7 steps to design an actionable customer journey!

You have just been promoted customer experience manager? Or somehow, designing new customer journeys has become your challenge? Congratulations! And welcome to this fascinating adventure where you will have great opportunities to get a stronger knowledge of your organisation and the many ways customers aspire to interact with it.

I will be honest with you though: designing a customer journey is not an easy job.

It takes time and energy, requires precision, creative and analytical skills along with good networking capabilities, and skills to deliver strong and bold messages … and even patience and structure if this is the first time your organisation undertakes such a challenge. But it is also very rewarding, especially when you obtain management buy-in with customer centric & growth hacking strategies.

This post aims to share with you the essential steps I believe one needs to go through. A blog post is obviously too short to share an exhaustive description of the approach but at least you have here the main lines, and if you choose to go with an external partner to undertake this challenge,  you have the key steps and outputs you should expect from them.
 

Step 1: Define the scope

Before you go further and start working on your project, the first step is to identify the best journey to initiate the process. Are you looking at the entire lifecycle of the customer end-to-end ? The customer acquisition part only ? The servicing part ? Specifically onto customer on-boarding? 

There are many possibilities and the one you will choose will essentially depend on the context and objectives of your organisation. 

In some organisations, the customer journey to revamp is already defined, so you won’t have a lot of options.  In some others, this is still under discussion and you can influence the decision. The main question you'll have is: “Where can I create impact?”

If you go for the most exhaustive & complex journey, you'll be able to revisit in one go most processes of the other journeys of your company.  If you have very distinct pain points, you might be more interested to pick up a journey causing the highest customer insatisfaction or the highest churn. But you could also go for the one with the highest growth potential. And if you need to launch a product or service, it might also be interesting to select customer acquisition, on-boarding and cross-selling journeys.

This will depend on your priorities and partly also, of the flexibility of the business processes you will have to eventually adapt to make effective changes.
 

Step 2: Define your business objectives & KPI’s!

Once the first journey is selected, you need to discuss with various stakeholders of the organisation to clearly understand their objectives, pains and challenges, their customer knowledge - since it will be with them that you'll define and make this journey happen. 

To do this, you need to identify the different business objectives and KPI’s your project will be evaluated upon. List them all but also check priorities. If you were asked to boost sales and customer acquisition, you might choose a different orientation (and maybe journey) than someone asked to reduce churn and/ or operational costs.
 

Step 3: Pick up your team wisely!

Whatever the topic of your journey, you will need partners to support your project. And you want to make impact. So make sure to build a transversal team with all the impacted stakeholders within our organisation: marketing, communication, product, digital, sales, contact center, IT, CRM, operations, …

Why? Because those “resource individuals” are often the persons in charge of a specific project in their own department that is (or will be) closely connected to your journey. By associating them to your project, you will obtain:

-   Experts with a clear view of what is currently part of their own areas of responsibilities and when and how it will be operational for your journey

-   Sparring partners with precise insights and ideas regarding the potential of those projects

-   Ambassadors facilitating the adoption and communication within the different departments, with an in-depth understanding of the overall benefits and a potential financial contribution to your future journey’s implementation budget.
 

Step 4: Collect insights 

This is my favorite step. Here, you need to map all the pains of your current experience. This is an opportunity to go in detail and depth of your organisations inner workings, and this is where you can make all the difference: by understanding what is positive or not and what your customers would appreciate INSTEAD!

-   Make the journey yourself > Yes. Mystery shopping. From A to Z. Talk to customer-facing staff, ask questions, complain, get to understand how they interact with people on a regular basis. Feel it, put yourself in the shoes of your customers. How is it like?

-   Talk to your customers > This might look overrated but this is still the best way to delight customers. Quite often, we tend to create experience that are ego-centric, risking to miss behaviors from significant profiles. Use studies to contact people that are representative of your customer base. Map segments and their significant behaviours, including their use of channels.

-   Benchmark competition and experience leaders > This is an easy step but do not underestimate it. Too often, I have seen quick and dirty benchmarks that didn’t provide any value. If you want to make the difference, you must pay attention to details.

As an example, if you visit a website, ask yourself a few questions: Are the value proposals reflecting the brand positioning? Is the product information clear? How and where can I purchase? How can I get support if I have questions? How am I treated as a customer? Is it a positive experience? What are the elements I would like to integrate in the new experience?

I will deep-dive further on this question in a future blog post in the coming weeks but in the meantime, make sure to compare your experience with best-in class players, even out of your own sector, not to take glory from dunces. 

-   Crunch the data > Take in all data you have, look how it performs end-to-end in a total journey. At this stage, the objective is to compare the current performance with the targeted KPIs to identify the different areas where the journey needs to be improved and where are your main leverages.  

In other words, if the main objective of your journey is to boost sales, it might be interesting to start crunching figures and expose the current conversion funnel to understand and map where are the pains, strengths and opportunities.
 

Step 5: Map your AS-IS journey!

Now that you have a better understanding of what are your customers’ experiences along your journey, you need to map the journey:

-   Define the key steps of your journey > You must start with life triggers (i.e. specific life events triggering customers’ interest for your products and services) and build a timeline with the different steps of your “customer lifecycle” – e.g.  search for information, purchase, after-sales servicing, daily experience, problem and resolution, end of contract, …

-   List the channels > Here you will set up 3 different areas under your timeline to represent the channels i.e. the different levels of your experience: digital interactions, remote interactions, human interactions. Note that most of the time, each channel includes different touch points e.g. digital interactions might not take place only on the website but also via social media, monthly newsletters, mobile app, customer zone, chat, etc.  that play in sync together. 

-   Tell stories through this mapping of steps and touch points> Illustrate all possible customers’ interactions by telling stories about people engaging with your touch points in the different channels’ areas and for each step of the journey.

At the same time, keep in mind to integrate emotions in the story, based on the touchpoint and the satisfaction level of your customers at each step of the experience.

A few tips to help you:

• Speak about the different (especially negative) experiences you went through during the insight phase and use “I” in all sentences e.g. “I do online search and visit the brand website”, “On the website, I try to locate a nearby store”, …

• Icons can also help to visualize key actions

• If you still wonder how a customer journey looks like, do not hesitate to conduct online searches to get inspiration. Here below, you will find a nice representation from a San Francisco based company named Toptal that represents most information to gather in this step

• Try to use a graphic design software like InDesign or Illustrator. You will save time and energy compared to PowerPoint. You can also request the contribution of a designer within the organization.

-   Position objectives on the different steps > In general, each area of the journey represents a specific business objective: share of voice, contacts, conversion, turnover, customer satisfaction, WOM, repurchase, … Positioning business objectives step by step will help you to work on the right priorities in the following phase.

-   Map your areas of improvements > Now that you have identified main business objectives by step of the journey, you can also apply current performance and gaps to fill, customer feedbacks, experience breakouts and needs for improvements, … to get an exhaustive understanding of the AS-IS experience.  
 

Step 6: Start designing your to-be journey

In this exercise, my point of view is to go the extra mile on each step of the journey. Then, we can still phase and prioritize the efforts but it would be a shame no to take the opportunity to get a corner stone and to innovate by designing THE end-to-end cutting-edge experience.

Of course, if you are doing this exercise internally and that your main goal is to boost sales for example, you might put an extra attention on your sales funnel, investing in smart support and retargeting for your prospects. But that doesn’t mean you can score poorly in your after-sales customer interactions.

Anyway, now that you have understood what are the market trends, where and how you can be better, start designing your new journey.

-   Use brainstorming tools to generate ideas with your team of sparring partners > In short, the objective is to turn the journey into a positive experience based on the key pains and opportunities you identified in the as-is CJ. Get wild at this stage, the reality check will come back soon enough.

-   Design the TO-BE journey > In the main lines, the exercise will be the same as the as-is journey, but you must now map the new experience you defined with your team. Possible readjustments to the original elements are possible here, as you need to set up the ideal end-to-end stories for your customers, considering their mobility between the different channels and touch points.

-   Set up the guiding principles of each interaction > Once it’s done, set up the roles of the different touch points and channels and define the golden rules to satisfy your customers at every step of the journey. Each interaction has an objective and a quality level to achieve, detail it. 

-   Turn your new journey into concrete value proposals & SLA’s > This is also an important step. If you want your customers to appreciate your new journey, you need to motivate them to test it, which means telling stories that answer to their life triggers. Having this message simple and communicated internally will also help to engage the rest of the organisation onto your new vision. 
 

Step 7: Build a roadmap phasing the roll-out and delivering strong customer value propositions

In general, companies need to invest into new assets to deliver to-be journeys. This is the moment negotiations start with other departments, as you will need to implement it in different steps and several departments will be engaged and will have to work in sync. 

To do so, you will need to map all the enablers and check the effort required to build them. Sometimes, you will also need to motivate the investment with a business case, as some assets might not fit in your budget.

And to be honest, there are dozens of ways to plan the roll-out. The only question to ask yourself is “What do I want?”. 

If your priority is to be the first to innovate on the market, you must focus all your efforts on delivering this innovation.  But if you prefer to scale your projects, you can go for a “test and learn” approach and build minimum viable projects to make proofs of concept, before industrializing the approach and communicating it to the market.

In any case, the main question to ask yourself is "What is the shortest route to reach my destination ?"

Talk to you soon?

This was my first blog post of our series around customer experience. I hope you have now a clearer idea of how to get started in this great challenge :)

Of course, If you need help or more info, don't hesitate to drop me an email at Amelie@belly-and-brain.com or share your thoughts by commenting on this post.

Can’t wait to read your feedback.

Amélie.

About the author

Amélie has been active in the digital strategy field since the last 12 years and during that period has consulted for a wide array of sectors: Beauty, insurances, transport, banks, energy, automotive, FMCG, Telco, Food retail, NGOs... she uses the diversity the challenges and solutions she examined to  think cross-industry and doesn't hesitate to apply best practices and solutions from one industry to another.

During the same period she has extended her experience and capabilities applies her digital thinking to marketing strategy, product portfolio design and has become one of Belgium's key strategists in terms of omni-channel customer experience design.