Journey mapping is a relatively recent term – one that’s generating a lot of buzz in the market. This activity, in all its previous names, is something that Walker has conducted for companies for decades. Journey Mapping engages both customers and cross-fuctional internal teams in exercises to illustrate the customer interaction points, critical moments of truth, unique strengths, and common challenges present in relationships between companies and their customers. Customer relationships are complex, particularly in business-to-business – Walker’s “sweet spot” – and this process helps to make sense of these complicated relationships. At its core, it harnesses three types of critical intelligence: company/operational, customer, and competitive/marketplace.
The primary benefits to the companies we serve are:
- to advise the design (or redesign) of a customer listening strategy, including current or new operating metrics related to customer experience,
- to identify, understand, and align other critical (i.e. non-survey) sources of customer input,
- to engage audiences to create alignment on the areas that are most important to customers,
- to optimize resources in launching new initiatives or allocating towards existing initiatives,
- to define both current and ideal customer relationship elements,
- to create a ongoing living training tool to orient and educate employees and customers on the nature of their mutual relationships
In each engagement, Walker and the client collaborate in the process that includes defining customer strategy goals, identifying initial hypotheses around customer interactions, conducting cross-functional customer-facing workshops or role shadowing (complemented with select external customer interviews), identifying internal key metrics (KPI’s) to align with external perspectives, creating a visual depiction of the key relational elements, and developing a recommended customer experience roadmap to pursue.
Please share your own thoughts or experiences related to Journey Mapping and its benefits.
