Where does your customer journey start?
A couple of weeks ago I realized my Swedish passport was about to expire and that I would have to renew it. Working on a daily basis with customer journeys and user experience, in my role as a software developer, I thought I’d pay extra attention to the overall renewal process; all the way from booking my appointment to collecting the final passport.
Below is a breakdown of the entire process. At the end you’ll find general tips on how to assess and improve customer journeys, exemplified through my passport renewal process.
First of all, for those of you not familiar with the process of renewing a Swedish passport, here are the high level steps (see illustration for additional steps).
- Book appointment online with a passport agency (police station) near you
- Show up to have your photo taken, leave your signature, and pay
- Return to collect the new passport (roughly a week later)
Booking the appointment online was easy, I just had to select the passport agency closest to me, find a suitable 10-minute time slot, provide my details, and make the reservation. Once done an email reached my inbox confirming my appointment the following week. It also clearly stated the importance of arriving in good time: “Remember to arrive ahead of your appointment, if arriving later you won’t be able register your arrival.”. I added manually my appointment to my calendar and scribbled down a note to be on time.
Fast forward one week and I find myself at the passport agency 30 minutes ahead of scheduled appointment. The day before I had received a text reminding me about my appointment, sweet! Proud of being in good time I walk up to the terminal to check in (those of you who know me knows that I usually arrive just in time). I’m prompted to enter my booking number so I pull out my phone and dig out the confirmation text, only to realize I now have to type a long “randomized” sequence of 10 digits.
Struggling with entering my booking number and proofreading it my session runs out, the terminal returns to the landing screen, and I have to start over again. I curse the system and speed up my input and proofreading a second time around, hit confirm and wait for my welcome message…
…only to be told that “The earliest time for arrival registration is 2018–08–10, 09:00:00”. WTF?! ^^
Waiting on a couch for time to pass, to have another go at the terminal, I watch fellow passport applicants struggling with their booking number only to realize that they too have arrived with too good of a margin.
As the queue to the terminal stacks up I get back in line, anxious to miss my appointment, hoping to not reach the front ahead of my “arrival registration slot”. Unfortunately I once again find myself facing the terminal with too much time on my hands; this time solving it by letting a couple of people pass while I wait next to the terminal for my “slot” to open.
Punching in my booking number for the third time into the terminal I finally manage to register my arrival. Relieved, I take the printed registration slip and head for my assigned photo booth. At the booth I have my photo taken, leave my signature, and finish off by paying before heading back home.
10 days later I receive an email stating that my brand new passport is ready for collection. Yay!
Assessing the overall customer journey here are my two cents on how the renewal process could be improved:
- Make it easy for your customer to follow your journey. Attach a calendar invite in the confirmation email including all relevant information, relieving the customer from additional steps (I had to enter all my appointment details myself into my calendar).
- Minimize the cognitive load on the customer. Use a more human readable booking number and display it appropriately for easier input and proofreading. E.g. instead of displaying it 5023118259, use a suitable spacing: 50 23 11 82 59. Or maybe even make use of a scannable code?
- Always relieve the customer from any unessential business constraints by gracefully handling it in the background. Let the system take care of my early arrival, I did nothing wrong — I simply showed up in time (which is what I was explicitly told to do). This particular step also forced me to go over the registration process two times.
- Use consistent communication channels, don’t mix email with text messages. Use either or, or send redundant messages in both channels. (I was forced to juggle both text and email messages, not quite sure where to look for what.)
- Get ahead of your customer! Send a reminder 8 months before my passport is about to expire. Why 8 months? Some countries have a restriction about how long (up to six months) your passport needs to be valid after scheduled departure back home. By getting a reminder well in advance of expiry the risk of being forced to apply for a new passport on a short notice diminishes.
Finding improvement areas that has a high ratio between customer value and implementation effort can sometimes be a bit tricky. Of the above stated improvements, I believe the final bullet point has the highest ratio. In this case I used the jobs-to-be-done pattern of thoughts to reveal this insight and come up with the suggested improvement.
As a passport customer what is my main job-to-be-done? Why do I need a renewed passport in the first place? Is the job simply to get myself a valid passport? Or is the actual job to make sure I have a valid passport when I am about to travel internationally? I would say, the latter. This reminds me of an occasion when a good friend of mine missed a trip, me and a couple of other friends went on, due to the fact that he discovered too late (the day before the trip) that his passport had expired! Talk about a terrible customer experience…
Final remarks: As with any chain, even your user journey is only as strong as the weakest link. When assessing your customer journeys always try to figure out what the actual job is your customer is hiring your product or service to do, it might open new areas for you to explore and focus on. You might even realize that your customer journey starts somewhere else, other than what you first thought!
Did you enjoy reading this? Have your ever missed a holiday due to an expired passport? Do you need help in assessing your customer journeys? Would you like to know more about how jobs-to-be-done can help your business to grow?
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