Editorial
The Gist
- Mode mapping impact. Mode mapping for customer experience offers real-time personalization by focusing on customers' current behaviors and states of mind.
- Real-time personalization. Mode mapping helps companies adapt to immediate customer needs, going beyond traditional linear journey maps.
- Customer-centric strategy. By utilizing mode mapping for CX, businesses can better customize interactions based on customer modes, driving more effective CX strategies.
Companies are so used to thinking about the customer experience as a journey that they miss the greatest opportunity to personalize CX. What the customer is doing right now is the most important opportunity, and with a mode map, companies can be prepared to meet the customer’s immediate needs. To truly improve CX, businesses need to embrace mode mapping for customer experience as a critical strategy for understanding their customers’ unique situations.
Many years ago, one of my first jobs was creating sitemaps for websites. For those of you who don’t know about this ancient art form, think about a very simple site with a simple menu structure. Companies used to hire information architects to create a diagram that would show the linking structure between basic html pages.
When web technology improved, designers were able to create websites without thinking through the site’s linking structure, leaving information architects to wonder what would happen to the web experience. Would the quality of the experience erode? How would the company plan updates to the site? Would customers get lost?
The concept I am about to share may leave many journey map designers with a similar feeling.
Traditional Journey Maps Vs. Mode Mapping: What's the Difference?
Traditional, linear journey maps cannot keep pace with the evolving expectations and activities of customers today. They cannot represent how decision-making actually happens, and they are not the right tools for the future of experience strategies.
While a journey map is a useful initial step to help a company plan its approach to improving the customer’s experience, it’s only a first step. To truly understand how to improve CX, we need to meet customers where they are right now and understand their unique situations.
Journey maps were invented and popularized in a time when companies had only a few channels available for delivering an experience. As the number of channels increased, journey maps became a means for helping organizations to visualize the ideal path through the channel complexities. Even though this is a good, positive development, it cannot sufficiently meet the abundance of choice and technologies in today’s consumer world.
Companies today have the ability to individualize the experience of their customers. They can give people control over their customer journey. They can tailor the experience to the customer, making each person’s journey unique to the person.
People Get into Modes
Your customers do not experience their interactions with daily life as a linear progression. Instead, they get into modes. A mode is a mindset and a set of behaviors that people temporarily get into. It’s not a habit, which is a repeated pattern of behavior. It’s not a routine, which is a permanent pattern. A mode is a temporary state of being that helps the individual accomplish their goals for the situation at hand — for example, parent mode, work mode, presentation mode, shopping mode and beast mode, among others.
People organize their environments, tools and interactions to support the mode they’re in. They might turn on certain music to focus more easily or set their phones to personal mode so they’re not bothered by work. Because the mode is purposefully temporary, they know that they have flexibility and control. They can switch modes whenever they need to.
Just as a company can customize an experience based on a person’s preferences, they can also customize according to a person’s modes. In fact, it’s pretty common today; airplane mode on a phone is the most obvious example. Companies can map important modes and use mode mapping for customer experience to help create a far more effective plan for supporting customer needs.
Related Article: Tactics to Build Customer Trust With Personalized Experiences
Traditional Journey Maps Vs. Mode Mapping for Customer Experience
Let’s look at the differences between a journey map and a mode map.
A journey map is a linear progression chart that describes a recommended sequence of events that the customer should experience. Often, the map also shows where the company falls short in delivering the ideal experience. It’s a staple of experience design, but too many companies rely exclusively on this framework to make experience design decisions.
A mode map is a scatter-plot map that shows common modes that customers get into. Some modes are positive (e.g., mommy mode, relax mode and learning mode); others are negative (e.g., crisis mode, anxiety mode and juggling mode). The customer’s mode not only tells the company their state of mind but often gives clues about their situation. For example, if someone is in mommy mode, there’s a good chance that a child is nearby.
Related Article: Is Your Customer Journey Map Inside Out?
How to Begin Mode Mapping
By understanding the most important modes that customers enter when experiencing a company’s product, a content strategist can make more specific recommendations and customize solutions to meet customers’ needs.
Here’s an example of how to get started creating a mode map.
- Create a scatter plot 2x2 chart with the following axes: X = negative to positive states; Y = low performance to high performance or output. (Performance/output refers to how much effort, work or focus the mode requires of the customer.)
- Identify as many customer modes as possible and plot them in the four quadrants. It’s okay if some modes get plotted in two places. Add a descriptor to clarify the difference between the two states. For example, “parenting mode” could be both negative and positive, so label these “stressed parenting” and “positive parenting.”
- Prioritize the most important modes that a company should focus on. Make sure you identify modes from all four quadrants. It’s easy to think that the upper right quadrant modes are the most important, but that’s not how customers experience things. Focusing only on positive, high performance modes will cause you to miss key opportunities.
- Start developing strategy, design and measurement requirements for how to customize the experience based on the customer’s mode. Don’t worry too much about trying to anticipate what mode the customer is in. Most people like being able to choose their mode and will adjust features of the experience accordingly.
Create Personalized Experiences with Mode Mapping for Customer Experience
By implementing mode mapping for customer experience, companies can better support their customers’ immediate needs and preferences. When you support customer modes, you create a highly individualized experience for customers without having to know everything about the customer. Why? Because most people experience common modes in a similar way. Almost all parents know what stressed parent mode looks and feels like. You don't need to conduct a segmentation study to understand the preferences of stressed parents and how to support their needs in the moment.
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What creates far more value for the customer is being able to customize the experience based on their mode. If they are anxious, you can help them relax. If they are learning, you can help them learn more effectively.
Of course, when they are done learning, they might choose to relax. That’s perfectly okay, especially since you know how to support relax mode. And hey, you’ll get to relax more, too, knowing you’re meeting your customers right where they are.
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