Customer Journey Mapping Playbook

Overview

Customer journey mapping helps you understand and visualise how a customer interacts with your product or service. By putting yourself in your customers shoes you gain a deeper understanding of the current experience and the motivations behind a customers actions. It is only when we have a deep understanding of our customers that we can build solutions to help improve customer experience.

Customer journey mapping is a great activity to perform during the early stages of any large piece of work, when you are trying to understand how you can best generate value for your customers. Like any new idea, a customer journey map improves as it is socialised with more and more people.

Don’t forget to walk your customer journey map with your most important group, your end customer. This can be done via customer interviews.

There are 6 steps in completing this Playbook

Preparation
Establish the boundaries
Understand customer personas
Map customer flow
Explore pathways
Identify pain points and opportunities

Participants

Team
Product Owner
Scrum Master
Invited Stakeholders

Difficulty

3 - Moderate

Duration

2-4 hours

Materials

If facilitating in person:

Whiteboard or wall space
Lots of Post-it Notes
Sharpies

For virtual facilitation

Collaboration space, (i.e. Miro or Mural)

Preparation

Who should be in the room

For the most effective session you want to plan for a cross functional diverse team made up of the following:

The whole team
Scrum Master or Team Coach
Product Owner
Experts in the product or service.
Business stakehodlers
Frontline staff who are interact with the customer.

Information to prepare

Prepare some details about the customer, (see the "Understanding Customer Personas" section below,) who will we focus on when describing their journey through our product or service?

Prepare details of the context, why customers will use this, what outcomes the yseek, etc..

Do some research around what else customers are doing that provides the same outcomes.

Establish the boundaries

A customer journey map can vary in scale from a high level map through an entire product or service to a detailed journey through a single feature.

Discuss the scale of this customer journey map with your workshop participants so there is a shared understanding of your start and end points.

Start with a specific customer persona and specific feature, product or service. Limiting the scope of your customer journey will help geneerate more specific insights and pain points.

PRO TIP!

Start at the end and end at the beginning

To help participants think about the best starting boundary for your customer journey map, ask them to share ideas about what the customer's outcome is. Thinking about what the customer wants to achieve will make the starting point of that journey obvious.

When considering the end boundary, it might simply be the point at which the customer has achieved their outcome, or it could be the natural conclusion to a journey that started at the beginning.

Understand Customer Personas

With clarity over the scope and scale of your Customer Journey Map, the next step is to empathise with your customer.

Customer Personas provide a way to connect with your customers and their needs. They are fictitious customers with enough detail, (age, experience, career, family details, attitudes, etc.,) and enough of a back-story so your participants can relate to their problem and the benefits they seek.

If you don’t have access to ‘ready made’ personas, (try reaching out to your digital teams, they most likely have these already,) use the canvas on the next section as a template to quickly create one.