CHAPTER 2

THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

 

2 The customer journey

The customer journey is relevant not only for the service consumer. The service provider must also identify, understand, and master the customer journey. The most successful organizations take this further, endeavouring to put themselves in the place of their customers and experience the end-to-end journey for themselves. Mastering the customer journey helps to maximize stakeholder value through co-creation, focusing on both outcomes and experience. Table 2.1 explains this further.

2.1 Stakeholder aspirations

It is important to understand stakeholder value, which requires exploring the functional, social, and emotional dimensions that explain why stakeholders make certain choices, in order to understand why stakeholders need certain products and services.

When the drivers are understood and a stakeholder experience aspiration has been defined, the next stage is to identify, understand, and master the end-to-end experience of the customer journey by defining personas, scenarios, journey maps, and service blueprints. Figure 2.2 shows the stages involved in designing end-to-end customer journeys and experiences.

2.2 Touchpoints and service interactions

Every customer journey involves several touchpoints and service interactions between the service provider, service consumer, and other stakeholders.

Service interactions include:

• transfer of goods

• provision of access to resources

• interaction with service provider resources (such as a laptop or an Internet of Things [IoT] device)

• joint service actions.

Touchpoints and service interactions are not necessarily the same. A user may be in contact with a service provider resource, such as a working space, a television commercial, or a poster, without interacting with the service provider. In another scenario, a customer may enter into an interaction with a service provider through a third party without being in direct contact with the service provider. Both situations are part of the customer journey and may influence the service experience and outcome.

The customer journey rarely follows a pre-defined path between touchpoints and service interactions. Some journeys may follow a simple, well-defined, and logical path, but most journeys are more complicated and develop from prior situations and transitions, or follow a complex pattern and emerge dynamically along the way. Nevertheless, identifying, understanding, and managing potential touchpoints and service interactions is key to understanding consumer experiences.

Identifying touchpoints and service interactions can be done by listing all of the places and times that the service consumer may encounter the service provider, its products, or its brand. However, individual touchpoints may perform well even if the overall experience is poor. Customers perceive the end-to-end experience, not the individual touchpoints. Hence, to facilitate service consumer satisfaction, each touchpoint must lead to a good experience and the journey as a whole must meet the service consumers’ expectations.

2.3 Mapping the customer journey

A journey is a specific, discrete experience in a service consumer lifecycle. For example, the act of subscribing to a virtual server from a public cloud service provider is a touchpoint within a customer’s journey. Researching and then subscribing to the service, integrating it, and getting it up and running in the service consumer’s organization would constitute the full journey as the service consumer sees it.

Commonly, service providers receive high touchpoint satisfaction scores and low end-to-end journey scores. This is because the individuals and teams managing touchpoints and service interactions can lose sight of the service consumer’s needs and desires. This is most common in multi-channel environments. The numerous customer interaction points across channels, devices, applications, and more, mean that facilitating consistent services and experiences across channels is difficult. This problem can be mitigated if the journey is managed as a whole, rather than through isolated touchpoints.

Touchpoint and service interaction management and thinking should not be abandoned; the expertise, efficiencies, and insights that individual roles and teams contribute are important, and touchpoints and service interactions represent invaluable sources of insights. Instead, in addition to identifying, understanding, and improving individual touchpoints and service interactions, the entire customer journey and service experience should be mapped and analysed.

A customer journey map visualizes the service consumer’s experience. It communicates the journey and the customer’s experiences at every stage. It identifies key service interactions and, for each of these, motivations and questions.

A customer journey map’s objective is teaching organizations about their stakeholders. When mapping a customer journey, it is important to consider the organization’s stakeholders, the journey’s timeframe, channels (telephone, email, portals, service catalogues, in-app messages, social media, forums, and recommendations), and actions that happen before, during, and after the experience of a product or service.

2.3.1 Personas

Each end-to-end experience that a customer has with one or more service providers represents a separate customer journey. Mapping individual customer journeys is unfeasible. Therefore, customer journey maps normally represent a generic flow for a group of stakeholders to allow the service provider to focus its efforts on widespread improvements.

Personas⁴ are often used to represent a group of customers. Personas summarize key characteristics for one or more individuals who exhibit similar attitudes, goals, and behaviours in relation to a service and a service provider. When discussing broad categories of service consumers, ranges must be used in order to summarize attributes of the entire group. These statistics are often too impersonal and difficult to remember when designing the customer journey. In contrast, a persona is a singular user derived from the data range to highlight specific details and important features of the group.

Although personas are archetypes, not actual people, they should be described as if they were real. They are snapshots of relevant and shared characteristics in a customer group, based on user research. To avoid creating bias, it is important to focus on developing generic attributes and relevant characteristics that are related to the use of the service.

It is important to note that customers and users may not be humans. For example, machine-to-machine services may be used by microservices or cognitive technologies. In these cases, the feeling and motivation aspects of the customer journey have little or no relevance.

2.3.2 Scenarios

Scenarios are short stories about personas trying to achieve their goals by using the service or product in their contexts. Therefore, customer scenarios are specific to customer segments and contexts.

Good scenarios are concise and answer the following questions:

• Who is the user?

• Why does the service consumer want the service?

• What goals does the service consumer have?

• How can the service consumer achieve its goals?

A typical customer journey map standardizes different customer segments. Using a scenario-based approach, it is possible to identify ideal experiences for the scenarios that are most important to the different customer segments. Then the different experiences can be combined to create a high-level customer journey map that is applicable to all.

2.3.3 Customer journey maps

There are many ways to visualize the customer journey. Simple maps typically include the steps of the journey, duration, touchpoints and service interactions, personas, service experience, and service provider teams and roles who interact with the service consumer. Figure 2.3 shows an example of a customer journey map.

Attributes such as service consumer goals, service provider goals, products and product features, channels, environmental properties, data sources (analytics, tracking data, customer relationship management [CRM] data), moments of truth, and prior improvements, may be added to the map for each step depending on the purpose, complexity, and nature of the customer journey. If necessary, some attributes can be categorized into sub-attributes. For example, it is common to map experience by tracking emotions, thoughts, and reactions.

Several techniques and models can be leveraged when mapping customer journeys. A simple but useful example is the Customer Journey Canvas.⁵ Furthermore, there are many software tools available to visualize personas, stakeholder maps, scenarios, and customer journey maps, including storyboards, emotional journeys, service blueprints, and many more.

2.3.4 Understanding the customer experience

The customer journey map is a good starting point when attempting to understand the customer experience. However, customer experience is shaped not only by the contact between the service provider and the service consumer, but also by factors that are partly or completely outside the service provider’s influence. Aspects such as organizational branding and the environment (including the digital environment) also influence the customer experience. Additionally, customer experience is affected by periods with no interaction between the customer and the service provider.

One way to gain a greater understanding of the customer experience is to run customer feedback surveys at major touchpoints or utilize customer experience management software. Feedback should reflect the individual customer journey touchpoints and service interactions and also examine brand touchpoints and environmental conditions, including their impact on comfort, ease, and speed.

The following questions should be asked when examining customer experience:

• What is the customer doing during each step?

• What encourages or discourages the customer from moving to the next step?

• What emotions do each of the steps trigger?

• Does the customer have questions that are difficult to find answers to?

• In which contexts does the customer get anxious?

• Could uncertainties cause the customer to give up and find a different service provider?

• What kind of obstacles does the customer confront in each stage?

• What are the cost and risk factors?

The service provider cannot understand the customer experience without involving the service consumer in its analysis.

If we apply the Johari window, which was proposed by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham (Luft and Ingham, 1955) and is shown in Figure 2.4, to the service relationship, it becomes evident that some areas are unknown to the service provider but known to the service consumer. Therefore, the service provider must seek feedback on behaviour in the invisible areas of the service relationship. Likewise, there are areas that are known only to the service provider, but that would benefit the customer experience if the service consumer was aware of them. These areas should be disclosed to the service consumer by the service provider.

The customer journey map is about listening to what the customers are saying, understanding their motives, and, when applicable, systematically measuring their opinions and actions and integrating this information into continuous feedback.

2.4 Designing the customer journey

The overall objective for the customer journey should be to plan and design customer journeys that support optimal value co-creation and lead to outstanding customer experiences.

Customer journey design is part of service design. However, customer journeys may span multiple services or products, and single services or products may support multiple customer journeys. More about service and product design can be found in Chapter 5 and in the service design practice guide.

‘Service design helps to innovate (create new) or improve (existing) services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for clients and efficient as well as effective for organizations. It is a holistic, multi-disciplinary, integrative field (Moritz, 2005).’

Before designing the actual customer journey, the desired outcome and customer and user experience should be defined. The expected value from the journey and how each stage can contribute to the co-creation of value should be considered as part of this definition. As was outlined in Chapter 1, the value definition includes:

• outcome

• experience (how the journey, services, products, brand, and environment are perceived and make the customer or user feel)

• utility

• warranty (including availability, performance, capacity, information security, continuity, accessibility, and usability)

• risk and compliance

• cost and resources.

The desired value should be defined for each major stakeholder in the customer journey. Techniques for defining, measuring, optimizing, and communicating value are described in the following chapters.⁶

2.4.1 Design thinking

Design thinking is a method that puts the user at the centre of the design process. It addresses how designers should think in order to create innovative solutions that fit user needs. For good innovation to occur, designers need to engage with real users to truly understand their problems and explore different ideas for a resolution. The main idea of the method is to explore and gather feedback from real users.

At a high level, Marc Stickdorn’s five principles of service design thinking may be adopted to guide the design process (Schneider and Stickdorn, 2012):

• User-centred The customers and users need to be put at the centre of the design process. This requires a genuine understanding of the customers and users beyond statistical descriptions and empirical analyses of their needs.

• Co-creative Facilitating co-creation in groups representative of the stakeholders is a vital aspect of design thinking and a fundamental part of service design. All stakeholders should be included in the design process.

• Sequencing Service design thinking deconstructs customer journeys into single touchpoints and service interactions. These, when combined, create service moments. Touchpoints and service interactions take place human-to-human, human-to-machine, and even machine-to-machine, but also occur indirectly through third-party feedback, such as online reviews. Every customer journey follows a three-step transition of pre-service period (getting in touch with a service), the actual service period (when the service consumers experience a service), and the post-service period. The customer journey should be visualized as a sequence of interrelated actions.

• Evidencing Physical evidence or artefacts, such as souvenirs, can trigger the memory of positive service moments. Therefore, through emotional association, they can continue to enhance a customer’s experience. Service evidence can prolong service experiences beyond the actual service period far into the post-service period. Also, service evidencing can help reveal inconspicuous backstage services. Intangible services should therefore be visualized in terms of physical artefacts.

• Holistic We see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and emotionally feel the physical manifestation of services. The entire environment of a customer journey, service, or product should be considered, as should alternative customer journeys.

At a more practical level, customer journey design does not differ much from other design processes. Although design processes are non-linear, it is possible to articulate an outline structure. It is important to understand that this structure is iterative in its approach. A typical customer journey design process may include the stages proposed by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, which are:

• Empathize Learn about the stakeholders that you are designing for. Understand the human needs involved. Define and test personas and scenarios. Set aside your own assumptions about the world in order to gain insight into the stakeholders and their needs.

• Define Construct a point of view that is based on user needs and insights. Re-frame and define the problem in human-centric ways. Map the existing customer journey, if any, and map stakeholder experiences to identify any problems in the customer journey. Define and plan for the desired outcome, experience, and value. Set goals and define metrics.

• Ideate Brainstorm and come up with creative solutions. Create many ideas in ideation sessions to think of improvements to the customer journey. By the end of this phase, the team should have several problem-solving ideas.

• Prototype Build a representation of one or more of your ideas to show to others. Adopt a hands-on approach in prototyping. Design customer journey maps and service blueprints.

Design for the stakeholders’ mental models by asking them to structure the journey or products for you. Consider frequency, sequence, and importance. Frequency means that things the customers do most frequently should have a prominent position in the sequence. Sequence means that activities that occur in sequence should be presented in sequence. Importance means that important pieces of information need to be given clearly and at the right time. Understanding the customers’ mental model and applying the frequency, sequence, and importance rule will solve most of the stakeholders’ usability needs. Verify that the design helps deliver the planned outcome, experience, and value.

• Test Return to the original stakeholder group and test your ideas for feedback. Do not avoid mistakes but explore as many mistakes as possible. Perform usability testing, role plays, and A/B testing. Track usage, build in feedback loops, review metrics, and role play to test that the design helps to deliver the planned outcome, experience, and value.

The customer journey design process involves knowledge and capabilities from different fields of expertise, including product design, graphic design, interaction design, social design, and design ethnography. Representatives from these fields may be involved in designing and planning customer journeys.

Additionally, there is a variety of tools and techniques available for customer journey design, including stakeholder maps, contextual interviews, five whys, day in the life, expectation maps, personas, storyboards, prototyping, A/B testing, storytelling, service blueprints, and operating model canvas. (For a good introduction to most of the listed tools, see Schneider and Stickdorn, 2012.)

2.4.2 Leveraging behavioural psychology

Humans are often rational beings, but can behave irrationally. However, we are predictably irrational (Ariely, 2008). Therefore, the design of customer journeys involving humans should cater for logical or rational behaviour and incorporate knowledge of cognitive biases and intuitive behaviour. Emotional intelligence and behavioural psychology are the keys to understanding and mastering the emotional aspect of the journey.

A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviating from rationality when making a judgement. An evolving list of cognitive biases has been identified over decades of research in cognitive science, social psychology, and behavioural economics. Examples of well-established cognitive biases are:

• Peak-end bias The tendency that we do not seem to perceive experience as a whole, but the average of how it was at its peak. So, after using a product or service, we tend to disproportionately recall the high and low points of the customer journey and not all the individual aspects of it. In particular, unpleasant endings have a strong negative impact.

• Availability bias The tendency to base our judgements on events that are most available in our memory, despite the fact that the availability of a memory is often influenced by unique and emotional factors. For example, the distribution and frequency of positive and negative points of interaction during the customer journey affects our service perception.

• Loss aversion The pain of giving up something is greater than the utility associated with obtaining it. We want to be in control of our journey as well as other immediate aspects of our life affected by the customer journey.

By understanding these cognitive biases, it is possible not only to consider them, but also to take advantage of them in the design of the customer journey (Bhattacharjee et al., 2016), including by:

• working through bad experiences early so that service consumers remember the more positive elements of the interaction

• segmenting pleasure and combining pain for the service consumers so that the pleasant parts of the journey form a stronger part of consumers’ recollections

• finishing on a strong, positive note, as the service consumers’ final interactions will have a disproportionate impact on their memory of the service

• providing service consumers with choices to give them a sense of control

• preventing surprises to increase service consumer satisfaction with the services received.

Redesigning the entire journey to incorporate the principles of behavioural psychology has the potential to yield sustained improvements in service consumer satisfaction. (Kahneman, 2011 gives a good introduction to biases and behavioural design.)

2.4.3 Design for different cultures

‘Mental models help an individual’s orientation in the world; they are the abstract and reductive mental representation of the complexity all of us face in everyday life – the schemas by which all of us understand the world around ourselves (Schneider and Stickdorn, 2012).’

Stereotypes are part of the mental model. Geert Hofstede says that culture is the collective mental programming of the human mind which distinguishes one group of people from another. Therefore, culture is part of the mental model and should be considered when designing customer journeys for different cultural groups or personas. Some examples are:

• users from different countries

• customers from different industries

• users from different teams in an organization

• users from different professions

• sponsors from public organizations.

Culture maps are tools which map cultures to decode the influences of intercultural collaboration. They are useful for analysing and designing service consumer scenarios as a basis for customer journey design. Figure 2.5 shows the culture of two user groups mapped to eight dimensions to identify similarities and differences. In this figure, each dimension is represented as a scale or spectrum of opposite extremes (Meyer, 2014).

2.5 Measuring and improving the customer journey

Customer satisfaction is a moving target. To continually improve, it is important to measure customer experience and feedback and gather analytics about stakeholder behaviour both across the journey and at individual touchpoints and service interactions.

Additionally, indirect measures, such as service quality, product quality, and the quality of the enabling value streams, practices, and resources can highlight customer experience and satisfaction.

It is best practice to start at the top, with a metric to measure the customer experience, and then cascade downwards into their key customer journeys and indirect performance and output indicators.

There are always more opportunities for improvement than there are resources. Therefore, the focus should be on quality and customer experience opportunities with the best chance of a high return on investment (ROI). Gaps in the journey and opportunities to improve it should be prioritized. Although eliminating pain points for customers is important, it is equally critical to identify areas that can differentiate an organization from competitors as customer expectations change.

Problem management techniques should be used to isolate the causes of gaps and identify improvements to all levels of the service stack: customer journey, service and product design, underpinning value streams, practices, and resources that enable the value streams and services.

2.6 Summary

Each service consumer is different and should be treated differently. Personas summarize key characteristics for customer and user archetypes and help the service provider to understand their needs and aspirations. By following the personas on their journey from touchpoint to touchpoint towards service outcome, a service provider can understand the customer experience. Leveraging this insight, combined with design thinking, behavioural psychology, and cultural insight, the service provider will be able to design and master customer journeys that lead to unique customer outcomes and experiences.