Often in business, well-intentioned decisions made upstream have unintended consequences for customers,
- A technology upgrade removes a feature that drove renewals
- A process change quietly eliminates accessible communications
The causes are usually obvious in hindsight, but rarely visible at the point the decision is made.
Instead, the first signal tends to be lagging operational metrics: rising complaints, increased churn, or declining revenue. By the time these appear, the organisation has often moved on, and the root cause is harder to trace.
How journey mapping helps
Mapping out your journeys from a customer perspective helps understand where and how these decisions have an impact. By mapping both the current journey and the intended experience, you surface gaps, opportunities, and what’s currently going well in the journey. I find that making these as visual as possible, using photos, iconography, and a consistent, recognisable colour palette (e.g. sales is always yellow), creates a shared language and understanding around customer experience.
These maps should be iterative, developing as insight is gathered, and updated as experience improvements are made. Creating a single, shared view of the end-to-end experience produces a single source of truth everyone can align to. And, by ensuring decisions are tracked against the customer journey as they are made, root cause analysis becomes much easier.
Where do I start?
With different approaches to journey mapping to choose from (more on that another time), a good first pass is…
Be where your customers are and experience it for yourself
Known as a GEMBA walk, this helps you observe and experience what customers do. I love doing these, it’s a great opportunity to see first-hand what’s going on, that you often miss when you’re not interacting with customers every day. I’ve uncovered some high-impact pain points from GEMBA walks, overly restrictive questioning to make a missed payment is one that springs to mind!
Choose a high impact journey (e.g. one of those lagging operational metrics), and be where your customers are e.g.:
- Reduction in in-store sales = find and buy something in your shop
- Drop-off in first call resolution = call your own contact centre
- Increased abandoned web sign-ups = sign-up for your own app
This gives you a broad view of the steps within a journey, before validating what you’ve observed with real customer insights. But in the first instance, walking through your own journey can often bring out pain points that are hidden in plain sight, and it’s this low hanging fruit to start with.
Sharing what you’ve found
Share your findings with non-customer facing teams – it’s been transformational when I’ve played back a journey to senior leadership for them to realise how many times a customer has input the same information online. Or how long they spend getting through an IVR to speak to someone.
It’s also key to gaining buy-in and approval to go and dig deeper into these experiences.. As the root cause of pain points usually aren’t sitting in front-line teams, they’re likely further upstream.
At Project50, we love getting under the hood of these challenges, and helping you better understand your customers. If you want to learn more, or want us to take a look at one of your journeys, you can book in a 30 minute chat with Louisa.
