What a great start to the morning! Over 120 CX enthusiasts showed up for Qualtrics’ Friday CX breakfast conversation in Sydney. Presented by yours truly, the topic, ‘Customer Journey Mapping – A CX Management Framework’, obviously struck a chord.
The challenge most organisations face in implementing a program of customer experience change is reorganising business silos and eliminating employees’ entrenched, siloed mindset. The problem is that most employees have a limited view of customers, limited understanding of customers’ needs and expectations and to be frank, limited interest in changing the status quo.
In my day-to-day customer experience consulting practice I utilise Customer Journey Mapping as a management framework in 3 primary areas of CX transformation. To connect, empower and enable employees, (customer and non-customer facing), in deeply understanding customers; their needs and expectations, trials and tribulations, pains and service gaps at each step of the experience.
I also utilise Journey Maps as a communication tool. Maps are an exceptionally effective for visualising the end-to-end customer journey; helping employees to understand their part in delivering the customer experience and their role in improving the experience. Gaining an understanding of the customer’s experience aids in the process of aligning employee groups to work together in creating positive customer change.
Journey Maps as a framework also reduce the complexities of siloed goals and the politics, biases and agendas that often influence the planning and prioritising of innovation efforts. The power of a Journey Map is that it clearly presents, using customer data, the evidence for investment of resources and effort to remedy customer experience fail points and innovation for value and differentiation.
Journey Maps tell the customer story and in the process, give employees an understanding of the ‘why’ behind their actions. Using mapping, employees have the chance to see, hear and feel what it’s like to be a customer; from the customer’s point of view and in the customer’s voice rather than business speak – for most, this is the ‘ah-ha’ moment that connects them to the work that needs to be done.
For many CX practitioners the goal of delivering change at scale has not been realised. I have seen first-hand how telling the customer story unifies teams, develops deep connection and builds customer empathy skills for customer-centric decision making. The rediscovery of Customer Journey Mapping to unify and align people across the business has the potential to unlock missed opportunities and deliver the promise of CX.