Delivering Business Value with Customer Journey Maps

Successful Enterprise Architects balance the practical and abstract and help tell a story that aligns organizational vision to a pragmatic course of action. This is especially important when building a Well-Architected Salesforce solution that delivers business value fast. One way to ensure that business value is always kept in the forefront when designing Salesforce solutions is to use a customer journey map.

Journey maps allow us to better understand the current challenges and opportunities a customer faces as their relationship with your company evolves. The process of building a journey map can also break down internal silos and encourage comprehensive discussions around delivering value. But what does a good customer journey map look like? Let’s dive deeper into the 5 steps needed to deliver value with customer journey maps.

Step 1. Identify Your Customer

As basic as it sounds, it’s important to start by getting agreement with your team on who your customer is. You may be surprised to hear different answers as you facilitate a group conversation. Ultimately, a customer is who you are aiming to deliver value to as an organization through the delivery of your products or services. Identifying your ideal customer is a crucial step for a customer journey map. This will help identify behaviors, preferences, and expectations later on. To orient on the right level of granularity in defining your customer, you can take a few steps:

1. Collect and analyze your customer data — What do your existing customers look like in terms of demographics, purchase history, and other relevant information?
2. Examine customer research that may exist by way of surveys, interviews, or feedback that you can leverage for insights.
3. Segment your audience based on ‘look-alike’ characteristics, needs, or behaviors that can help define your target personas.

Sometimes it might not be obvious who your customer is. For example, a hospital system can have a few different versions of a customer, both internal and external. You can have a a patient, payer, provider, partner, and so on. Alignment on the ultimate customer will help focus conversation around the specific activities and engagement that will have the most impact. Healthcare and regulated industries are notoriously challenging in understanding the different actors and customers across the lifecycle. Your target industry may be more straight forward, but you can quickly target your focus by determining who your organization ultimately looks to create positive outcomes or value for.

In our hospital system example, the customer we create positive outcomes for is the patient. With the ultimate customer in mind, we can more clearly define the steps involved in bringing value to them.

Step 2. Define the Value Stream

A value stream encompasses all the activities and steps involved in delivering value to the customer, starting from the initial contact or inquiry to the final delivery and support.

A few tips and examples as you begin drafting your value stream:

1. Make it customer specific
2. Group commonalities together, but customize the steps and terminology to be most relevant for your organization
3. Often impacted by internal processes and when and how teams are engaged
4. Customers can have more than one (B2B and B2C, Customer and Partner, Different Products)
5. Understand the types of customers and how their journeys may be different
6. Be mindful of scope; how many customer types and/or lifecycles can you cover

In step one, we identified the patient as the primary customer that we’re trying to serve. Following this example, we can draft a value stream breaking down the steps involved in delivering value to the patient. Each industry has a slightly different terminology or approach to this value stream, so take that into consideration as you map out the logical steps in which value is delivered to your customer. Our patient value stream might look like this:

Step 3. Capture Relevant Activities, Opportunities, and Pain Points

Next, bring together cross-functional stakeholders involved in each of the steps in your value stream. Walk through the steps as a team to identify pain points, areas of improvement, and opportunities for enhancing the customer experience. Encourage participants to think creatively and propose solutions or initiatives. If you are facilitating a group conversation or workshop, it can be helpful to create a grid to capture thoughts and ideas in a collaborative fashion.

Following our example from above, let’s focus on the acquisition of new patients for our health system. The touch points involved in this step are scheduling and new patient intake. The job performers are call center agents and the healthcare provider. In today’s hyper-personalized consumer environment, we have the opportunity to better meet the needs of new patients if we can minimize the amount of times they have to fill out new patient forms. This opportunity has a measurable key performance indicator (time spent entering data), and we can act on this opportunity by identifying the systems involved in the new patient registration process like engagement tools, electronic health records, and other 3rd party solutions.

When you start to connect data, systems, and activities you create a future state that solves for tactical pain points. It also helps create the space to re-imagine or re-define business processes and operating models.

Step 4. Create A Future State Journey

From here, you can consolidate the workshop outputs into a visual representation that we call a customer journey map. This can be a digital or physical artifact that captures the stages, touch points, pain points, and improvement opportunities.

This future state journey represents the idealized version of how our external customers interact with us and the way that we facilitate those interactions using our own people, process, and technology.

In Step 3, we identified critical pain points in the customer journey — as we reimagine the future state, we can identify the moments that matter and how we can best serve them with data and technology. You can see in our future state we focus on the contact center agent having the Patient 360 view when receiving a call to schedule an appointment, and having the seamless hand-off to clinical intake and ultimately the provider & care coordinator.

It’s important to remember, this is an iterative process. Customer expectations change and all organizations have external and internal forces acting on their organization that change how things are prioritized and executed.

The goal is to have a north star that is tied to the organization’s vision & strategy that help guide decisions and actions in the short, mid-term, and long-term.

Step 5. Prioritize Actions & Execute

The final step in the process is to discuss and prioritize the actions that help us realize our future state journey based on their impact and feasibility. Determine which actions should be taken and by whom.

It can be helpful to organize the actions on a grid according to impact and effort. This is a great way to visualize your priorities including quick wins and strategic investments.

In our journey map above we identified a critical opportunity for new Patient Acquisition. When a patient calls in to schedule an appointment, we have highly fragmented data that is leading to poor end-user experience. We have a number of approaches to help fulfill our new future state journey:

1. Create a single view of Patients for our Contact Center Agents
2. Create Self-Service options for our end Patients to schedule/reschedule
3. Create intelligent automations in the flow of work to prioritize and streamline our interactions

This matrix drives alignment not only on what we want to do, but making sure it’s viable and feasible. Does the future state connect to our strategic vision and strategic objectives? Do we have the resources, ownership, and support to deliver on this now and in the future.

Finally, this prioritization and action plan will feed directly into your strategic roadmap. Together with a business case, you’ve successfully taken a customer focused approach that delivers value now and in the future in a trusted, easy, and adaptable way.

Conclusion

A customer journey map is a valuable tool for aligning your architecture with the needs and expectations of your customers. By doing so, you can bring value to your customers by creating a solution that not only meets their current demands but also adapts to future growth and changes in the market.

As you go forward in creating trusted, easy, and adaptable solutions following the Salesforce Well-Architected Framework, consider a customer journey map as a powerful tool to create alignment and incorporate data-driven decision making into your organization.