A Customer Journey Map Workshop

Just last week I ran a customer journey map (CJM) workshop at FICO World 2014. I always enjoy the enthusiasm for customers and engagement around designing better customer experience that happens at these workshops.

The secret to any good workshop is to facilitate an environment of trust where the participants can be free to share and explore ideas. I remind participants at the beginning of the workshop that there are no wrong answers and to have fun to set the right tone.

For the CJM workshop, we went through some basics about what is a customer journey; I used a definition “The complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand” but you can state this however you feel most comfortable or fits your bigger ideas.

Then we discussed CJM. I shared that it is a tool to understand your organization from your customer’s perspective to improve your customer experience. It helps you to understand how customers interact with you today and identify improvement opportunities. We talked about how CJM provides a single view across your organization’s various business units of the experience you deliver to your customers and other benefits so that the participants understood the value to their organization (what’s in it for them).

We went on to discuss what went into creating a CJM. We talked about sketching out a timeline and laying out the stages of the customer experience – “touchpoints” where a customer comes in contact with their brand. We discussed scenarios at these touchpoints and their motivation, questions, and obstacles to understand their emotional responses. We went over the level of detail that you may want to go – high-level overview of the customer journey or diving deep in a certain area like the sales experience or services experience or product experience.

I showed some examples of CJM and emphasized how much they varied because they were focused on that organization’s specific need. Then we made some maps and everyone shared what they learned.

Everyone seemed to have a good time with lots of learning and new found excitement around their customer’s journey and the experience that they delivered.