It's the customer's journey, not yours

The owner of the map determines the route

We should first consider whose map we are looking at. By definition if we are looking at the customer’s experience then we should surely start with the customer’s perception of the journey. But very often internal thinking drives a touch point analysis of the journey, thus ignoring the parts of the process that fall outside of specific company interactions.

The argument being that the company can only control its own touch points. It can’t, for example, do anything about the traffic that someone might encounter on the way to the store, or the speed of someone’s broadband when they are looking a company up. They certainly can’t control the fact that a couple may have had an argument about money before they sit down in the bank to talk about their mortgage options.

So if touch points are all you can control – is that all you should try and map?

Absolutely not. Context is hugely influential on how people approach your touch points, and how they will assess the experience. A company touch point map has numerous limitations, not least that it fails to put the customer at the centre of the experience.

It may feel as if it is addressing customer experience and therefore customer-centricity, but it is like the corny waiter jokes “apart from the fly in your soup sir was everything else OK?”. Imagine the customer being asked to complete a questionnaire rating how well they understood the menu, how quickly the food arrived, whether the right dish was provided and the open ended comments relating to insect life would be coded under ‘other’.

And, it is more serious than this implies because re-designing or amending a company’s touch point delivery can be costly. For example, increasing the number of people available to answer the phones may seem like the solution to address the customer’s apparent dissatisfaction with the length of the wait, increasing the overhead costs as a consequence.

But working with a company who managed after sales service queries for an automotive client, we were able to show that the customer's anxiety about whether their problem would be solved was creating tension. Sending clear information telling people how they would be looked after if they had any problems would remove the anxiety and lower the stress around telephone response times more cost effectively than reducing wait times. This was a case of emotion playing a much bigger part in people’s memory of the journey. Their estimates of how long they had waited were directly correlated to their emotional state.

We found very similar correlations between remembered experiences and emotional states when working in Christchurch after the earthquake. Insurance customers’ stories of their customer experiences just didn’t tie up with the factual reality of the experience, so improving the experience wasn’t about tweaking processes to improve them but required a much more fundamental change in approach which we were able to guide our client through.

Some maps are better at getting you from A to B than others

So it is the customer’s journey from their perspective – and that means their emotional as well as physical experience – that offers us the most value in building meaningful and useful journey maps.

This is where we must heed the concept of the map not being the territory. A customer’s experience reflects their reality which goes through many filters and we need to understand these to make sense of our map.

Context is everything

“Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all.” – Gregory Bateson

When we talk about context we can mean environmental influences, social context or we can also mean the expectations a person has when they set off on the journey. For example, their reasons for starting the process can be the single biggest driver of how they will experience the journey.

Recent work mapping the shopper journey in an FMCG category showed vastly different perceptions of the journey based on the context of what initiated the start of the process.

Tapping into unconscious journeys

People can be largely unaware of their behaviour in regard to touch points – in some decision making journeys observation is a valuable adjunct to direct questioning or even the only useful tool. Observation can be digital as well as physical so, for example, we can monitor people’s search behaviour on their devices (yes, we do ask permission first and participants have to install a simple tool) and this invariably shows a very different behaviour from what people will describe if we rely just on reported behaviour. People can’t remember what they do and their memories are biased in so many ways. Reported behaviour is a very poor quality data input into most journey maps.

All sorts of cognitive biases also affect the way we make decisions and interact with touch points – these can range from learned behaviour patterns to irrational rules of thumb that determine how we behave. How we offer people choices at touch points can significantly affect not just the decisions made but also how they perceive the experience, so a deep understanding of these cognitive processes elevates the insights and creates action-oriented outputs.

Emotional journeys

And then there is emotion which has a huge impact on how we remember our experiences with brands. We know that people remember how they felt about an experience better than they remember the specifics about what actually happened. We’ve all had the experience of seeing someone and knowing they were familiar but not being able to remember how we know them. Yet what you will know for sure is whether you liked them or not, i.e. how you felt about them.

So much of what we now understand about human behaviour stems from how we respond emotionally. Carefully mapping the emotions at different points along the journey – whether or not they relate to specific touch points – allows us to plot the moments of truth and the points when we can make the biggest difference to the customer’s experience.

It is important to recognise that emotions are very often unconscious and are always experienced in the moment – think of these as hot spots. Then think of the consequence of asking someone about their experience away from that hot spot. Unless you use stimulus that triggers the involuntary emotional response of the hot spot you won’t ever see or understand it.

There are many ways of circumventing these problems but first you have to recognise them and put a research method in place that addresses them. We’ve put together a few guidelines that will help to ensure your journey in journey mapping puts the whole customer experience centre stage.  

Journey mapping guidelines

1. Don’t start from your own systems and touch points. Let the customer construct the journey and provide their context.
2. Accept the irrationality of decision making and work with it, not against it – get familiar with cognitive biases and influences on decision making.
3. Map emotions to better understand the experience and don’t rely on memory, but use it to understand the critical emotional points in the journey.
4. Don’t rely on reported behaviour, track real behaviour physically, digitally or through data analytics.
5. Make sure you know what the core drivers of your customer journey map are and ensure the design of the map reflects these – not all journeys are linear, get creative about the visualisation of the customer’s perspective on the journey.
6. Don’t reduce the tool to a one size fits all – if you start with a pre-determined model of CEx design, the outputs of your map will already be pre-determined and you will miss the crucial insights.