklist to help brainstorm different stages of the customer experience. Here are the 5Es:

• Entice — How is someone attracted or made aware?
• Enter — How does the user begin?
• Engage — What is the core of the experience?
• Exit — How does a user complete or finish the experience?
• Extend — What happens after the experience?

4. Touch points, emotions and thoughts

After you’ve defined the stages, you should capture what the user is doing, thinking, and feeling during the journey. These data points should be based on qualitative research, such as field studies, contextual inquiry, and diary studies.

A “touchpoint” refers to any time a customer comes into contact with your brand. This also includes moments that happen offline/online, through marketing, in person, or over the phone. This is basically an interaction with your product or service.

This component is not meant to be a granular step-by-step log of every discrete interaction. Rather, it is a narrative of the steps the actor/user persona takes during that phase, epic steps that helps us to uncover the essence of his journey.

It’s crucial to capture not only the touch points that user has, but his thoughts, motivations, questions and emotions. The goal is to have a well-rounded sense of how that person feels to be in this experience.

Emotions are plotted as a single line across the journey phases, literally signaling the emotional “ups” and “downs” of the experience. Think of this line as a contextual layer of emotion that tells us where the user is happy versus frustrated.

5. Capture opportunities

Opportunities , ownership and metrics are insights obtained from mapping; they talk about how the user experience can be improved:

• What needs to be done with this knowledge?
• Who owns what change?
• Where are the biggest opportunities?
• How are we going to measure improvements we implement?

When you have Customer journey map in place, you can now plan how to arrange your company’s process to meet the customer needs.

Service blueprint

A service blueprint is, in essence, an extension of a customer journey map. A customer journey map focuses on what customers encounter when engaging with a service or business, from specific actions or touch points to pain points. Service blueprints go a few steps deeper and combine customer experience with all employee actions and support processes that may or may not be visible to the customer.

The aim of blueprinting is to expose how the company works; inner processes of how the things a customer experiences are actually produced.

Service blueprint

The five main swim lanes that are captured in a service blueprint are as follows:

1. Customer actions

This is description of what’s happening written from the customer’s perspective.

Customer actions are derived from a customer-journey map. Steps, choices, activities, and interactions that customer performs while interacting with a service to reach a particular goal.

2. Front stage

Front stage should capture what happens in each touchpoint that is visible to the customer.

Front stage is where the action happens. Actions that occur directly in view of the customer. Interaction with your employee, your app & etc.

3. Back stage

Back stage captures what happens in each touchpoint that the customer doesn’t see. Steps and actions that take place behind the scenes to facilitate on-stage events.

4. Support processes

Internal steps and interactions that support employees in the delivery of the service. Clearly, service quality is often impacted by these below-the-line interaction activities.

5. Evidence

The last layer of the service blueprint is evidence that is made of props and places that anyone in the blueprint has an interaction with.

Tangible elements associated with each step that has the potential to influence customer perceptions of the service encounter e.g. uniforms, delivery vans

Lines of interaction, visibility and internal interaction

There are three primary lines:

1. The line of interaction depicts the direct interactions between the customer and the organization.
2. The line of visibility separates all service activities that are visible to the customer from those that are not visible. Everything frontstage (visible) appears above this line, while everything backstage (not visible) appears below this line.
3. The line of internal interaction separates contact employees from those who do not directly support interactions with customers/users.

Additional elements:

Time
an estimated duration for each customer action should be represented in your blueprint.

Emotion
Where are employees frustrated? Where are employees happy and motivated?

Theodore Levitt, the famous Harvard professor wrote:

“An industry begins with the customer and his needs, not with a patent, a raw material, or a selling skill…The industry develops backward, first concerning itself with the physical delivery of customer satisfaction”.

It is important to look at both perspectives — what the person experiences, and what went on outside of their view to make it happen. The only way that you can build a great customer experience is to build your processes around your customer needs and goals. So stop blind guessing and use those two tools to create a really fantastic change for your customers , your company and anyone involved.

For more information check my blog gecis.co