Editorial
MaritzCX’s customer journey mapping program is not a process-mapping exercise.
“Frequently people think this is process mapping, but that tends to be very internally focused and doesn’t have the view of what the customer is seeing,” Matt Inman, head of CX strategy and design consulting at MaritzCX, said during the CMSWire webinar, “5 Steps to Map the CX Path in Financial Services.”
“Customer journey mapping is a visual representation from the customer’s point of view and how they interact with your brand.”
MaritzCX, a Lehi, Utah-based customer experience management provider, provides organizations with several steps toward building a customer journey map which Inman covered during the webinar.
“Journey mapping is a great way to be able to identify gaps in your current VOC (voice of the customer) measures,” Inman said. “You can identify what you should be measuring from the starting point. You can get the right insights from your VOC measurements. You can give everyone a consolidated view of what customers are doing and how you fit into the larger picture.”
Step 1: Hold Discovery Meeting
Before he got into MaritzCX’s actual steps, Inman shared some general material on customer journey mapping:
MaritzCX’s first step includes holding a discovery meeting, during which organizations get an overview and agree upon a timeline, objectives and meeting needs.
During this initial stage, businesses can identify the functional areas to include in the workshop, leverage existing research and create plans for new research. This also is a time to review existing personas, brands, segmentations and learn what the customer seeks when interacting with the brand.
Here are two examples of personas built from these initial steps:
Step 2: Employee Workshop
MaritzCX gathers stakeholders for one or two days. The goal? Identify the major steps needed and the high-level things a customer may encounter in an experience with a brand.
What’s the customer’s main objective? What do they want to get out of an experience with a brand’s product or services?
Determine all the touchpoints with which a customer interacts with a brand: web, social, call centers, printed materials and anything that shapes what a customer’s journey looks like.
Time plays a big factor as well. How long does a customer interact with a brand? One MaritzCX customer found via research that motorcycle shoppers visited a showroom on average 30 times before making a purchase. Data like that can arm salespeople and prevent them from being too aggressive in the early stages of a customer’s journey, Inman said.
Other important information to obtain include a customer’s thoughts, attitudes, emotions, high-impact moments of truth, pain points and satisfiers. Determine the importance of each data point discovered in the customer journey mapping process to weed out the not-so-important things.
“Don’t lose site of the things you do well,” Inman said. “You can leverage them and highlight from a marketing perspective.”
Step 3: Qualitative Validation
Do one or all of these in order to gain some data from customers:
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- In-person focus groups with customers
- Online bulletin boards: Focus groups, but in a professionally moderated chat-room structure. This helps organizations move past geographic boundaries
- Customers Mission/CX Workout: Collect feedback from customers as they go through the actual journey
- In-depth one-on-one interviews: Deep dives with customers, usually done over the phone
Step 4: Quantitative Validation
Validate the feedback from the workshop and customer research by putting it into a survey. Gather insights to establish how big the pain points you’ve discovered really are.
Does it have an impact on the overall experience? Is it a killer for us? How big of an issue is this?
Survey data can help organizations statistically value their biggest issues.
Step 5: Final Report and Map
MaritzCX issues a detailed report from all the meetings, exercises and research on what drives the customer experience more than anything else. It helps illustrate where the stakeholders fall into the journey.
Step 6: Action Planning, Blueprinting
This extra-day workshop gets deeper into customer objectives and root causes. It includes arriving at data such as this:
Step 7: Design New Experience Workshop
The final session is a way to get more top of mind ideas. This gives everyone a chance to share their pent-up ideas in a structured format, Inman said.
You can also identify problems and demonstrate how people think a different company may handle it.
And there’s there the “Get Fired/Get Hired High Risk ideas” MaritzCX encourages. Accept all ideas, no matter how far-fetched they may seem at first.
“It’s a license to throw things out there that look kinda silly,” Inman said, “but they could be the next differentiators in the marketplace.”
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