How To Use a Customer Experience Map to Delight Customers

Customer Experience Maps are an excellent way to align your team and organisation with the features and services that are truly important for customers. Through these maps we can chart the course of a customer – including potential high and low points, the emotions they go through, and the interactions that wow them – in order to create better experiences.

Let’s face it, we’ve all had horrible experiences with organisations at some point in our lives. When this occurs, we are far less likely to use the organisation ever again, and far more likely to tell all our friends not to do so as well.

Today the world’s best companies take customer experience very seriously. They invest time and effort into understanding the journey customers go through, and pinpointing the many places where they can improve.

Given the renewed focus on the customer over the last decade it is little wonder that metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES) have become so important.

In this post we take a look at several examples of customer experience maps. We also look at 8 checkpoints to consider when you start your own customer experience mapping activity.

2 Excellent Examples of Customer Experience Maps

#1. Adaptive Path

Adaptive Path is a world-renowned experience agency. Capital One acquired the agency in 2014 to provide in-house expertise for user experience and service design. In this example from their blog Adaptive Path details what was required to provide an experience map for Rail Europe. As stated in the write up, Rail Europe “wanted to get a better handle on their customers’ journeys across all touchpoints, which would allow them to more fully understand where they should focus their budget, design and technology resources.” Personally, I like the lenses of Doing, Thinking, Feeling that are used to explore the customer experience. The map also does an excellent job of detailing linear and non-linear journeys.

#2. Seek Recruiter Experience

Late in 2014 a user experience team at Seek mapped the Recruiter Experience. The team (Mathew Devey, Tim Crook, and Chris Gray) wrote about the process of creating the map on the Seek Product Blog. In their notes they emphasised the importance of gathering high-quality research and data points that represent actual customer views. Often a limitation of many experience maps is that they draw only upon the internal views of an organisation. The Seek approach avoids this by involving customers in the research process, as well as members of the internal team.  I’m a strong believer in involving customers in research as I’ve detailed in other posts.  According to their blog, the mapping process helped the Seek team to “identify and prioritise the right product initiatives, fostered a user centric approach and will ultimately lead to a better product for our customers.”

Top Tips for Creating a Customer Experience Map

Over the years I’ve created dozens of experience maps. Some of these were all-encompassing maps, covering as many aspects of the journey as possible into a single reference document. Others were far more fine-grain, exploring only very specific aspects of the customer journey in detail.

If you are seeking to create your own customer experience map, here are some 8 tips for creating purposeful maps with your team:

#1. Spend time gathering and building up your cross-functional and highly collaborative Experience Mapping team.

#2. Create a research program that gathers inputs from voice of the customer.

#3. Ensure that you have a process to capture, consider and prioritise insights and data points to inform the customer experience map.

#4. Consider the variables that are important to the customer experience and iterate the map continuously through collaboration.

#5. Be open to ideas new ideas but also defend the insights revealed through customer research.

#6. Focus discussion at a level consistent with the goals of the map (If you have a highly explorative team, it’s natural for people to want to dive into the detail of specific aspects of the customer experience. This is an excellent learning practice for the team. Just make sure that at some point discussion returns to an overarching level that is appropriate for the experience map)

#7. Walk-through the final experience map with as many stakeholders as possible and invite dicussion.

#8. Reflect on the customer experience map as a way to plan and checkpoint initiatives, so that the overall experience is constantly improved.

I hope you found this post useful in thinking about how to approach creating a customer experience map.