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 group of particpants made up of the following:

Customers, (if possible)
The whole team that will deliver valuable customer outcomes
Scrum Master or Team Coach
Product Owner
Experts in the product or service.
Business stakeholders
Frontline staff who are interact with the customer
Leaders

Information to prepare

All the metrics you can get your hands on about the customer experience.

The number of customers starting the journey
The number of customers completing the journey
The number of customers abandoning the journey
The point in the journey where customers drop out
Anything else about the customer's journey

Make sure you include metrics beyond the technology. Are customers completing one or more steps in their journey on the phone, in a branch, somewhere outside your systems?

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 problems 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.

Customer Persona Canvas

Download the Customer Persona Canvas to help you define a customer persona that participants at your Customer Journey Mapping workshop can empathise with.

Simply work through each of the boxes in the canvas to create a view of who the customer is, what they care about and why they are taking this customer journey.

Establish the Boundaries

It starts earlier than you think!

We usually think about a customer’s interactions with our teams and systems as starting when they phone us or log in to a system.

Sometimes the way people feel about our teams or systems is biased by what they went through leading up to it. Sometimes there are things that occur after we think the interaction has finished that influence how they feel about it.

Establishing the boundaries of a customer journey usually involves thinking through the very first thing that set them on the journey and the action or event that confirmed for them that the outcome was achieved.

The trigger point

The trigger point is the thing that started the customer on this journey. Very often, this will be something we don't control, but it is still important to capture it as it will help you understand how the customer is feeling before their first interaction with your teams or systems.

What is it that made them want to achieve the outcome? It could be:

An event
A desire
An action

The exit point

The exit point is the thing that confirms for the customer that their journey is successful and their outcome has been achieved. As with the trigger point, this is often outside our control, but is still an important influence in how the customer feels about their overall journey.

WHat is it that lets the customer know that their outcome has been achieved? It could be:

An event
A feeling
An action