Description

“A good customer experience starts with the customer’s perspective”

Creating a customer experience map is one of the best methods for understanding how customers interact with your company. It uncovers opportunities for where and how you can improve a customer’s experience. A better customer experience increases loyalty, satisfaction, spend and referrals.

Using graphics, pictures and other visual cues an experience map describes the behavioural, mental and physical aspects of your customers’ experience, allowing you to not only better understand the customer’s journey but also how different departments within your company work together to strengthen or weaken a customer’s experience at each touch points. 

The best kind of map provides an at-a-glance dashboard view that quickly shows where pain points exist in a process. It’s something that can be easily shared with both managers and employees throughout the organisation to show them how they can make an impact and help drive change.

COURSE OUTLINE

Introduction to CXM: Creating authentic customer understanding

• Why is it so valuable?
• When should it be used?
• Steps in the process 
• What is a customer experience map and what do they look like?
• What information do you need to create the map?

Understanding your customer’s real experience

• Getting out into the field to observe customers interacting with your product or service
• Drawing out feelings, motivations, activities
• Interviewing your customer with an open mind
• Actions: What is the customer doing at each stage?
• Motivations: Why is the customer motivated to keep going to the next stage? What emotions are they feeling? Why do they care?
• Questions: What are the uncertainties, jargon, or other issues preventing the customer from moving to the next stage?
• Problems, frustrations, issues: what is stopping the customer from having a fully satisfying experience?

FIELD TRIP – we get out of the classroom to observe people going through a customer experience.

Mapping the experience

• Identifying and sequencing the steps
• Picking the right level of detail for your map
• Organising steps into phases (the major components of the experience)
• Organising all the data and insights to avoid information overload
• Identifying touch points and aligning them with steps (mapping the key touch points of the journey against the steps the customer is taking)
• Identifying points of customer pain and delight (which parts of the experience are frustrating? Which are satisfying?)

PRACTICAL EXERCISE – work in small groups to develop a customer experience map based on our field trip. 

Identifying opportunities to improve the customer experience by analysing your map 

• Where could the experience be improved?
• Which parts of the experience aren’t well supported?
• Which parts of the experience are working well?
• Which touch points are the most and least important from the customer’s perspective?

Using experience mapping to drive customer experience innovation

• Sharing your map with executives and the wider organisation
• How the map can help you get your message across
• Creating innovation projects based on your map
• Blueprints; creating new maps to depict desired future experiences

Reflection on group work: How to apply it to your own customers

• Drawing out principles and core ideas about CXM from the group work
• What was your biggest challenge during the field trip?
• What kind of capability is needed to support experience mapping?
• What will be your first priority when returning to work after this training course?
• Questions?