Moment Mapping the Customer Experience
Customer Experience mapping and User Journeys are big buzz right now, but they frequently become overwhelming. How can you take complex user flows and turn them into a deliverable program of work? The answer is Moment Maps.
Customer experience (CX) design is a process that actively crafts an organisation’s products, services, processes and culture to drive customer satisfaction.
At the heart of CX design is the concept of journey mapping. Customer journey maps allow organisations to understand customers and their critical touchpoints across the business. Many organisations work hard to understand the ways customers interact with them over time, and ultimately try to improve their experience. As useful as journey maps are in understanding how customers engage with your organisation, they can quickly become overwhelming.
Multi-channel businesses now have numerous ways to serve customers, and customers frequently move between service channels to whichever is most convenient. There can be so many different customer journeys that it can be difficult to capture and understand them in their current state, let alone imagining what an improved, future state looks like.
It’s this complexity of interconnected user journeys — the proliferation of touchpoints, service channels and digital platforms — and the inability of businesses to flexibly break down customer experience challenges, that led us to develop a new approach to capturing user journeys.
Introducing “Moment Mapping”
A number of key ‘Moments’ occur in a customer’s interaction with your business. A Moment might be a transaction, a service request, or it might simply trigger the need for your products.
Moments can cover reaching your customers, engaging with them, acquisition and conversion, and loyalty and retention activity.
Most organisations can very quickly capture dozens of Moments in a typical customer lifecycle by workshopping these events across multiple functions.
Once you’ve got a bunch of Moments, you can begin to prioritise them based on the potential impact each Moment has on your business. Is a particular Moment a major pain-point for customers? Are there some that cause major inefficiencies? Do some cause dissatisfaction or abandonment? Are you missing opportunities to surprise and delight your customers?
Think about Moments that can add value, or are major costs; ones that cause frustration; ones that are risks, or moments that are critical to building loyalty and advocacy. Use these criteria to develop a priority list of which Moment have the greatest impact on your business.
Once you’ve got this list, it’s time to start mapping…
How to Moment Map
Imagine each Moment as a scenario for a given audience. This includes imagining the events that lead up to the Moment, what happens during it, and then what happens afterwards.
When capturing events around a particular Moment, be sure to do it from the customer’s point of view.
Each Moment Map should explore customer needs, how they are thinking and feeling, and what channel or touch point they are using.
When complete, your Moments should allow you to envisage the future of the experience where pain-points are minimised and opportunities to surprise and delight your customers are maximised.
The result
Your finished Moment Map captures a slice of the holistic user journey, and together begins to form the overarching customer lifecycle.
The beauty of Moment Maps is the ease with which you can re-prioritise and change your program of work to deliver improvements. Simply by shuffling the deck, and placing the highest impact Moment at the top of your list, you can be flexible about delivering each improvement project. If something changes, or new products, services or opportunities emerge, just create a new Moment, and re-prioritise again.
Once you have your maps, you can use these to overlay a range of other considerations, such as the technical requirements implied by interactions, data requirements to drive experiences, and any new experiences that will form the basis of your digital roadmap.
Moment aps can help to foster agility when we’re faced with complex Customer Experience and when applied to your business, might help revolutionise the way you interact with your customers for the better.
