Customer Experience Mapping

What does your organization look like from the
outside?
When customers call you, what do they experience?
When
they make a purchase, what information, support and follow-up
do they get?
And when they have a problem, how do they get it
resolved to their satisfaction?
Does this leave them wanting to
do business with you in the future, or vowing never to buy from
you again?

The chances are you know part of the answer to these questions.
But even in small companies, the full picture may be scattered
across the organization and amongst various members of your team.
What's more, your customers' real experience may not be anything
like as good as you think it is.

If you want to know exactly how customers experience your
business, Customer Experience Mapping (also called Customer
Journey Mapping) is a powerful tool. Tactically, it's a great
technique to help you improve customer service processes and
resolve recurring customer complaints. Strategically, it helps you
build a better product, service or brand, thereby helping you win
repeat business.
How to Use the Tool
To use this tool, follow these steps:
Step 1: Define Your Objectives
Customer Experience Mapping can be a huge and time-consuming
undertaking, so it's best to work out exactly what you want to
achieve before you start out. If you have a specific problem to
solve, focus on that specific part if your customers' experience.
If necessary, you can expand your scope later.

Whether your chosen objective is broad or narrow, define it and
write it down. As you get deeper into your analysis, this will be
help you stay focused on what you are trying to achieve.

Example objectives might be:

"To improve customer service processes
across the company and so improve customer satisfaction"
(broad).
"To reduce complaints about late delivery"
(narrower).

Step 2: Outline the Key Stages of Your Customers' Experience
Next, list the stages of the customers' experience, in relation to
the problem you are trying to resolve.

It's important to think about this from your customers' perspective.
Although this may sound obvious, it's all too easy to start mapping
customer service processes as they appear from inside your company.
Some aspects of their experience may be outside your control –
the performance of the postal service, for example – but these
must still be identified and brought within your analysis.

Take the example of complaints about late delivery: As a customer,
what are the key stages when experiencing late delivery of your
product? They might be:

Forming an expectation of delivery schedule.
Arranging delivery.
Awaiting delivery.
Taking delivery (when delivery happens as
expected).
Chasing late delivery.
Taking delivery (when late).

Tip: Capturing the Full Customer
Experience
If you're looking at the full customer experience, these
stages will describe the total lifecycle of each customer's
experience with your company.

This might start with customers "experiencing" your business
through a general awareness of your brand or reputation.
They might be aware of your publicity and media advertising.
Once they are in contact with you, they'll experience your
direct marketing or sales processes. As a new customer,
they'll see how you deliver your product/service, and your
customer services. Then they might see your after-sales or
maintenance services, and so on.

Step 3: Identify Customer "Touch Points" and
Map Customer Experience
Once you have outlined the stages that you
want to map, you need to identify all the related customer "touch
points." This means identifying and listing each point of contact
that your customers have with your business, within these stages.

This is where you can start developing your Customer Experience
Map.

Two good ways of doing this are to use flow
charts or swim lane diagrams .
These help you depict how the customer experience flows from beginning
to end, so that you can analyze what's happening and share your
findings with other people. Swim lane diagrams have the added
advantage of clearly showing how different people and departments
interact with your customers at each point in the process.

For each stage, think about what the customer experiences. In our
example, key questions are:

How does the customer form his or her expectations
about delivery?
How does he or she arrange delivery?
What is the experience of waiting for the
delivery and what information does the customer have while waiting?
What happens when delivery goes to plan?
What happens when delivery is late?
How does the customer chase late delivery?

Dig down deeper into each question to reveal all of the touch
points. Remember that the customers' experience may not follow
your intended process: Keep thinking about this from the
customer's perspective.

As well as thinking about processes and direct interaction with
your company, it's also important to think about how information
shapes the customer experience. What information do your customers
use? How and when do they use it? How does that influence their
expectations and how they interact with you?

Consider the role of information in our delivery example: Where do
customers find out about delivery times, who to contact in case of
any problem, and so on? You might have a great customer services
team, eager to deal with delivery enquiries, but if your website
or order line staff are giving misleading information, your
customers' experience will be one of confusion rather than of
great customer service!

Even though you don't intend it, these become customer touch
points too, and they are an influential part of the customer
experience. Informational touch points need to be included in your
list of customer touch points, and shown on your customer
experience map.

Figure 1 below shows a swim lane diagram for a customer experience
of late delivery. This is done at quite a high level: You can
break this out into finer detail as appropriate. As a result of
mapping the customer experience in the example, you might realize
that there is a problem with expectation setting. Perhaps the
web order form promises delivery within two or three days, but
owing to high demand, you know that orders are taking up to five
days to be dispatched. This might lead you to amend the web order
form to better manage customers' expectations, and stop the flood
of calls to your customer services team enquiring about "late"
delivery. In the longer term, you may want to redesign your dispatch
process so that it can process orders quickly even when demand
rises.
Figure 1 – Customer Experience of Late Delivery



Step 4: Analyze the Customer Experience
How to analyze the customer experience is, to
some extent, determined by your objectives. Are you trying to
solve a specific problem, or are you looking to improve the customer
experience more broadly? Here are some questions to help get your
analysis started. Supplement these with specific questions related
to your specific business and objectives.
Does the customer:

Know what to expect and when?
Have the right information at the right time?
Know who to contact for each reason he or
she needs to contact you?
Know what to do if things don't go smoothly?
Get informed sufficiently promptly if something
goes wrong or takes longer than expected?
Get acknowledgment of orders, complaints
and so on?

Do your customers' interactions with your company:

Work as you intend them to work?
Flow in a way that's logical and easy to follow?
Provide the right level of interaction at the right time?
Give the right level of information? Are you bombarding the customer with too much information, or providing too little?

Is your internal organization:

Efficient and effective?
Organized, with clear responsibilities for customer interaction?
Confusing to the customer because it involves too many people or departments?


Tip: Involving the Customer – Is it a Good Idea?
Should you involve customers in your customer experience
mapping? It can be a powerful addition to the process and
analysis. But think carefully about how you get them
involved. One option is to ask some customers to participate
in a review of your customer experience map. Alternatively,
you could survey customers to find out which touch points
are working well or not so well, or you could ask them for
ideas about how to improve their experience.
The right way to engage with your customers will depend on
the nature of your interaction and relationship with them,
and also on what's in it for them, in terms of the type of
improvement you'll be able to make with their support.


Key Points
Whether you want to solve a specific customer-related business
problem or undertake wider customer-facing improvements, Customer
Experience Mapping can help you explore, in a systematic way, what
your customers experience when they have contact with your
business.

You can use it to shed light on all or just part of the customer's
experience, thereby helping you find out in detail what your
customer service strengths and weaknesses really are.