Customer Experience Journey Map: Applying the Top 10 Requirements

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A customer experience journey map is a critical tool to understand your customer experience. A journey map can help you understand a long-term engagement, such as when a prospect shops for your category, or to find opportunities to improve a specific experience, such as when a customer calls for service.Customer Purchase Map with Criteria


Last week’s post Customer Experience Journey Map – the Top 10 Requirements generated a ton of great dialog through Twitter, LinkedIn, email and even a few phone calls. To help continue this dialog, this post includes two example journey maps that we use with our clients at SMS Research Advisors. Please keep in mind that these are simply our implementations of the journey map criteria. As a Customer Experience advocate and researcher, I make no pretensions to graphic design skills! But this may help you apply the criteria to your own customer experience. You can also download a PDF of the two maps at the end of this post.

The first customer experience journey map is a variation of the Home Theater Purchase Journey Map from last week’s post. The map includes commentary on how it implements the 10+4 criteria. The second is a deep dive into a specific customer experience, scheduling a physical.

Customer Journey Map with Criteria


The key difference between the maps is what you are trying to understand. The purchase journey map focuses on identifying touch points, including those outside of the company’s control. The customer experience journey map focuses instead on the emotions your customer experiences through the journey. As a result, a different map is placed in the center – touch points for the purchase journey and emotional impact for the experience journey map.

I really enjoyed the conversations (and debates!) generated by the journey map criteria, and would love to continue the conversation. Connect to be via LinkedIn, or go to the About Jim tab for my email or phone number.

As a reminder, the 10 critical customer experience journey map criteria are:

  1. Represent your Customer’s perspective.
  2. Use research.
  3. Represent Customer segments.
  4. Include Customer goals.
  5. Focus on emotions.
  6. Represent touch points.
  7. Highlight moments of truth.
  8. Measure your brand promise.
  9. Include time.
  10. Ditch the PowerPoint.

The four optional criteria are:

  1. Break the experience into phases
  2. Bring in Customer Verbatims.
  3. Include Customers and Non-Customers.
  4. Use your other Voice of the Customer components.

I wish you the best of luck implementing these criteria and learning more about your customer experience!

You can download the PDF of the two maps here.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Jim Tincher
Jim sees the world in a special way: through the eyes of customers. This lifelong passion for CX, and a thirst for knowledge, led him to found his customer experience consulting firm, Heart of the Customer (HoC). HoC sets the bar for best practices and are emulated throughout the industry. He is the author of Do B2B Better and co-author of How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer?, and he also writes Heart of the Customer’s popular CX blog.

3 COMMENTS

  1. First of all, this makes me smile all day. Most company’s still think that THEY know how to handle Customer Experience from THEIR point of view. But in the last years, things changed a bit. You must know what the customer want, and not yours. If you know what YOUR customers wants to have, to do, or to order, then you got your company where you want it to be.
    Allthough from Germany, i think it’s all the same right?

    Great post!

  2. Edenz,

    I’ts most definitely the same! One of the biggest challenges in customer experience is remembering that it’s the CUSTOMER view that matters. We get so wrapped up in our view of the experience that it’s hard to step outside.

    Thanks!

  3. Love your 10 criteria! I gave a little cheer when I read #10 – "Ditch the PowerPoint.” So true! Ppt and other Office tools certainly weren't designed for journey mapping! It's nearly impossible to represent all of the emotional and analytical components of a journey on a single canvas (like PowerPoint) in way that can be easily understood, updated and shared with others.

    As an alternative to trying to cram everything onto a single map canvas, the company I work with, Touchpoint Dashboard, has developed a web-based mapping tool. It helps companies create “3-D,” detailed maps of their customer journey, view it in its entirety, OR zoom in to view specific sections of the journey (down to an individual moment of truth or specific touchpoint). It's designed to help companies visualize and understand their complete customer experience across all channels and lines of business. You can test-drive the tool on our website. We'd love to get your feedback!

    Thanks for sharing your great posts!

    Jennifer
    TouchpointDashboard.com

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