Mapping the Customer Journey

Imagine you're planning a trip to a new city. You probably wouldn't just jump on a plane and wing it - you'd do some research first, right? The same principle applies when you are trying to understand your customers. You shouldn't try to engage with customers without understanding their journey.

Customer journey mapping is all about figuring out what your customers are thinking and feeling at each step of their journey with your business. It's a way of putting yourself in your customer's shoes and seeing things from their perspective.

Journey Mapping Visual

Figure 1. What is it?

A complex pathway

Figure 2. An Example

Touchpoints and journey maps

Figure 3. Touchpoints on the Customer Journey

Digital and Analogue Touchpoints

Figure 4. Digital and Analogue Touchpoints

Journey Mapping Tool

Figure 5. Journey Mapping

Touchpoint Design

Figure 6. Touchpoint Design

Journey Mapping Template

Figure 7. Creating your own Customer Journey Map

Design Thinking Gets Serious about ROI

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Design Thinking (DT) has received quite a bit of press in mainstream business publications over the last couple of years. The narrative, for the most part, has been very positive. Conversely, there has been a number of pragmatic attempts to temper some of the wide-eyed optimism by discussing the importance of results-driven DT. In a previous article I referred to ROI as the elephant in the room. As design thinking and service design begins to gain traction amongst the C-Suite, there has been, and will continue to be, a renewed focus on metrics. For all the anecdotal success stores and “soft benefits”, metrics are the “hard” currency of the board room. At the 2013 Global Service Design Conference, Lee Sankey, Director of Design at Barclays, asked “Is Service Design more in love with process than outcomes?”. This was not meant as a criticism of service design. Rather, it was delivered as a challenge to service designers. Do they wish to be defined by service design outcomes or the service design process? 

Of course, talk of results-based DT is not entirely new. The Strategic Decision Group (SDG) at Stanford have demonstrated how analytical tools such as tornado charts can be used to quantify the value of design. However,  the renewed focus on DT outcomes is a welcome development as it signals DT's move from niche to mainstream. Dr. Susan Weinschenk of Human Factors International has discussed the ROI of User Experience and the Design Council have also done great work in discussing the impact evaluation of service design efforts.  

I recently attended a presentation by Justin Ferrell of Stanford's famed d.school. Though  the d.school has traditionally eschewed research in favour of practice, Justin mentioned that the d.school have recently begun to look for empirical evidence for the success of DT. Ironically, nobody asked them to do this before d.school became wildly successful. I suppose it was inevitable given the growth of DT and the burgeoning cottage industry that has sprung up around it. 

UK's First Interactive Virtual Grocery Store

The era of the 'Meta Product" (web-enabled product-service networks as typified by products such as iPhone/iTunes and Nike +) is well and truly upon us. Future services will be delivered using a combination of physical and virtual touchpoints. Tesco, following a successful pilot programme with Homeplus in South Korea, has finally brought their virtual shopping experience to the UK. The first UK trial is being launched in the North Terminal of Gatwick airport. Customers will be able to interact and purchase products via virtual supermarket shelves using their smartphones and a bar-code scanning application. The installation is a great example of a virtual/physical service hybrid. 

Business Origami

Along with the use of personas, paper prototyping is one of the easiest and most effective tools in the software design, or service design, toolkit. A small amount of effort provides a substantial return in eliciting stakeholder feedback. It also provides valuable context for further discussion. It allows you to prototype quickly and cheaply. I came across the use of Business Origami from Jess McMullin at the Centre for Citizen Experience - a  Canadian startup that advances public sector research, strategy, policy and service design.  

 

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Business Origami is a paper prototyping method that uses paper cutouts to represent different components of a system such as people, places, objects and value exchange. Originally used by researchers at Hitachi, the technique is excellent for prototyping service design touchpoints . I recently had the opportunity to test drive the technique as part of my participation in the Standford D.School Design Thinking Action Lab. I was quickly able to create a prototype by downloading and cutting out the Business Origami Shapes. The resulting model, had a much greater impact that anything I have ever put together on Visio. Everybody who visited my office was fascinated to know more about it. 

For more information about how to use Business Origami and try it yourself please check out the Centre for Citizen Experience website, download a copy of the business origami shapes, and watch Jess McMullin's presentation.