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Customer Journey Mapping

Brief Description:

Customer Journey Mapping is a tool for visualising how customers interact with people and organisations in order to make a purchase or experience a service.
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Description:

Customer Journey Mapping comes from the corporate sector and market research. It can be used as a form of consultation to improve a service through finding out how people use the service and how they interact with the service provider. It provides a map of the interactions and emotions that take place, and can help an organisation provide its customers with the experience it wants them to have.
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Used For:

It can help organisations understand:

  • How prospective and current customers use a service and when they interact with staff and the system.
  • How customers perceive the organisation at each interaction and how they would really like the customer experience to be.
  • How departments and functions need to work together.
  • The potential barriers and obstacles that customers encounter.
  • How to use this knowledge to design an optimal experience that meets the expectations of major customer groups and achieves competitive advantage.

Suitable participants:

Any customers or service users.
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Cost:

Medium - depending on whether the mapping is done in-house or by an external consultant.

Time Requirements:


When To Use / What It Can Deliver:

It can be used:

  • to improve efficiency within an organisation or service
  • to gain an understanding from the perspective of the customer / service user
  • to identify the interdependencies of processes that interact with the customer
  • to identify the different perspectives and priorities of different user groups
  • to encourage a flexible approach to working to ensure that the process remains alligned with service user needs

When Not To Use / What It Cannot Deliver:

  • It cannot deliver an understanding of the wider community as only service users will be consulted.

Strengths:

  • It can encourage a more participatory approach to service design and improvement.

Weaknesses:

  • Only works for specific services
  • It may not be seen externally as consultation or engagement

Origin:

From the corporate sector and has links with market research and mystery shopping.
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Case Studies:


Related Methods


Restrictions In Use


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Further Information

http://www.mulberryhouseconsulting.com

http://www.ecustomerserviceworld.com

Popular Methods
21st Century Town Meeting
Citizens Jury
Deliberative Polling
Open Space
Participatory Appraisal
Participatory Budgeting
Webcasting

Readers might be interested in these two posts on my blog - the first offering a workshop to be put on by Stoke City Council (as a consequence of the interest created by the earlier post):

http://smallcreativeideas.blogspot.com/2009/08/customer-journey-mapping-workshop.html

http://smallcreativeideas.blogspot.com/2009/04/customer-journey-mapping.html\\

Jon

Just blogged some more on customer journey mapping and Attendance Allowance:

http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2009/10/customer-journey-mapping-attendance.html

Thanks Jon. Very useful, keep posting!

Edward

Journey mapping is a diagnostic - not an end in itself.
It is widely used for developing improved customer experiences, with the end goal of increased customer loyalty.

For more information on journey mapping integration into customer benefits, and a step-by-step guide to download, see:
http://www.customerfaithful.com/Customer_Faithful/Downloads.html

Posted by Rick Harris at Dec 11, 2009 13:57; last updated at Jan 19, 2010 11:51

Rick,

Good point, although I think that most of the methods listed here are tools rather than ends in themselves. Thanks for the link.

Edward

A useful guide for charting consumer behaviour. Downloaded for digesting. Thanks Rick.

Zaki