Create Better Customer Outcomes through Journey Mapping Workshops

This post was originally shared through the ICMI (International Customer Management Institute) newsletter. You can view the original version here.

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Call center managers have seen it before. Customers form an expectation from your sales channel or marketing literature, receive a different experience through operations, and then call your contact center where they may receive a third perspective.

It’s the setup for a rough call, and an even rougher customer experience. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Great companies have found a way to create a consistent end-to-end experience. They align their silos, creating a consistent experience from start to finish. How do they do it?

Enter customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping is a series of techniques that map out your customer experience from start to finish. It follows your customer across silos as they go from initial awareness through the sales process into ongoing engagement.

A popular way to conduct journey mapping is through a workshop.

Journey mapping workshops involve participants from throughout the company to document your customer’s journey, showing both customer-facing and back-end groups and systems that impact your customer. These interactive workshops bring your teams together to align on how your customers truly experience your products and services today. They isolate your friction points and uncover which systems, groups or incentives cause that friction.

Fidelity is a great example of a company who uses journey mapping to deliberately engineer their journey, as explained here. They use this process to identify “rocks” – those touch points that cause friction in their customer journey.

They use their journey maps to deliberately engineer improvements at these moments that matter. This process led to an increase in their Net Promoter Score, but more importantly to business outcomes, including higher revenue and lower costs to serve.

Journey mapping workshops provide a number of benefits to you:

1. Demonstrate the journey through your customer’s eyes. Done well, your workshops help participants understand how your customers truly view your journey. This leads to a shared view of this experience from your different silos, which is the first step to building improvement.
2. The results are immediately internalized. The process leads to learning that can be internalized immediately. By taking an active role in the process, teams from sales to finance to operations can immediately apply the learning to their operations.
3. The results can be applied tomorrow. In every single customer journey mapping workshop I have led, teams were able to come up with a series of quick wins that could be applied within 30 days – some much quicker. And since all critical teams are part of the mapping process, there is little pushback to implement the changes. It creates a shared win.

You can learn more about how to run one of these workshops here.  This Slideshare walks you through the process, from research-based journey maps to how to conduct a workshop at your organization.