9. Customer Journey

We’ve spoken a few times about how the customer’s journey is the start of any work that has the goal of improving the customer’s perceived experience. However, I know there are many questions about creating the journey and how it must be developed.

Firstly, a small disclaimer. With almost everything related to companies that develop their customers’ experience, there is no singular method. Many roads lead to Rome.

Nowadays most companies possess a mapped journey that looks somewhat like this:

I don’t particularly appreciate this model and would like to propose a slightly different journey.

Here’s a model which tangibilizes each individual’s impact on the customer’s measured satisfaction:

In the above Miro document, you’ll find correlated details about each element described in this article.

First we must discuss the ideal Journey and the real Journey.

The Ideal Journey is the journey whose interactions we, studying with our teams, perceive as giving the customer the most satisfaction and LTV.

The Real Journey is that which enables us to visualize the real patterns of our customers. We make it by drawing every possibility of entry and exit for a certain interaction, indicating which probability a customer has of taking each path. If you haven’t done so, now is a good time to analyze the Miro model linked above.

In sequence, we must understand the importance of the Survey Rule

Every survey has bias, when we learn this we are able to remove all of the artificial bias and work with the natural bias. The natural bias comes from the customer’s experience itself and is anchored on the customer’s context, however, the most important bias is the temporal bias. When someone poses a question about a certain company, people exhibit the tendency to comment with the latest experience in mind.

When we utilize the customer’s own journey as a trigger for our surveys we are manipulating this bias. We want our customers to tell us whether they are satisfied with us or would recommend our company, but for that, we must know what they are going through. For that, we must know which were the last experiences they have had with our brand. In this manner, we may compare every other customer which is in the same stage of their journey, and correct our interpretation of their survey responses with the proper bias.

The Survey rule is the document that shows when each survey is being realized and what interactions have been the customer’s last at the moment in which they are answering that specific survey. Every survey must have a journey trigger or they will be made without context and consequently produce muddy data.

Creation Method

The customer journey is a document that helps every department of a company visualize their role in the memories a customer builds of their brand. That is why my first recommendation is to assemble every team to take part in this creation.

First step

In the first stage, you may simply list every possible interaction a customer can have with the brand without concern for placing them in chronological order. It also does not matter if they are part of the ideal journey or not.

Break up the workshop participants in multidisciplinary groups so that they list as many interactions as possible between customer and company.

You can even make it a mini competition to see who can come up with the most interactions.

Second step

With every interaction listed, it will be time to converse about past customers who are considered golden customers. Those are the customers you wish you had every day — ones with high LTV who you know are happy.

Try to bring up such customers who are in different stages of their journey, both old and new.

Third step

After identifying those customers you must draw the route they took to get where they currently are. You will notice satisfied customers usually follow very similar routes, so long as they have similar characteristics.

To help in that task you can also list the worst customers, those with whom you know something went wrong. Try to draw their route so that you do not take it again.

Crossing these many paths you will be able to draw the journey that takes the customer to success with high LTV and satisfaction.

There’s no need to stress when creating the Survey Rule — just look to the ideal journey and categorize:

• Which are the most important steps
• Which steps you have enough control over that you can trigger a survey immediately afterward
• Which steps you believe contain the most failures

These are the moments you should start with.

Differently from the customer’s journey, the Survey Rule can be altered without a problem. Know what to monitor and add a survey there. If in the future you find yourself needing to monitor another interaction, add another survey there.

If you know the customer journey well, there’s no need to ask each customer about every stage. You can ask some about the purchase stage and others about the service stage. That way you’re always monitoring every stage whilst avoiding survey fatigue.

When we face reality, facts deviate from theory, that’s why we also have the Real Journey.

Each customer will follow their own path. Some will take shortcuts we haven’t thought of, others will need to retake a previous interaction before being able to proceed. This will take place in spite of every team’s effort to enforce the perfect experience and that’s okay.

The objective of monitoring the Real Journey is to understand exactly where we are able to keep the customer on the Ideal Journey and where we often lose control. These places where the customer is taking an unexpected turn deserve attention: it could be that the customer has found a new best path or it could be that we must work on that interaction to better align objectives and next steps with the customer.

With an event tracking platform, you will be able to follow customer movements.

With these three documents or as I like to call them, artifacts, you have in your hands the beginnings of your team’s work in evolving the customer’s perception of their interactions with your company.

If you need any aid, count on us.

You should keep to the idea that such documents should never be set in stone. Any change can affect the customer’s journey and posteriorly, every artifact herein described. Always remind yourself of sharing the newest version of the document with the rest of the company, after all, each and everyone has an important role to play and will only be able to give their best if they know the impact of their actions on the whole.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.