Journey Mapping

Add Journey Mapping to Your Solution Toolbox

• Heart of any solution should be an intention to make your customers' lives better.
  • “Relationship Design” - creation of experiences that foster ongoing engagement, strengthening connections between people, companies, and communities
  • Journey Mapping is a told to help make this happen.
    
    
• Journey maps are documents that visually illustrate the experiences customers have with an organization. It identifies:
  1. Steps or activities a customer/user takes to accomplish a goal
  2. Challenges they face accomplishing it
  3. People they interact with
  4. Touchpoints and channels (ex: devices, apps) they use as they accomplish a goal
  5. Feelings, thoughts, reactions during the journey
• Example steps a customer might have working with a company’s service department:
  1. Customer enrolls
  2. Customer calls in with a question, requesting service
  3. Service rep opens a request for service and sends them an email confirmation, then checks the customer’s service history
  4. Service rep provides the service
  5. Customer’s record is updated and reflected in an online portal, viewable by the customer
• Journey likely involves many “touch points” between the customer and service rep, and service rep may also be collaborating with other colleagues in sales.
  • For solutions based on Salesforce, admins, architects, designers, developers, marketers etc all have a stake in mapping out the customer journey for a new feature - workshops with a cross-functional team are necessary.
• Benefits of Journey Mapping
  • Better team alignment - helps different teams (sales, service, design, etc) speak in a common language about customer
  • Promotes strategic thinking - enabling conversations about best allocation of company resources for highest impact
  • Deeper understanding of customer pain points - expose gaps in a flow, moments of vulnerability or dissatisfaction for customers
  • Increase empathy for audience’s experience
  • Strong case for innovation - discover what matters to customers and how to innovate to make that happen
  • Guide to measuring impact - model how current customer experience will change, and analyze each change’s potential for impact, model new experiences before they are designed
    
    
• A journey map: illustrates the customer’s experience and challenges when accomplishing tasks using your product/service.
• A journey map helps with cross-team alignment and increases empathy.

Define Intention and Audience

• Start with a set of assumptions:
  • Business Objectives - ie, “why you’re doing it”
  • Impacted Audience - ie, who will be most impacted or best served by the experience
    
    
• Common examples for business objectives that might lead to creation of a journey map:
  1. Create a differentiated customer experience
  2. Acquire new customers
  3. Increase customer’s use of a product/service
  4. Integrate a new feature/service
  5. Increase efficiency/effectiveness of product/service
  6. Improve completion rate of a specific task/goal
  7. Improve service quality and reduce calls to support/service
• Scope the journey map appropriately - not too broad or narrow.
  • Example of correct scope: I want to purchase a technology solution that helps us automate service processes
• Audience could be several different groups of users:
  • Segment of customers (customers with field service fleets)
  • Employees and partners (job applicants, consultants supporting new product line)
  • Customer’s customers (retail customers ordering online)
• Example steps for journey of a new hire and their onboarding:
  1. Submit an application
  2. Speak with a recruiter
  3. Have interviews with hiring manager/team
  4. Wait for the offer
  5. Receive the offer
  6. Negotiate the offer
  7. Accept the offer
  8. Attend first day orientation
  9. Onboard for first 90 days
  10. Access new hire support for first 180 days
• Only build a journey map if you have a clear understanding of the customer/user, built on research
  
  
• Important to find the right scope for a journey map because it helps ensure you can track success with reasonable metrics, and it helps set the right boundaries to protect everyone’s time
• When deciding whose journey to focus on, you should consider who’s involved in meeting the business objective and who influences the experience.

Start Your Journey Map

• Architecture of a Journey Map - seven sections
  1. Phases - distinct stages of an experience. Ex: awareness, consideration, purchase, onboarding, advocacy
  2. Actions - what the customer/user does
  3. Thoughts - what the customer/user thinks
  4. Feelings - how the customer/user is feeling
  5. Touchpoints - where your brand, product or service comes into play. Times where the organization and the user get in touch
  6. Context - environmental, social, and time factors important to the customer/user’s ability to reach their goal
  7. Opportunities - where and how you can have the most impact by reducing pain or reinforcing strength
     
     
• Stages to Creating the Journey Map
  1. Write down all your ideas, specifically each activity and decision point, on individual notes
  2. Group activities into phases based on mindset or context change
  3. Bring in collaborators - many teams make an impact on the customer at different points their interaction. Make sure stakeholders from all teams are represented.
  4. Invite People to the Journey Mapping Workshop - Five to Seven people who:
     • Know your customer, are generative (enjoy brainstorming), are optimists and realists, bring diversity
  5. Prepare the workshop
     • Virtual Workshop Logistics - four sessions, 2 hours each. Prompt participants to do prep work ahead of time. Use a virtual whiteboarding tool
     • In-Person Workshop Logistics - entire day of collaboration. Find a quiet place where participants will not be distracted.
     • Plan to have many multi-colored sticky notes, markers, foam core boards, voting dots, colored tape to create grids
  6. Set the stage
     • Share key research info and prompts in the form of a brief. It should include insights and data on the specific customer type’s behavior as well as:
       • The business challenge
       • Users/customers you’re serving
       • Work done so far
       • Description of the participant’s role as collaborators in the journey mapping process
     • Set of boards that are needed:
       #1 Journey map itself
       #2-n. Drill down into each section
       
       
• Its best practice not to draft a full journey map before getting feedback. Instead, it should be created collaboratively from the get-go.
• Its best to invite people who like coming up with new ideas to the journey mapping workshop.

Run a Journey Mapping Workshop

• First Activity after welcome and setting expectation for the day:
  • Review phases and actions in the work completed so far
    • Do the phases and actions resonate as true to life?
    • Did we miss anything?
    • Did we include anything unnecessary?
• Think about your customers together
  • Participants should review research material for relevant customer quotes, feedback and other insights
• Synthesis your research and insights - more art than science. It is how we arrive at the key insights that form the customer/user journey.
  • Step 1: Cluster - group insights based on similar or related themes and ideas.
  • Step 2: Express - Craft phrases to express each important cluster around thoughts, feelings, touchpoints, and contexts. Come up with 3-4 points for each square of the journey map grid.
    • At this stage, any ideas/solutions for the opportunities section should be noted in a “parking lot” - a blank board in the corner typically.
• Take a step back
  • After synthesizing the emotions, touchpoints, contexts for each phase, review the bigger picture your insights reveal.
    • Does it read as a coherent story? Can you picture a real person having this experience? Which parts are most important to the customer? Do any feel extraneous/misplaced?
• Find the opportunities
  • Once the story is complete and coherent, ask participants to find opportunities for improvement based on whatever is lacking, inefficient, or could be improved.
    • Ex: “Visualize the shipping route and package tracking,” “Engage in social media with strategic purpose”
• End the workshop by asking people to vote for their favorite opportunities in each phase. They should consider:
  • Moments that matter most to the customer
  • Metrics you can improve
  • Places where your organization can contribute to the community/world
  • How well they satisfy business objectives using current capabilities
• Eliminate opportunities that represent short-term gains at the expense of long-term relationships; they’re ultimately bad for your business
  
  
• You synthesize ideas by clustering insights based on related themes and ideas and draft phases based on these clusters
• Opportunities can be a mix of vague and specific goals

Craft Your Journey Map

• At this point all the pieces are in place: customer research, draft of phases and activities, insights of colleagues
• Tell the story by working through it from beginning to end. Consider the following:
  1. What’s a one-sentence intro?
  2. What’s a summary?
  3. What’s your point of view on the best steps to take first?
• Compiling a finalized journey map doesn’t require professional design skill or perfect aesthetics, but it does need to be readable and effective. Consider:
  • What do you want people to take away from it?
  • What if they see it when you’re not available to explain it?
  • What if they only have a few minutes to spend with it?

• In journey above, note customer’s picture and story added to the top along with Persona Key Facts.
• Before moving ahead, run a “Consequence Scan”, considering:
  1. What are the security, reliability, support, and accessibility implications?
  2. What could this idea mean for wellbeing/relationships?
  3. What would it mean if everyone in the world were using it? Could there be negative broad societal impact?
• The idea of a consequence scan is to help ensure that any innovation is responsible and builds strong relationships with your customers and community, both of which are foundational to business success.
  
  
• Adding story and visual elements to your journey map helps make it more readable
• A consequence scan helps improve your journey map by helping you uncover unintended consequences and how to mitigate them