Customer Journey Mapping

Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure of joining Brilliant Noise  at their customer journey mapping event a full summary can be found here. The event was billed to explore how effective customer journey mapping will:

• Improve customer experience by identifying creative ideas and improvements to systems or processes.
• Deliver against your business objectives through targeted, measurable change projects.
• Constantly improve customers’ journeys with a sustainable improvement programme.
• Identify the KPIs to evaluate improvements, quality and business outcomes.

Iain Nokes Chief Customer Journey Officer at The Economist led that charge, he’s been working with Brilliant Noise to map The Economist’s customer journey with some great success.

Above is a segment of that map showing just a snippet of the touch points and how they are interconnected. What Ian was sharing made perfect sense but as an internal communicator I couldn’t help wondering if I was in the wrong room and whilst an interesting learning opportunity, was it the best use of my time. Then we got into the weeds and Ian shared his key learnings and my brain kicked into overdrive.

The word hypothesis was mentioned multiple times and it seems to be a word of choice when i’ve been talking to my team this week about where we are going to focus our attention over the coming year. This is important when we look at where we might start, where can we have the biggest impact and what will support our overall strategy and business goals. We need to be able to measure our impact and sometimes starting small has more chance of being a success. Or even just identify activity we can stop doing to create space to do more of the things that do get the cut through we’re hoping for.

Visualisation is critical it makes your strategy come to life, Ian mentioned their map is up on the wall in their office and visual content helps drive the message home. We are currently looking at the channels we use and how we can create great content to share on these channels. But as I listened to his journey I was starting to formulate a version of our employee experience in map form in my own head.

For the second part of the afternoon we broke out into 3 groups and naturally I gravitated to the topic around How the customer journey mapping can support collaboration and culture change. The topic quickly picked up pace and we started to talk about the pain points, in particular when our employees don’t experience the customer journey this can leave them with little empathy for how the customer experiences the brand. And even more challenging is when our employees know and agree that the customer experience needs to change but “the fear” kicks in. Does this mean I will need to do my job differently? will I even have a job? We all shared experiences of back end and front end tensions regarding systems and processes.

So what? My conclusion is that we actually have to look at our own employee journey. Our challenges are very similar and we can take a similar approach to address them. The topic was about the customer experience but if you can’t communicate what that is effectively internally to your employees you have no chance of being able to deliver. Do you make customer experience part of all employees goals for example? However you approach it like all employee communications you need great content delivered through relevant channels.

My takeaways:

• A new contact who has way more expertise than me on creating great content that I hope to do some knowledge swapping with she’s in the market to learn more about communities.
• I’m going to map out some of the activity we are reviewing to see what the employee experience looks like with the hope that we can identify quick wins to improve and be more effective in communicating internally.

Definitely a worthwhile afternoon and I’m looking forward to putting some of the ideas into action over the coming weeks.