Posts

Shawn Phillips

What Is a Living Journey Map?

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Once you find out what a living journey map can do, you won’t have any trouble understanding why it’s so important to the success of your CX initiatives.

So what can it do?

Unlike a static journey map, a living journey map doesn’t remain fixed in particular point in time. It changes and evolves as your journey does, tracking updates in customer/operational data and KPIs across the entire journey as you implement improvements. This allows you not only to see what’s working, but to prove it with the kind of hard business data the C-suite is eager to see. (And who here isn’t eager to please the C-suite?) Read more

Jim Tincher

Need a Presentation With Punch? Think Visually

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“All creativity should communicate in a nanosecond.”

So says George Lois, the “original Mad Man of Madison Avenue,” in his book, Damn Good Advice (for people with talent).

He’s talking about advertising, but his recommendation applies to any organizational communication – especially in customer experience. Read more

Interactive Customer Experience Map
Jim Tincher

Customer Journey Maps: The Top 10 Requirements

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It’s hard to believe it’s been seven years since I launched my customer experience consultancy, Heart of the Customer, way back when CX was still in its infancy.Interactive Customer Experience Map

At that time, when I first wrote Customer Journey Maps – the Top 10 Requirements, I didn’t know the post would be viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and reposted around the world. But I did know that customer experience as a discipline – given its proven ability to boost customer loyalty and company results – was here to stay.

I enjoyed revisiting and updating the post back in 2015, but in the intervening years, the world has changed, the CX industry has evolved, research methodology has gotten more nimble, and technology has advanced. (And yet, somehow, none of us has aged a day – it’s uncanny!)

So it’s time once again to refresh the content. I am proud that the underlying philosophy and framework remains solid and consistent, but I’ve tweaked some terminology, techniques, guidelines, and examples.

In short, it’s an oldie, but a goodie, and I hope that regardless of whether you’re rereading it or encountering it for the first time, you will come away with something new and helpful. Read more

Business and Customer Experience Metrics
Jim Tincher

If All Customers are Important, You have a Bad B2B Customer Experience

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“When all customers are important…none will be.” – Syndrome from The Incredibles (slightly paraphrased)

Are all customers worth the same to your business? No! But odds are, your CX program doesn’t recognize this.

Read more

Jim Tincher

Move to the Top Levels of the Gartner CX Pyramid with Journey Mapping

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Last week I discussed Gartner’s CX Pyramid and its approach to evaluating your customer experience. Yesterday’s post discussed how to use journey mapping to help you move up the first three levels. Today, I’ll talk about using journey mapping to move to the top of the pyramid – the Proactive and Evolution levels.

Getting to these levels requires significantly more investment in both customer insights and design. Interviews – particularly in-person at your customer’s site – are good ways to help you in the lower stages, but here it requires deeper methodologies to truly understand your customers’ needs. Read more

Jim Tincher

Gartner’s CX Pyramid: An Approachable Framework

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Like many CX consultants, I’ve seen my share of maturity models. Most are really good at showing all the things you’re not doing. Typically, the sponsoring company offers to help by selling you useful consulting services to help you move up the model. 

Whether it’s Temkin Group’s CX Maturity Model, Forrester’s six-step CX Management Maturity exam, or MaritzCX’s CXEvolution, the complex models help you evaluate your program, and each is compelling in its own way. The maturity models help you analyze what you’re doing and where you’re strong or weak.  

I’ve used Gartner’s former CX model in the past and liked it. Now, while reading through October’s issue of Customer Relationship Management, I ran across the new Gartner CX Pyramid and was intrigued. I can’t find the article online, but you can review Gartner’s summary here.  Read more

Healthcare Customer Journey Map
Jim Tincher

Journey mapping has become a must-have approach to customer experience

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Before it became a business five years ago, Heart of the Customer was a blog I started when I was leading CX at a Fortune 100 company. Along the way I learned about journey mapping, and created the post Customer Journey Map – the Top 10 Requirements to reflect the limitations I saw at the time. That post has since had over 108,000 views, including over 4,000 in the last year. When I started the business, that post drove us to number 1 in any Google ranking on the topic – journey map, customer journey map – even “journey mapping software,” we didn’t even offer software!

Since then, journey mapping has become even more popular, as you can see from the chart on the right.

Journey mapping is now the go-to customer experience tool, and has been discussed in Forbes, the Harvard Business Journal, and countless other journals.

Read more

Jim Tincher

CX + EX (Employee Experience) = Great Experiences

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Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first. – Simon Simek

This quote reflects one of the biggest disconnects in customer experience – focusing only on the customer experience.

It makes sense. Heck, that’s our name! Why wouldn’t we? But focusing only on the customer without regard to the employee experience leads to missed opportunities and sub-optimized efforts.

I had the great honor to co-present on this topic with Darin Byrne, Wolters Kluwer’s VP of Client Experience. We made three primary arguments to our CX audience:

  1. CX Fails Without Engaged Employees
  2. UX is Critical to Employee Experience
  3. Employee Experience Needs to be Part of Your Day Job

Read more

Jim Tincher

Journey Mapping Best Practices

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The Twin Cities Research Group (TCRG) asked Jean Fasching and I 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!

Kris LaFavor Journey Map Designer
Jim Tincher

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