Customer Journey Mapping

BY ABEY FRANCISAPRIL 4, 2014MARKETING MANAGEMENT

Every time a customer contacts the organization or its representatives, there is an

opportunity for a customer moment of truth. These moments of truth are
opportunities for the organization to make a good or bad impression on the
customer and are key moments in the customer journey.
This concept of moment of truth was first introduced by Jan Carlzon, the former
president of Scandinavian Airlines, in his 1986 book titled Moments of Truth.
Carlzon defines the moment of truth in business as:
Anytime a customer comes into contact with any aspect of a business, however remote,
is an opportunity to form an impression.
Customer journey mapping builds on this concept by providing a strategic tool to
start the process of ensuring that every interaction with your organization is a
positive one.

Customer journey mapping is a tool organizations use to help them see what
their customers truly want the real moments of truth and the ways in which
customers go about achieving their needs. It is the process of tracking and
describing all the experiences that customers have as they encounter a service or
set of services, taking into account not only what happens to them, but also their
responses to their experiences. It recognizes moments of potential failure or bad
customer experiences to help define where products or services need to be
strengthened. By identifying those steps in your customer experience with the
greatest impact, your journey map becomes a centerpiece of your customer
experience

planning

process. Used

well,

it

can

reveal opportunities

for

improvement and innovation in that experience, acting as a strategic tool to ensure

every interaction with the customer is as positive as it can be.
A customer journey map is a framework that enables organizations to improve
their customer experience. It documents the customer experience through their
perspective, helping organizations best understand how customers are interacting
with them now and helps you identify areas for improvement moving forward.
Journey maps can vary from very simple step-by-step documentations of the
process to complex infographics containing multiple layers of information. Great
customer journey maps are rooted in data-driven research, and visually represent
the different phases of customers experience based on a variety of dimensions
such as sentiment, goals, touch points, and more.
Typical elements of customer journey maps include:

Customer actions, usually broken into chronological phases of some kind.

Goals and needs at each step in the process.

Moments of truth, or areas of particular importance in the overall customer

experience.

Pain points, gaps and disconnects in service.

Brand impact, satisfaction, and emotional responses.

Business

touch-points

departments of the provider.

and

process,

including

roles,

systems

and

Existing services and opportunities for improvement.

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping will enable organizations to focus on removing the
anomalies

and

will

start

to

allow

to

deliver

consistent,

predictable

customer experience. Customer journey mapping helps organizations to:

See things from the customers point of view.

Get it right when it really matters e.g. when emotions are highest or need
greatest.

Deliver information, messages and services at the most appropriate time.

Deliver a seamless, streamlined experience that cuts across silos.

Target limited resource for maximum impact.

Plan the most efficient and effective experience by reducing duplication and
shortening the length of processes.

Identify baton-change points where service or communication breakdown is

most likely.

Identify cheapest cost to serve.

What distinguishes Customer journey mapping from data that might be gleaned
from customer relationship management systems is its equal focus on emotional
insights about the customers experience. Customer journey mapping mixes
quantitative approaches with qualitative, experiential data. Also, it can help to
identify how customers are treated during each contact that takes place. It should
be viewed from the standpoint of how does the customer feel during a particular
end-to-end experience?

Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Customer

Experience
by Adam Richardson | 8:05 AM November 15, 2010

A customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your
customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an
online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination. The more
touchpoints you have, the more complicated but necessary such a map becomes.
Sometimes customer journey maps are cradle to grave, looking at the entire arc of
engagement. Here, for example, is a customer journey timeline that includes first
engaging with a customer (perhaps with advertising or in a store), buying the product or
service, using it, sharing about the experience with others (in person or online), and
then finishing the journey by upgrading, replacing, or choosing a competitor (re-starting
the journey with another company):

At other times, journey maps are used to look at very specific customer-company
interactions. By way of example, lets look at a customer journey that doesnt work well:
home theater.
Anyone who has attempted to research, buy, set up, and use a home theater system
knows that this is one of the most frustratingly complicated customer experiences in the
consumer electronics realm. It makes buying a car seem trivially easy. Heres a real
sample of some questions asked by a prospective purchaser on a home theater forum:
For HD and Blue Ray DVD HDMI audio I do not understand if any post processing is
done on the 5.1 Lossless PCM channels from these players. Will DD PLIIx or THX 7.1
apply to these? What are the limitations?
Dont worry if you have no idea what this means you shouldnt have to. There is no
good reason why a layperson just wanting to watch movies at home should be exposed
to such complexity and jargon. Yet in home theater, such confusion is rampant. Its a
bad sign when there are numerous forums for customers to help each other out, as is
the case in home theater, since it means that the manufacturers have utterly failed in
creating a comprehensive customer experience. But its also an opportunity for smart
companies: retailer Best Buy bought service start-up Geek Squad to solve exactly this
type of problem.

If I were a manufacturer, how would I go about understanding the customer journey so I

could improve it? Here is a diagram that shows one way of looking at the home theater
journey up to the point of getting the gear home:

The spine of the timeline in this case is based around the conventional sales funnel
(awareness, research, purchase), but then adds another step: OOBE, or out-of-boxexperience. This has become an increasing important step. Do a search on YouTube for
unboxing, for example, or looking at unboxing.com for many examples of people going
through what is now a ritualistic act of opening up the latest gadget.
But beyond the emotional factors, it makes good business sense. A great out-of-box
experience is like a little piece of theater. Scripting it well helps guide the customer
through the first steps of using their new purchase and minimizes expensive calls into
help lines.
The timeline is just the starting point; next we need to look at whats happening at each
stage. A framework that I find consistently useful is to look at:

Actions: What is the customer doing at each stage? What actions are they taking
to move themselves on to the next stage? (Dont list what your company or partners
such as retailers are doing here. That will come later when we look at touchpoints)

Motivations: Why is the customer motivated to keep going to the next stage?
What emotions are they feeling? Why do they care?

Questions: What are the uncertainties, jargon, or other issues preventing the
customer from moving to the next stage? As you can from the diagram above, home
theater has a larger proportion of questions than almost anything else at each stage,
which indicates this is an area that manufacturers and retailers should be attacking
aggressively.

Barriers: What structural, process, cost, implementation, or other barriers stand in

the way of moving on to the next stage?
Filling all these out is best done if grounded in customer research, preferably
including in-depth ethnographic-style interviews and in-context observations.
Surveys and focus groups tend to gloss over too many details that are critical to
really understanding the experience. Ask customers to map out their journeys for
you, while you are visiting them for the research.
Note that the journey is often non-linear. Someone may jump straight from
awareness to purchase if they are not inclined to do research and have a strong
recommendation from a friend, for example. Or they may spend a long time
spinning through iterations of the research process for an expensive purchase. I
remember interviewing a gentleman in Texas who spent six months visiting stores
for a big-screen TV, as he didnt want to get it wrong, and he would play sales
people off one another to get the lowest price.
This is certainly not the only way to create a customer journey. My colleague
Gianluca Brugnoli has a nice Slideshare about a customer journey for digital
media (including touchpoints, which is the next installment in this series). You can
find some other examples a tService Design Tools (software products also), and
at This is Service Design Thinking (PDF download). Interaction designer Hugh
Dubberly has also written and diagrammed extensively about customer experience,
and looked at the customer journey. Treating the journey as a storyboard, complete
with photos or sketches of each stage, is a nice way to add more flavor, but is not
necessary to get started.

There is no single right way to create a customer journey, and your own
organization will need to find what works best for your particular situation. But the
frameworks provided here should give you a good head-start at better
understanding the journey that your customers travel through as they engage with
your company, brand, products, partners, and people.