What makes a Customer Journey Map valuable?

How useful is a Customer Journey map?

There's a mix of answers to this question, and it depends on who you ask and how mature your organisation is with customer experience. If there isn't one already created, then it is a great tool to give everyone visibility on the way customers navigate and extract value from the product and services delivered by the organisation. Simply put it is a shared, evidenced picture of what it's actually like to be your customer. From that perspective it is an excellent communication tool, but is that all there is to it?

We believe for a lot of companies, that view is one that is defined for a project, and only looked at again when the next project comes around and there's an impact to the customer. For others who have taken the next step, they are constantly updating it to ensure that it is maintained, a correct representation of the customers.

However, there is a cohort that takes it to another level. The journey map is a live, it is accessible across all functions, it has views that makes sense for the teams delivering value to customers as well as decision makers using it to inform them on what is important to the customer. It suddenly transforms from a communication tool into a decision making tool. We believe that this is where the true value is, and not many organisations are doing this (granted not many tools in the market does this, but we'll get to that soon).

But how do you transform it from a comms tool to a decision making tool? Well first, you have to figure out who will be reading this journey map and what decisions are they making.

The importance of understanding your audience

There are 4 key audience and your customer journey map differs for each:

1) The Decision Makers: They want the shape of the problem and the size of the prize. Where are we losing customers, where are we burning cost, and what's the one or two things worth funding this year? There's a very high likelihood that they'll see your journey map once or twice, but they're looking for the link between customer's behaviour / feedback and the metrics that matter to their department and organisation as a whole.

It is your job then to understand what matters to them and link it to customer behaviour / feedback. For example: if your Decision Maker is in Operations, maybe their key metric is cost reduction, which means that they would care about cutting down labour doing things customers don't care about and focus on things customer value, and that comes through from not only sales data but also customer feedback and sentiment.

2) The Trusted Advisors: These are the right-hand person of the decision makers. They could be General Managers under Directors, part of the senior leadership that need to look at the low level detail and bring it up to the level that makes it easier for the Decision Makers to do their role. This is where customer journey maps can start to shine even more - these guys would pay a bit more attention to the signals, and would more likely look at journey maps from a pattern perspective: what has changed over time and should we worry about the change or should we pounce on any opportunities that present itself.

3) The Specialists: These are people with certain specialities that have a direct contribution towards shaping the customer experience. They have operational KPI that has a direct link towards a customers experience, resulting in behaviour that can impact the metrics that matter to the Trusted Advisors and Decision Makers. They need to know what part of what they deliver has an impact to influence customer behaviour.

4) The Invested Party: They don't necessarily have a say in what is done, but they work for the organisation. They invested their career and time for the organisation, they want to know if the organisation is doing all they can to take care of customers who pay their pay check. Active management of customer experience is a signal - how well we're taking care of customers will result in more loyal customers, which is security, which is stability for employees.

So what should be in the CJM to deliver value?

Knowing all of this, here are the things that we believe is important to be in a customer journey map:

1) The Journeys levels

Customers go through multiple stages and pathways when they're making decisions, which is why journeys are not a simple one-layered affair either. The most consistent way we've defined journeys are based on the following levels:

Level 0 - Customer Intent: Again, use the language customers use. For example, a home builder is looking at customer journey mapping. From a customer language perspective, the level 0 might be "Exploring options", "Choosing bank", "Committing to a bank", "Depositing money", "Withdrawing money", etc.

Level 1: The journeys that are under each level 0. A journey is one customer intent, with a trigger they would recognise and an end state they would recognise.

Level 2: These are the customer steps within the journey map. What the customer actually does, in sequence, inside one journey. Their actions, their thinking, their feeling, with evidence attached.

Level 3: The process, systems, teams, policies, suppliers, handoffs and SLAs that sit underneath each step. The service blueprint layer. Some maps point to a reference to the process, and this is more often than not sufficient. However, the link has to be there to there are traceability back to processes that has an impact on the customer.

2) Pain points and delight points

The key here is to present all the pain points in relation to the journey step itself. Also, this is not a once off exercise as pain points that gets addressed over time can disappear, and sometimes it becomes a positive. Which is why it is important to keep track of historical changes in the pain point against the journey step itself.

3) Process link: This goes back to the Level 3 in the journey levels. This is where we link internal process steps that are involved in the customer journey step. Even better if the link leads towards a visual of the process itself, capturing roles involved in delivering value to the customer, and areas of potential improvement.

4). Data: This is where you can tailor it to communicate at different levels in the organisation. Find out what metric matters to a Decision Maker and their Trusted Advisor. Understand the link back to customer feedback and once you make that link, make that metric visible on the journey map.

What tool should you use to present this

The best tool to use for this is whatever tool you can get a hold off that's within your organisation's budget. I've created journey maps with free tools that although required a lot of customisations delivered the message that I wanted to. Here's a list of tools I've used in the past that's free (also we're not sponsored by these companies - we just think they're pretty good):

• Draw.io: It is a blank canvas - once you create a template, you can save it locally as a template and reuse it each time you create a new journey map. It's purely visuals and no integration to data repos, but still a great tool.

• Miro: There's a free version of this and although limited in the number of journeys you can create, it has a relatively mature journey mapping capability that is feature rich.

• UXPressia: There's a free tier for this product and it's super simple to get started. Definitely for those who just wants something simple and can get off the ground relatively quickly.

At CXD Labs, we have been doing this for quite some time that we've created our own tool to produce Customer Journey Maps, Process Maps, and Customer Feedback Analysis that would all link back to the relevant journey map. We're planning to release this in the next few months so keep an eye out for it.

How to keep it relevant

Lastly (and most importantly), in order to keep it relevant, there are 3 things that needs to be done:

1) Give it an owner: Either an individual or a team, owners need to constantly update the maps to ensure relevancy and currency.

2) Don't let the metrics go stale: Sometimes you read a report with a metric that no one understands or doesn't really add any value to the decision making process. It's the same with Journey Maps - you have to curate and actively manage metrics that matter and remove those that don't add any value.

3) Create summaries of movement: This is important - sometimes people can't see the shift of the journey map from month to month or from quarter to quarter. Help them identify the shift and make it relevant to them. Include these summaries / briefings in comms at all levels, in particular to the four audiences I mentioned earlier.

And there you have it! Follow the guide above and hopefully the journey map that you've created stays relevant and useful to everyone in the organisation. At the end of the day, the one who ultimately benefits is always the customer!

Note: If you're still reading this then here's a bonus: We are about to launch our own journey mapping platform that's different from what's in the market. If you are interested in being part of the cohort to test this and get exclusive access and pricing when it launches, email your interest to hello@cxdlabs.com.