Customer Journey Map

Customer Journey Map Solutions

A customer journey map is an incredibly useful tool that allows you to better understand the perspective of your customer throughout each stage of their experience with your business. They show a customer’s desires, frustration, concerns, and more. By creating and analyzing a customer journey map, you can better grasp what it’s like to be your customer and how that experience can be improved. This can lead to dramatic results that directly impact ROI including increased loyalty. See what happens when you put the customer at the core of your business. Learn more below.

Reflections after Five Years of Journey Mapping

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Last month we celebrated Heart of the Customer’s 5th year anniversary. The team got together to share where we are, discuss best practices, plan for the future, and—most importantly—to celebrate! We were also grateful to have Angelica Bonacci from Allianz come to tell us about the ways her organization is using our journey mapping work to drive internal change.

This led me to reflect on what has occurred over the last five years in terms of journey mapping as an art. Next week, we’ll have five posts discussing journey mapping and how it has changed. The five are:

  1. Journey mapping has moved from a nice-to-have to a must-have in customer experience.
  2. We’re still challenged by navigating trade-offs when deciding what to map.
  3. Too many see journey mapping as just a workshop.
  4. Journey mapping tools still don’t address the most critical challenges.
  5. Journey mapping is still happening in silos.

These all reflect, to varying degrees, the five journey mapping questions that you should consider before embarking on a project: Read more

It’s not Necessarily a Design Issue

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I regularly receive emails that go something like this: 

I have almost completed my organization’s journey map! Can you give me some design suggestions before I share it with my company?

This request comes from a good place, a desire to educate the company about the customer’s journey, but after a few questions, it quickly falls apart. There are at least three problems with this request. 

Read more

Why do you need to talk to customers?

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I was talking with a prospective customer last week, and I walked through our customer journey mapping process – first you collect companies’ hypothesis and existing data, then go out to their customers to interview them in their places of work (they’re a B2B company), and finally bring that voice of the customer back to your teams to drive change.

He had attended a journey mapping training class and truly drank the Kool-Aid. He talked about how he put together a workshop and wanted to expand the methodology. Then, at the end of the conversation, he asked: “Jim, I trust you; you do this professionally, but why exactly do you need to talk to customers in journey mapping?” Read more

CX Webinar Invitation, August 27th

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Do your employees love your company?

Jim Tincher joins Shiftonomics to break down the customers’ journey, and how strongly it is impacted by corporate culture and the effort the company puts into empowering its frontline teams.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to hire people who care
  2. Keys to maintaining employee engagement
  3. How to map each customer’s journey
Taylor Pipes

About Taylor Pipes and Jim Tincher

Taylor Pipes, an industry specialist from Branch Messenger, is joined by Jim Tincher to talk about the customer and employee experience. With a lifelong passion for customer experience, Jim founded Heart of the Customer to help companies of all sizes increase customer engagement.

Reserve your spot here.

Interested in workshops? Read more here.

Interested in journey mapping? Read more here.

Interested in improving your CX? Read more here.

What is the point of a journey map?

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We held an offsite today. As our team expands, it’s important to connect and learn from each other, and this was one of those rare opportunities.

Engagement Lead Kathleen Hoski led us in an exercise to review our past journey maps, discussing and aligning on best practices. As she led the discussion, something interesting happened.

Even though we were in a room with sixteen people whose job it is to create customer journey maps, we had slightly different ideas as to the exact role of the customer journey maps: Read more

The Top 10 Reasons Customer Journey Mapping Fails

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I just came back from hosting the CXPA’s Insight Exchange and talking all things customers. Of course, I tended to hang out in the customer journey mapping sessions. While the practice is maturing, there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

In the spirit of sharing best practices, we at Heart of the Customer put together our Top 10 Reasons that Journey Mapping Projects Fail, a la David Letterman.

Without further ado, let’s proceed!

10. Not doing your homework. Too many try to rush into journey mapping projects, without taking the time to dig out what’s already known in the organization today. And we don’t just mean existing customer research. Call center logs, operational KPIs, social media complaints – all should be included in the approach. Read more

Science shows why your customer journey maps need to be visual

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“The more visual the input becomes, the more likely it is to be recognized – and recalled. It’s called the pictorial superiority effect.” – Brain Rules by John Medina

Read more

Three Tips for Employee Journey Mapping

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Journey mapping is powerful. A clear visualization of your customer’s journey helps rally the company to support a new vision of your customers’ challenges, and how you can make it easier to be your customer.

But why should customers get all the love? If it’s such a powerful tool, shouldn’t we find other uses for it?

Employee journey mapping is often neglected. Or, worse, it’s done in a haphazard way, foregoing the discipline we use for our customers. But there’s no shortage of research on the linkage between the customer and employee experiences. Consider using your journey mapping process for customers.

Below are three tips for applying journey mapping to your employees. Read more

Journey Mapping Best Practices

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The Twin Cities Research Group (TCRG) asked Jean Fasching and me to present on Journey Mapping Best Practices. Jean is a HoC engagement lead with a strong research background, perfect for this audience.

The agenda:

  • Who we are
  • Why journey mapping?
  • What makes journey mapping successful?
  • Case study: Meridian Health

The presentation was given in-person, but the audio and slides were captured below (warning: the sound quality isn’t ideal):

You can also download the PDF of the slides here.

Enjoy!

Designing Customer Journey Maps: An Interview with Kris LaFavor

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We sat down recently to chat with Kris LaFavor, Heart of the Customer’s Data Visualization Designer, about her work designing journey maps.

What do you do when you start the process of designing a customer experience journey map?

It’s important for me to have context before I start. I make sure I understand the background material and information in regards to what the client wants to map and what they’re trying to achieve with the map. This understanding ensures that I’m not mapping extraneous information. The high-level information is plotted out first and hierarchy flows from there. Read more