Customer journeys, which frame customer experiences and touchpoints, aim to ensure that customers will be happy with the interaction when they connect with a product or service. Often, the risk is a siloed focus on individual touchpoints, missing the bigger, and more important, picture: the customer’s end-to-end experience through their own eyes. Only by looking at the entire journey a customer takes, can you really begin to understand how to meaningfully improve it.

This blog considers the tools and methods to creating a compelling customer journey - with lessons learned from the use of other process improvement toolsets like Process Maps, Organisational Diagrams, Operating Models, Roadmaps, Value Chains. These are all visual tools that can take a lot of creativity, skill and insight to create, and should draw the reader in and engage them with the subject. However, done wrong and they can be one dimensional, difficult to read and even worse - inaccurate.

The trick is not only to use the tool to make a compelling artefact, but also to drive towards a compelling outcome, in this case building a compelling customer journey.

Where is this blog coming from?

Last week, I chaperoned my daughter to Brighton for her to undertake some A-Level Geography field work, (she was polling random strangers and I thought she might need some back-up!) I soon realised that what she was doing was effectively researching the customer journey for a particular street in Brighton, but what she was struggling with was actually engaging with those very customers. They just really did not want to stop and answer her questions, and when she entered into some of the shops to observe the products on offer, the mix of clientele and the length of the interactions, she mainly got challenged and shooed away. Her answer was to fill in the gaps, cut out some of the locations under review and make up the answers on the questionnaires!

This got me thinking about how you can really get the customer journey mapped accurately, from end to end from the customer's true viewpoint, and, more crucially, what you do with it once you have it?

The difficulty with defining touchpoints

How do you put outside observations into perspective and how do you know you can trust it? No one likes feedback and not everyone really tells it like it is. Breaking down the customer interactions into individual touchpoints is a useful way for gathering Net Promoter Scores (NPS), particularly when you have a standard process which can be followed in a consistent manner, again thanks to the process maps.

However, the difficulty is understanding the holistic view. For example, the feedback from a customer focus group, may be totally divorced from the sum of the individual NPS’ received at each touchpoint in the process. The cumulative experience over time, across multiple channels can be totally different from the sum of the touchpoints.

Multi touchpoints, multi channel complexity

How do you ensure you have all dimensions covered? Customer journeys are affected by experiences before, during and after the defined touchpoints for a product or service. Complexity is a difficult subject. Creating distinct customer, or buyer, personas will help to define who your customers are, their goals, pain points, and buying patterns, but there are various contexts in which these personas can cut across the different functions on their end to end journeys.

So how do you manage all this messy stuff in a way that creates a clear narrative from which you can define the touchpoints and key hooks into winning that compelling customer experience?

The outside in approach

This is where the ‘outside in’ approach can help. At the core of every organisation is the siloed nature of service delivery and the different cultures, processes, and systems that evolve inside companies to design and deliver those services. It is these groups that define and own the touchpoints that determine how the company’s activities serve the customer. The functional groups that manage these touchpoints are constantly at risk, despite optimising their own contributions to the customer experience, of losing sight of what the customer actually experiences (or expects).

The challenge is to expand on the discreet touchpoints into the broader end to end external view in order to determine the cumulative effect. Much like a Value Chain is greater than the sum of the underlying process maps, this requires the use of a 3rd party, functional agnostic, perspective to complement the insights gained from individual touchpoint controls. After all, internal functions are incentivised for efficiencies, and managed for internal scale and productivity in order to deliver transactions, not to craft compelling customer journeys.

So how do you craft the customer journey?

Firstly, you have to step outside the organisational hierarchy and think from the customer’s point of view. Walk through each of the customer’s touchpoints with your product or service, mapping their needs and expectations during each part of the journey. This will help you understand what can improve the customer experience and in which priority does the customer view the gaps, and therefore offering you opportunities to improve the journey.

Getting the above points presented in an artefact (for tools to create these take a look at Mural, MIRO or Lucidchart) which is both relevant and realistic, and which presents actionable deliverables that will actually improve the end users experience, is imperative. It needs to be an ongoing endeavour, as the journey is improved and expanded. Things to watch out for in your high level customer journey map, which should define all the touchpoints between the customer and the company, are likely “pain points” in the journey and key “moments of truth”.

Then there should be a second layer of detail defining the functions and teams responsible for delivering each touchpoint, how these are linked (maybe multiple routes). You also need to identify the intended outcomes for the customer at each point, and their relative priority, both as viewed internally or by the customer. The relevant measures and levers that track and affect performance should also then be defined.

In summary

To develop a compelling customer journey takes a lot of insight, research and design up front, but also requires perseverance and agility to implement changes in time to capture the customers as you have defined them. Personas, like the weather, will change with the season, and the pandemic has taught us all that current assumptions can be turned upside down in a very short period of time.

So a compelling journey for your customer starts with an active and persistent review of your market, environment and your product (existing and prototype MVP). It also depends on how you deploy these insights to your organisation, delivery teams, product design and operations. And, of course, there is no end… constant change requires you to keep a constant watch on your customers, and their journeys through your product/experience, both yesterday, today and tomorrow.