Idea Gathering: Customer Experience & Customer Journey Mapping

Not just hearing, but translating innovations and insights is a huge part of the value of the Total Customer Experience Leaders. Our unique idea gathering wrap-ups between sessions facilitate alignment of customer strategy inspiration with business relevant actions and have been one of our most highly rated features in the past.

Here on the blog, we'll be presenting weekly idea gathering wrap ups of some of our favorite customer experience strategy, design and alignment news and views.  

This week our focus is on Customer Journey Maps.

Customer Journey Maps are one of the most underrated parts of a good Customer Experience Strategy and are all too often under utilized or not used at all. Imagine a general who made battle strategies without a map or a contractor trying to build something without blueprints. 

These examples are exactly as absurd as trying to create a customer experience strategy without a customer journey map. Customer Journey maps track customer engagement with a business every step of the way from the first interaction, or thoughts of potential interaction, to after the sale, and every possible step in between. 

Customer Journey Mapping is about understanding the wants, needs, interactions, and emotions of the customer in relation to your business. How does walking into one of your stores make a customer feel? What is a customer thinking when they search for your product online? These are examples of questions that a good customer map should answer. Taking the time out to actually relate to the emotions of customers is an invaluable effort that will reflect greatly on actual customer experience. PeopleMetrics describes this kind of customer empathy as “mak[ing] it easier to shift out of internal process mode and into thinking about how the company could be doing a better job of delivering value to customers.”

Customer Journey Maps should not be taken lightly and to create a truly effective map takes a lot of time and research to determine actual customer experiences and emotions. You also might not like what your first map looks like but that’s part of the process.

UXmatters.com explains that Customer Journey Mapping is all about very subtly selling service design. They define service design as “the design of the overall experience of a service, as well as the design of the process and strategy for providing that service” . 

This means that customers should enjoy the experience of doing business with a company every step of the way despite the fact that the experience is not something which can physically be capitalized on. So while making a Customer Journey Maps wont instantly give you business,  when properly used, they will significantly improve the experience of the customer.

About the Author

Jeffrey Marino is a contributing writer concentrating his focus on Business Administration, Management Information Systems, and Tech Innovations. He blogs at Fordham Nights and can bereached at JMarino@iirusa.com.