Five Steps to Map Customer Journeys

In this video Martin Wright, Customer Journey Consultancy, outlines five lessons learned from over 20 years of customer journey mapping.

If you would like to find out what else was discussed in this webinar, you can watch the replay ‘Making Customer Journey Mapping Easier‘

Video Transcript

I want to share five of the lessons I’ve learned from over 20 years of journey mapping for a whole range of different clients.

Step 1 – Start Simple

I would say start simple. It’s very common for people to want to start by boiling the ocean, and they just get completely lost in the detail. You’ll have dozens of segments, and perhaps millions of customers. But I would start with just two.

Pick two very different people and look at the journey from their perspective. Then by all means, as you begin to develop more confidence and experience, you can begin to drill down into as much detail as you can and explore more segments.

Step 2 – Engage Stakeholders Early

The second thing I want to get you to think about is engaging stakeholders early. Once you’ve stood in your colleagues’ shoes and seen what the implications of mapping might be for them, then that’s a great way to arm you to go and speak to them, and to get them lined up and aligned behind your mapping project.

There’s a few things that you really need to think about. A couple of those often get missed, such as what’s in it for them, besides potentially hard work, if they’re going to change stuff. And what are any red lines?

So quite often, for example, we’ll find we haven’t got any capacity to change the CRM system for the next two years or whatever it is. You need to know that and build that into your scope right at the outset.

Step 3 – Customer Insight

The thing that we find is most important is customer insight. If you haven’t got really good, relevant customer insight about how they’re feeling about their experiences, then it’s just the internal perception of what’s going on. And very often that’s wrong.

Step 4 – Tap Into Emotions

Think about the power of emotions and the subconscious. We’re all business people, and very often we just think that these are rational things, like customer effort, and all of that kind of stuff. We forget how powerful that unconscious bias and first impressions are.

Psychologists tell us is that a rational mind is a bit like the mahout sitting on the shoulders of a huge elephant. He thinks he is in control, but we know if the elephant really decided to do something else, he’d be in a lot of trouble.

Step 5 – Use KPIs to Drive Change

The final point I’d like to leave you with is about KPIs and CX measures. All too often, and with people being what they are, we find companies are unconsciously using their KPIs and their CX measures not to drive change, but to say to the boss what a brilliant job they’re doing, and how actually they don’t really need to change very much at all.

This video was recorded when Martin Wright was a panellist on our 2022 webinar ‘Making Customer Journey Mapping Easier‘

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