A trip to delight: Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping (CJM) is a powerful tool that enables organizations to understand and improve the customer experience by visualizing the steps a customer goes through when interacting with a product or service. This guide delves into the nuances of conducting customer journey mapping workshops, especially in remote settings, highlighting the challenges, tools, and best practices to ensure effective collaboration and actionable outcomes.

Why Use Customer Journey Maps?

Journey maps combine storytelling and visualization to provide a shared understanding of the customer experience. They help break down organizational silos, align stakeholders, and drive customer-centric improvements. By mapping out the journey, organizations can:

• Shift Perspective: Transform the organization’s view from an inside-out to an outside-in approach by focusing on the customer’s experiences rather than internal processes.
• Break Down Silos: Journey maps facilitate cross-departmental conversation and collaboration, creating a unified vision of the customer journey.
• Assign Ownership: Identify which departments or teams are responsible for various touchpoints to ensure accountability and consistency.
• Target Specific Customers: Focus on understanding the journeys of different personas, prioritizing high-value segments, or exploring new customer types.
• Understand Quantitative Data: Use journey maps to uncover the reasons behind trends observed in analytics, such as declining sales or underutilized tools.

Remote Customer Journey Mapping: Overcoming Challenges

Conducting CJM workshops with distributed teams presents unique challenges, including:

• Lack of buy-in for the process: Engaging team members who are geographically dispersed can be difficult, especially when they cannot witness the journey mapping activity firsthand. Without seeing the process, it’s challenging to convey its value.
• Lack of buy-in for the outcome: Distributed teams may struggle to engage fully with the journey mapping process or its results, leading to less actionable insights. When team members are not in the same room, fostering a sense of ownership and commitment to the outcomes can be more challenging.
• Difficulty iterating: Static, physical journey maps are hard to update, making it challenging for distributed teams to iterate and evolve the map. When teams are dispersed, maintaining a living document that evolves with new insights becomes even more crucial.

Key Elements of Customer Journey Maps

While journey maps can vary significantly depending on the context, they generally include the following elements:

• Point of View: Define the actor of the story, typically aligned with a customer persona.
• Scenario: Specify the particular experience or journey to be mapped, whether it’s an existing journey or a “to-be” experience for a new product or service.
• Actions, Mindsets, and Emotions: Capture what the customer is doing, thinking, and feeling during the journey. This information should be based on qualitative research.
• Touchpoints and Channels: Identify the points of interaction between the customer and the organization and the methods of communication or service delivery.
• Insights and Ownership: Highlight gaps in the user experience and assign responsibility for addressing these issues to specific teams or departments.

Rules for Creating Successful Journey Maps

Creating effective journey maps requires adherence to several guidelines:

• Establish the “Why” and the “What”: Clearly define the business goal and the specific experience or persona the map will address.
• Base it on Truth: Use qualitative research to build an accurate narrative of the customer’s experience.
• Collaborate with Others: Involve stakeholders from various departments to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the journey.
• Don’t Jump to Visualization: Ensure a thorough synthesis of data before creating the visual map.
• Engage Others with the End Product: Make the journey map a living document that stakeholders can interact with and reference in meetings and conversations.

Using Digital Tools for Remote Journey Mapping

Journey Mapping for Remote Teams: A Digital Template (NNg)

The NNg template: NN/g Customer Journey Mapping Template (Make a copy to your own drive (File > Make a copy). Note, you must be logged into your Google account in order make a copy.)

Digital tools facilitate remote journey mapping by providing a platform for collaborative work. One effective method is using a collaborative spreadsheet, which offers structure and accessibility for all team members.

How to Use a Spreadsheet Template

1. Access the Template: Obtain the template by copying it to your own drive. Versions for Google Spreadsheet, Excel, and Numbers are typically available.
2. Identify the Point of View: Define the map title, persona, scenario, corresponding goals, and the internal team responsible for the map.
3. Create the Narrative: Describe the phases of the customer journey, and for each phase, identify the user’s actions, thoughts, expressions, and emotional experiences.
4. Capture Insights and Opportunities: Explicitly list any insights that emerge and assign ownership for different parts of the journey map.
5. Analyze the Map: Collaboratively identify the highs and lows of the customer journey and visualize these using the spreadsheet.

Why use the template:

• Compatible Format and Structure: Spreadsheets offer a flexible structure that aligns with journey mapping needs.
• Inclusive of Various Expertise: Spreadsheets are familiar tools, reducing technical onboarding time and increasing participation.
• Accessible to Most Companies: Spreadsheets are widely used and accepted within organizations, often bypassing strict software policies.

Key Components of a Journey Map

Journey maps typically include:

1. Actor: The persona or user experiencing the journey.
2. Scenario + Expectations: The situation addressed by the map, associated with the actor’s goals.
3. Journey Phases: High-level stages in the journey, providing organization for actions, thoughts, and emotions.
4. Actions, Mindsets, and Emotions: Behaviors, thoughts, and feelings of the actor throughout the journey phases.
5. Opportunities: Insights gained from the map, highlighting how the user experience can be optimized.

Journey Map Variations

• Experience Maps: Broader and agnostic of specific businesses or products, used for understanding general human behaviors.
• Service Blueprints: Extensions of journey maps, focusing on internal processes supporting the customer journey.
• User Story Maps: Used in Agile development to plan features or functionalities from the user’s perspective.

For in-depth info, just join the NN class: https://www.nngroup.com/courses/journey-mapping/?lm=journey-map-digital-template&pt=article

Source: Journey Mapping 101