customer journey mapping case study

The stages may not be the same for you — in fact, your brand will likely come up with a set of unique stages of the customer journey. But where do you start? Let's take a look.

Generally, there are 5 phases that customers go through when interacting with a brand or a product: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty.

1. Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, customers realize they have a problem. At this point, they may not know that they need a product or service, but they will begin doing research either way.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands should deliver educational content to help customers diagnose a problem and offer potential solutions. Your aim should be to help customers alleviate their pain point, not encourage a purchase.

Some educational content that I've created in the past are:

• How-to articles and guides
• General whitepapers
• General ebooks
• Free courses

Educational content may also be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Social media
• Search engines

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, customers have done enough research to realize that they need a product or service. At this point, they begin to compare brands and offerings.

During this stage, brands should deliver product marketing content to help customers compare different offerings and, eventually, choose their product or service. The aim is to help customers navigate a crowded marketplace and move them toward a purchase decision.

Product marketing content may include:

• Product listicles
• Product comparison guides and charts
• Product-focused white papers
• Customer success stories or case studies

Product marketing content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your website
• Conferences

3. Decision Stage

In the decision stage, customers have chosen a solution and are ready to buy.

During this stage, your brand should deliver a seamless purchase process to make buying products as easy as possible. I wouldn't recommend any more educational or product content at this stage — it's all about getting customers to make a purchase. That means you can be more direct about wanting customers to buy from you.

Decision-stage content may include:

• Free consultations
• Product sign-up pages
• Pricing pages
• Product promotions (i.e "Sign up now and save 30%")

Decision-stage content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

4. Retention Stage

In the retention stage, customers have now purchased a solution and stay with the company they purchased from, as opposed to leaving for another provider.

During this stage, brands provide an excellent onboarding experience and ongoing customer service to ensure that customers don't churn.

Retention-stage strategies may include:

• Providing a dedicated customer success manager
• Making your customer service team easily accessible
• Creating a knowledge base in case customers ever run into a roadblock

Retention-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

5. Loyalty Stage

In the loyalty stage, customers not only choose to stay with a company — they actively promote it to family, friends, and colleagues. The loyalty stage can also be called the advocacy stage.

During this phase, brands should focus on providing a fantastic end-to-end customer experience. This should span from your website content to your sales reps all the way to your social media team and your product's UX.

Most importantly, customers become loyal when they've achieved success with your product — if it works, they're more likely to recommend your brand to others.

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

• Having an easy-to-navigate website
• Investing in your product team to ensure your product exceeds customer expectations
• Making it easy to share your brand with others via a loyalty or referral program
• Providing perks to continued customers, such as discounts

Loyalty-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your products

To find out whether your customers have reached the loyalty stage, try a Net Promoter Score survey , which asks one simple question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" To deliver this survey, you can use customer feedback software like Service Hub .

Now, let's get to the good stuff. Let's talk about creating your customer journey map.

What is the customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer's experience with a company. It also provides insight into the needs of potential customers at every stage of this journey and the factors that directly or indirectly motivate or inhibit their progress.

The business can then use this information to improve the customer's experience, increase conversions, and boost customer retention.

Now, the customer journey map is not to be confused with a UX journey map. But, for clarity, let's distinguish these two below.

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how a customer experiences their journey toward achieving a specific goal or completing a particular action.

For example, the term "UX journey mapping" can be used interchangeably with the term "customer journey mapping" if the goal being tracked is the user's journey toward purchasing a product or service.

However, UX journey mapping can also be used to map the journey (i.e., actions taken) towards other goals, such as using a specific product feature.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

While the customer journey might seem straightforward — the company offers a product or service, and customers buy it — for most businesses, it typically isn't.

In reality, it's a complex journey that begins when the customer becomes problem-aware (which might be long before they become product-aware) and then moves through an intricate process of further awareness, consideration, and decision-making.

The customer is also exposed to multiple external factors (competitor ads, reviews, etc.) and touchpoints with the company (conversations with sales reps, interacting with content, viewing product demos, etc.).

Keep in mind that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.

By mapping this journey, your marketing, sales, and service teams can understand, visualize, and gain insight into each stage of the process.

You can then decrease any friction along the way and make the journey as helpful and delightful as possible for your leads and customers.

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map — the visual representation of a company's customer experience. It compiles a customer's experience as they interact with a business and combines the information into a visual map.

The goal of this process is to draw insights that help you understand how your customers experience their journeys and identify the potential bottlenecks along the way.

It's also important to note that most customer journeys aren't linear. Instead, buyers often experience a back-and-forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey.

Let's look at the stages that you should include in any customer journey.

• The Buying Process
• User Actions
• User Research

1. The Buying Process

To determine your customers' buying process, you'll want to pull data from all relevant sources (prospecting tools, CMS, behavior analytics tools, etc.) to accurately chart your customer's path from first to last contact.

However, you can keep it simple by creating broad categories using the typical buying journey process stages — awareness, consideration, and decision — and mapping them horizontally.

2. Emotions

Whether the goal is big or small, remember your customers are solving a problem. That means they're probably feeling some emotion — whether that's relief, happiness, excitement, or worry.

Adding these emotions to the journey map will help you identify and mitigate negative emotions and the pain points that cause them.

On HubSpot's journey map , we use emojis to represent potential emotions at different stages of the customer journey. 

3. User Actions

This element details what a customer does in each stage of the buying process. For example, during the problem-awareness stage, customers might download ebooks or join educational webinars.

Essentially, you're exploring how your customers move through and behave at each stage of their journey.

4. User Research

Similar to the last section, this element describes what or where the buyer researches when they are taking action.

More than likely, the buyer will turn to search engines, like Google, to research solutions during the awareness stage. However, it's important to pay attention to what they're researching so you can best address their pain points.

5. Solutions

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? Save yourself some time by downloading HubSpot's free customer journey map templates .

This has templates that map out a buyer's journey, a day in the life of your customer, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company's buyer persona. Not only will this lead to improvements to your product, but also a better customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you're creating one in the first place.

What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it for? What experience is it based upon?

If you don't have one, I would recommend creating a buyer persona . This is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics representing your average customer. This persona reminds you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward the right audience.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research. This is where it helps to have customer journey analytics at the ready.

Don't have them? No worries. You can check out HubSpot's Customer Journey Analytics tool to get started. 

Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback are questionnaires and user testing. The important thing is to only reach out to actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services and who have either interacted with your company or plan to do so.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

• How did you hear about our company?
• What first attracted you to our website?
• What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
• How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
• Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
• Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
• Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
• Can we further support you to make your process easier?

You can use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

Once you've learned about the customer personas that interact with your business, I would recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a UX journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company — so if you group too many personas into one journey, your map won't accurately reflect that experience.

When creating your first map, it's best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don't worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map specific to those customer types.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there's no overlap.

This is essential in creating a UX journey map because it provides insight into your customers' actions.

For instance, if they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they're quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you also need to look at how your customers might find you online. These channels might include:

• Social channels
• Email marketing
• Third-party review sites or mentions

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand, impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

The proof is in the pudding -- you can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below.

HubSpot's free customer journey map template makes it easier than ever to visualize the buyer's journey. It saved me some time organizing and outlining my customer experience and it made it clear how a website could impact my user's lives. 

The customer journey map template can also help you discover areas of improvement in your product, marketing, and support processes.

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

There are four types of customer journey maps , each with unique benefits. Pick the one that makes the most sense for your company.

Current State

These customer journey maps are the most widely used type. They visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience while interacting with your company. They're best used for continually improving the customer journey.

Image Source

Day in the Life

These customer journey maps visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience in their daily activities, whether or not that includes your company.

This type gives a broader lens into your customers' lives and what their pain points are in real life.

Day-in-the-life maps are best used for addressing unmet customer needs before customers even know they exist. Your company may use this type of customer journey map when exploring new market development strategies .

Future State

These customer journey maps visualize what actions, thoughts, and emotions that your customers will experience in future interactions with your company. Based on their current interaction with your company, you'll have a clear picture of where your business fits in later down the road.

These maps are best for illustrating your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

Service Blueprint

These customer journey maps begin with a simplified version of one of the above map styles. Then, they layer on the factors responsible for delivering that experience, including people, policies, technologies, and processes.

Service blueprints are best used to identify the root causes of current customer journeys or the steps needed to attain desired future customer journeys.

If you want a look at a real customer journey map that HubSpot has used recently, check out this interview we conducted with Sarah Flint, Director of System Operations at HubSpot. We asked her how her team put together their map (below) as well as what advice she would give to businesses starting from scratch. 

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Set a goal for the journey map.
• Survey customers to understand their buying journey.
• Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.
• Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.
• Review and update each journey map after every major product release.
• Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

Determine whether you aim to improve the buying experience or launch a new product. Knowing what the journey map needs to tell you can prevent scope creep on a large project like this.

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

What you think you know about the customer experience and what they actually experience can be very different. Speak to your customers directly, so you have an accurate snapshot of the customer's journey.

3. Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.

Sometimes, customers aren't aware of their specific pain points, and that's where your customer service reps come in.

They can help fill in the gaps and translate customer pain points into business terms you and your team can understand and act on.

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

It's easy to assume each customer operates the same way, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Demographics, psychographics, and even how long someone has been a customer can determine how a person interacts with your business and makes purchasing decisions.

Group overarching themes into buyer personas and create a UX journey map for each.

5. Review and update each journey map after every major product release.

Every time your product or service changes, the customer's buying process changes. Even slight tweaks, like adding an extra field to a form, can become a significant roadblock.

So, reviewing the customer journey map before and after implementing changes is essential.

6. Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

Customer journey maps aren't very valuable in a silo. However, creating a journey map is a convenient way for cross-functional teams to provide feedback.

Afterward, make a copy of the map accessible to each team, so they always keep the customer top of mind.

Breaking down the customer journey, phase by phase, aligning each step with a goal, and restructuring your touchpoints accordingly are essential steps for maximizing customer success .

Here are a few more benefits to gain from customer journey mapping.

1. You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective.

Rather than discovering customers through outbound marketing, you can have your customers find you with the help of inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing involves tactics targeted at generalized or uninterested audiences and seeks to interrupt the customers' daily lives. Outbound marketing is costly and inefficient. It annoys and deters customers and prospects.

Inbound marketing involves creating helpful content that customers are already looking for. You grab their attention first and focus on the sales later.

By mapping out the customer journey, you can understand what's interesting and helpful to your customers and what's turning them away.

2. You can create a new target customer base.

You need to understand the customer journey properly to understand your customers' demographics and psychographics.

It's a waste of time and money to repeatedly target too broad of an audience rather than people who are actually interested in your offering.

Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the customer's experience.

It highlights moments where people experience delight and situations where they might face friction. Knowing this ahead of time allows you to plan your customer service strategy and intervene at ideal times.

Proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more reliable. For example, when I worked in customer support, we would anticipate a surge in tickets around the holidays. To be proactive, we'd send out a message to customers letting them know about our team's adjusted holiday hours. We would aalso tell them about additional support options if we were unavailable and what to do if an urgent problem needed immediate attention.

With expectations set, customers won't feel surprised if they're waiting on hold a little longer than usual. They'll even have alternative options to choose from — like a chatbot or knowledge base — if they need to find a faster solution.

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it's easier to pick out areas where you can improve it. When you do, customers experience fewer pain points, leading to fewer people leaving your brand for competitors.

After all, 33% of customers will consider switching brands after just one poor experience.

UX journey mapping can point out individuals on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors of these customers, you can start to spot them before they leave your business.

While you might not save them all, it's worth the try. Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.

5. You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.

As your company grows, it can be tricky to coordinate all your departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams are. That's because each department has varying goals, meaning they might not be prioritizing customer needs -- they might focusing on website traffic, leads, product signups, etc.

One way to overcome this data silo is to share a clear customer journey map with your entire organization. The great thing about these maps is that they map out every single step of the customer journey, from initial attraction to post-purchase support. And, yes, this concerns marketing, sales, and service. 

For more examples of customer journey maps, read on to the next section for a few templates you can use as a baseline for your company's map. 

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

To help guide your business in its direction, here are examples to draw inspiration from for building out your customer journey map.

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

HubSpot's free Customer Journey Map Templates provide an outline for companies to understand their customers' experiences.

The offer includes the following:

• Current State Template
• Lead Nurturing Mapping Template
• A Day in the Customer's Life Template
• Customer Churn Mapping Template
• Customer Support Blueprint Template

Each of these templates helps organizations gain new insights into their customer base and help make improvements to product, marketing, and customer support processes.

Download them today to start working on your customer journey map.

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map clearly outlines the five steps Dapper Apps believes customers go through when interacting with them.

As you can see, it goes beyond the actual purchasing phase by incorporating initial research and post-purchase needs.

This map is effective because it helps employees get into the customers' minds by understanding the typical questions they have and the emotions they're feeling.

There are incremental action steps that Dapper Apps can take in response to these questions and feelings that will help it solve all the current problems customers are having.

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

This fictitious customer journey map is a clear example of a day-in-the-life map.

Rather than just focusing on the actions and emotions involved in the customer's interaction with the company, this map outlines all the actions and emotions the customer experiences on a typical day.

This map is helpful because it measures a customer's state of mind based on the level of freedom they get from certain stimuli.

This is helpful for a company that wants to understand what its target customers are stressed about and what problems may need solving.

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map, designed for Carnegie Mellon University, exemplifies the usefulness of a future state customer journey map. It outlines the thoughts, feelings, and actions the university wants its students to have.

Based on these goals, CMU chose specific proposed changes for each phase and even wrote out example scenarios for each phase.

This clear diagram can visualize the company vision and help any department understand where they will fit into building a better user experience.

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map shows an in-depth customer journey map of a customer interacting with a fictitious restaurant.

It's clear that this style of map is more comprehensive than the others. It includes the front-of-stage (direct) and back-of-stage (non-direct or invisible) interactions a customer has with the company, as well as the support processes.

This map lays out every action involved in the customer experience, including those of the customer, employees directly serving diners, and employees working behind the scenes.

By analyzing how each of these factors influences the customer journey, a company can find the root cause of mishaps and problem-solve this for the future.

To get your business from point A — deciding to focus on customer journeys — to point B — having a journey map — a critical step to the process is selecting which customer mindset your business will focus on.

This mindset will determine which of the following templates you'll use.

1. Current State Template

If you're using this template for a B2B product, the phases may reflect the search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

For instance, in our Dapper Apps example, its phases were research, comparison, workshop, quote, and sign-off.

2. Day in the Life Template

Since this template reflects all the thoughts, feelings, actions, needs, and pain points a customer has in their entire daily routine — whether or not that includes your company — you'll want to map out this template in a chronological structure.

This way, you can highlight the times of day at which you can offer the best support.

Get an interactive day in the life template.

3. Future State Template

Similar to the current state template, these phases may also reflect the predicted or desired search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

Since this takes place in the future, you can tailor these phases based on what you'd like the customer journey to look like rather than what it currently looks like.

Get an interactive future state template.

4. Service Blueprint Template

Since this template is more in-depth, it doesn't follow certain phases in the customer journey.

Instead, it's based on physical evidence — the tangible factors that can create impressions about the quality and prices of the service — that often come in sets of multiple people, places, or objects at a time.

For instance, with our fictitious restaurant example above, the physical evidence includes all the staff, tables, decorations, cutlery, menus, food, and anything else a customer comes into contact with.

You would then list the appropriate customer actions and employee interactions to correspond with each physical evidence.

For example, when the physical evidence is plates, cutlery, napkins, and pans, the customer gives their order, the front-of-stage employee (waiter) takes the order, the back-of-stage employee (receptionist) processes the order, and the support processes (chefs) prepare the food.

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

5. Buyer's Journey Template

You can also use the classic buyer's journey — awareness, consideration, and decision — to design your customer journey map.

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Charter the Path to Customer Success

Once you fully understand your customer's experience with your business, you can delight them at every stage of their buying journey. Remember, many factors can affect this journey, including customer pain points, emotions, and your company's touchpoints and processes.

A customer journey map is the most effective way to visualize this information, whether you're optimizing the customer experience or exploring a new business opportunity to serve a customer's unrecognized needs.

Use the free templates in this article to start mapping the future of customer success at your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August, 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

HCII 2021: HCI International 2021 - Late Breaking Posters pp 44–50 Cite as

Using Verbatims as a Basis for Building a Customer Journey Map: A Case Study

• Arturo Moquillaza   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7521-8755 8 ,
• Fiorella Falconi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2457-2807 8 ,
• Joel Aguirre   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8368-967X 8 &
• Freddy Paz   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0142-1993 8  
• Conference paper
• First Online: 06 November 2021

2246 Accesses

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1498))

Customer Journey Map is currently a very used canvas in the UX (User Experience) practice and design processes. Although it is widely discussed, both in the academic and industrial domains; practitioners still present questions about how to model this diagram. Customer Journey Maps are typically generated from the Personas technique, which is generally created by interviews or observations. On the other hand, many organizations employ a tool called NPS (Net Promoter Score). This tool generates both quantitative and qualitative data. The tool obtains expressions from the customer about the service or product called “Verbatim” about the qualitative data. These verbatims capture faithfully the event that took place when customers interacted with the financial products, services, systems, or channels. In that sense, we present a case study where a different approach is employed to build a Customer Journey Map about customers and their User Experience interacting with ATMs in a financial institution in collaborative sessions. In this sense, by applying this approach, we could map the touchpoints by analyzing verbatims. This way, verbatims could constitute a better source of information over interviews. The integration of the verbatim analysis in the CJM process could effortlessly scale as the data gathered from customers grows, promotes the sharing of knowledge inside the organization, and the culture of data-driven decision-making. In the end, we could obtain crucial insights and pain points that could generate new opportunities, requirements, and even new projects for the channel development backlog. We shared the results with a multidisciplinary audience with positive feedback, and they suggested that for new initiatives and analysis, to apply this new approach.

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Acknowledgment

We want to thank the ATM team in BBVA Perú for its support along with the research. In addition, we thank the “HCI, Design, User Experience, Accessibility & Innovation Technologies (HCI DUXAIT)”. HCI DUXAIT is a research group from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP).

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Arturo Moquillaza, Fiorella Falconi, Joel Aguirre & Freddy Paz

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Stavroula Ntoa

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Moquillaza, A., Falconi, F., Aguirre, J., Paz, F. (2021). Using Verbatims as a Basis for Building a Customer Journey Map: A Case Study. In: Stephanidis, C., Antona, M., Ntoa, S. (eds) HCI International 2021 - Late Breaking Posters. HCII 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1498. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90176-9_7

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Journey Mapping the Customer Experience: A USA.gov Case Study

Journey maps are a visual representation of a customer’s end to end journey with your product or service. They are a powerful tool for exploring key interactions and experiences with your organization, programs, and/or services.

Journey maps describe a customer’s entire journey, even the parts that occur before and after contact with your organization. They typically contain elements such as the customer’s attitudes, emotions, and needs.

We recently updated USA.gov’s personas and used them as the backbone for our journey maps. We updated our personas to help inform our Web design, content, and contact center services.

We have a lot of data that we regularly analyze, and it tells us a lot about our customers’ journeys within a channel, but we knew we needed to better understand our customers’ journeys across channels. This is a best practice to better understand what a customer experiences, where there are disconnects in information, and where improvements can be made to your website, contact center interactive voice response recordings, or service delivery on any channel.

Preparation is Key

We used information in the CX Journey Mapping Toolkit to plan the sessions and our approach. We invited subject matter experts, managers, and other stakeholders to participate in the mapping sessions and designated facilitators to lead the sessions and keep us on track.

One of the most important preparation activities is creating the behavior line. This is the path your customer takes and the journey you’re going to map.

One of USA.gov’s personas, Linda, wants to browse information or learn more on a general topic. We selected “searching for financial assistance from the government” as the topic of Linda’s journey because it’s consistently one of the top reasons customers visit USA.gov or call 1-844-USA-GOV1 , and it falls within the persona category.

To create Linda’s behavior line, we looked at:

• USA.gov Web analytics, including demographics, devices, common paths, popular pages, outbound links, and onsite searches
• Web analytics specifically for our Government Benefits, Grants, and Loans content
• USA.gov customer satisfaction survey data
• Searches on Google that led customers to USA.gov
• Contact center content usage
• Web analytics for other government websites available through the Digital Analytics Program
• General search trends on Google

Once the behavior line was created, we printed each step on one piece of paper. We taped the steps to the wall, with accompanying images, and the facilitators walked the participants through a series of exercises to explore the journey, which includes:

• Employees and systems the customer interacts with personally
• Behind-the-scenes employees and systems that support the direct interactions
• Customer’s attitudes, emotions, and needs
• The highs and lows of the journey

After adding multiple rounds of sticky notes and stickers to mark these different factors, we picked the greatest pain points in the journey and brainstormed ways to improve them.

The four journey mapping sessions generated a total of 110 ideas. Of those ideas, 58 were broad, and many were repeated in each session. Clear themes emerged around areas such as:

• Partnerships
• Contact center operations

The journey mapping process and results helped us clearly see the pain points and gaps in the customer’s experience, including channel, content, and device gaps. It also helped to build empathy and increase understanding with our employees.

Next Steps and Key Takeaways

While the process of journey mapping is enlightening, it doesn’t end with a map. Follow-up and planning for improvement are key. We’ve incorporated many outcomes from our journey maps into our customer experience (CX) improvement queue. We’ve prioritized several projects into our fourth quarter objectives and key results across our content, user experience, performance measurement, and contact center teams.

Some specific priorities in our CX improvement queue:

• Improve our contact center interactive voice response (IVR) menu
• Engage partner agency customers in journey mapping exercises that cross our programs
• Share our data; make better linkages in results that impact our programs (e.g., search results impact on user experience, content usage on Web and in contact center)
• Improve reporting of key results throughout our organization and to senior leadership
• Improve customer understanding by using personas and journey maps as a standard process that we incorporate into the beginning of any new project or product
• Establish a Customer Advisory Council that includes our agency customers; engage them in our USA.gov transformation efforts and problem solving

Journey mapping isn’t a one-and-done project. We are continuing to analyze our results and prioritize areas for improvement, and we’ll continue to map future state journeys to help define desired experiences, keeping the customer at the center of our efforts.

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Customer Journey Mapping: Regence Blue Cross and Blue Shield

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Regence Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans (Federal Employee Program) - Customer Journey Mapping Best Practice Case Study

SQM Group Helped Regence Achieve:

The Call Center is Performing at the World-Class Standard for Customer Service

Company Description

Regence serves more than two million members through Regence BlueShield of Idaho, Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon, Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Utah, and Regence BlueShield (select counties in Washington).

Each health plan is a non-profit, independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. Regence is part of a family of companies dedicated to transforming health care by delivering innovative products and services that change the way consumers nationwide experience health care.

Regence Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans (Federal Employee Program) has 59 Customer Service Professionals (CSP) who handle member and provider calls and 10 Claims Experience Advocates (CEA) who receive claim inquiries from CSP and do back-office work.

First Call Resolution and Customer Satisfaction Results

Since 2015, we have steadily improved our First Call Resolution (FCR) rate from 74% to 86% and Customer Satisfaction (Csat – top box survey response) from 84% to 90%. As a result, SQM has certified us as a world-class customer service performing call center. To be certified as a world-class customer service performing call center, the FCR rate must be 80% or greater.

In addition, based on SQM's customer service benchmarking studies for 500 leading North American call centers, our FCR and Csat performance has consistently been at the top 5% level. Moreover, of the 500 call centers' SQM benchmarks, only 5% of their clients perform at the world-class FCR standard of 80% and Csat standard of 85%.   

In 2021, our world-class calls increased by 3% compared to 2020. The 2021 customer service improvement is remarkable when you considered in 2020; we were already performing at the world class FCR and Csat levels. The FCR and Csat improvement resulted from our customer journey mapping and ensuing people, process, and technology improvements.

Opportunity Statement

Our member (also known as a customer) journey mapping program is designed to identify opportunities to better serve and change how we work to promote a member-obsessed culture. We assess 6 to 8 member journey maps per year to improve customer service. In addition, we use non-First Call Resolution (FCR) interactions to identify opportunities to improve customer service.

As an example of a member journey that we mapped, our non-FCR analysis identified an opportunity to improve our member-submitted claims process. By identifying the painpoints in the process that drove unnecessary repeat calls, we were able to improve the information gathering process so that claims could be processed on their initial receipt. Utilizing customer journey mapping and incorporating non-FCR into the process ensures we focus on the right areas to improve customer service (e.g., FCR and Csat) and reduce operating costs (e.g., call avoidance) goals.  

The journey mapping of the member experiences visually tells us the story (e.g., moments of truth) or persona type experience over time. Furthermore, the member journey mapping helps us discover potential gaps and opportunities for achieving alignment on goals for change.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A journey map visually tells the story of a customer's experiences or persona over a period of time. Journey maps are valuable for helping discover opportunities and fail points for improving customer service. In addition, journey maps help achieve alignment on goals and required changes.

The essence of the customer experience (CX) journey map is to walk in the member's shoes as they interact with us using our call center. For example, our CX journey map focuses on specific interactions (e.g., medicare certification letter, member-submitted claim) that have been identified as having high non-FCR that need to be improved.

The journey map illustrates and describes the sequential activities or tasks that customers or employees experience when interacting with our call center. Each activity or task is plotted on the journey map on the horizontal axis. Furthermore, the journey map illustrates the customer's emotions associated with each activity or task on the vertical axis.

The journey map illustration for current and future member experience must be understandable to ensure the workgroup responsible for implementing new people, processes, and technology changes know what needs to be done.

How Does the Member Journey Mapping Work?

Our member journey mapping uses a holistic approach for tools, such as my SQM™ Contact Center FCR software, speech analytics, map illustration, and workgroup employees (e.g., leaders, managers, QA, and subject matter experts) to assist us in our journey mapping initiatives.

The starting point of a customer journey mapping initiative is to determine what customer interaction call reason we need to improve CX. To assist us in deciding which journey map we want to work on is based on SQM Group's voice of the customer (VoC) FCR research; it's the most accurate because it is from a customer perspective to determine non-FCR call reasons.

In addition, focusing on VoC non-FCR interactions for a specific call reason ensures that we are working on the areas that our members want us to improve. Furthermore, focusing on non-FCR repeat call reasons allows us to identify root causes that need improvement to increase the FCR rate and Csat rating.

We incorporate the FCR metric in the beginning, during, and after the customer journey mapping initiative. The FCR metric allows us to determine what to work on and provides insights into whether or not we have been successful in our member journey initiatives. Put differently; the FCR metric keeps the journey mapping workgroup focused on improving CX.

To validate that our workgroup journey mapping team will be improving the right failure or opportunity, a collaborative group consisting of leaders, managers, supervisors, and QA auditors will listen to non-FCR calls. The collaborative group assesses together what theme to work on, which is not always the highest repeat call reason frequency, but what is the impact on CX.

The leadership group has the authority on what failure or opportunity to journey map current and future CX. Part of the decision-making process is where they think they can improve CX. We use speech analytics at this phase to help quantify how often that non-FCR call reason frequency occurs and the member experience for a specific interaction.

For example, a member makes their claim but does not understand what they must do or what info to include. So, they call an agent to ask questions, finally send in the form, and it takes a long time to process, so they have to call back to get a status update. So, part of the project is to resolve claims quicker, so the customer doesn't have to call back to check.

Furthermore, after a repeat call reason has been chosen, the journey map group takes over the improvement initiative, bringing in subject matter experts on the topic. The group uses speech analytics to determine a sentiment score for each critical activity or task. Speech analytics is also unbiased in letting us know the scripting and what was said in specific scenarios.

The below journey map shows member-submitted claims opportunity that needs to be fixed. The problem to be fixed was members contact us to submit a claim for a nonparticipating provider, and then the claim is not processed due to missing information. The map shows the positive (e.g., happy face) and negative (e.g., unhappy face) member emotions they experience for each activity or task required (also known as moments of truth) for them to fill out a form and call the call center to submit a claim.

In this journey map, the member experienced negative emotions for receiving a claim denial, the member phoning the call center, and the agent reprocessing the claim for the member to be reimbursed for covered expenses.

JOURNEY MAP FOR MEMBER SUBMITTED CLAIMS OPPORTUNITIES TO BE FIXED

How to use the Journey Map Steps:

• Identify customer interaction to be mapped based on FCR insights  
• Determine the steps and sequence of steps in a customer interaction  
• For each step, identify questions, tasks, decisions, activities required, and for the company (behind the scenes activities that directly impact the customer's journey)  
• How did the customer rate the emotional experience of each step? 0 is neutral, plus 5 is extremely positive, and minus 5 is extremely negative. After each moment is rated, plot the steps along the timeline using the emotional scale  
• Draw a line connecting each point in the sequence  
• Identify which moments offer the most significant opportunity for redesign. Focus on the moments with the lowest emotional experience rating and the moments with the greatest opportunity to lift the line.

Tips. You can use this process to map one customer, multiple customers, or customer personas. You can use the journey map process for all touchpoints and interactions or just focus on critical moments of truth.

Journey Mapping Results

After completing the above journey map steps, we improved the member journey experience. The member impact goal was to eliminate claims returned for missing information and educate members before submitting a claim on what is needed.

As a result of FCR measurement as a validation, they improved the member-submitted claims call type by 4%, from 73% FCR to 77% FCR. Furthermore, we were also able to reduce the number of returned claims for a quality issue due to missing information from member-submitted claims by over 30%.

The below journey map illustrates the member experience after we fixed the problem with members submitting a claim for a nonparticipating provider, and then the claim is returned for missing information. In addition, we conducted a post changes journey map to assess member emotions with members submitting a claim to verify that our changes had a positive CX impact. The journey mapping results showed only positive emotions (e.g., happy face) for all the steps associated with submitting a claim.

JOURNEY MAP FOR MEMBER SUBMITTED CLAIMS OPPORTUNITIES AFTER FIXES ARE MADE

Journey Mapping Progress and Insights

To assist us in our member journey mapping initiatives, we have the workgroup assigned to the project complete a commitment progress and insights form, which is shared with management. We use this form to ensure we have effectively managed our journey mapping initiative. Furthermore, the form identifies the owner and the timeframe for the journey mapping initiative.

For example, the journey mapping form includes goals (e.g., What is the desired member impact?), targets (e.g., What was supposed to happen?), results (e.g., What actually happened?), achievements (e.g., At above or below expectations?), and insights (e.g., What has been learned?). If achievements are below expectations, a plan is developed to describe what actions we need to take to achieve our goals.

A best practice for journey mapping initiatives goals includes FCR and Csat metrics. Including FCR and Csat metrics allows us to understand the member CX performance prior to the interaction journey map improvement. In addition, after we made changes to the member journey map experience, it is essential to measure if we improved the CX by using the FCR and Csat metrics.

What has helped us successfully use journey mapping initiatives to improve CX is incorporating the FCR metric into the mapping process to understand what to improve and determine after we made changes if we improved CX. In addition, we keep the maps very simple, focusing on critical moments of truth that have the most significant impact on the member experience. Put simply, we ensure that our maps are easy to understand so that the workgroups that need to implement the changes can focus on making the changes that drive improvement instead of worrying about a complicated journey mapping process.

SQM Awards Received

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practice (Federal Employee Program): 2021 Call Center World Class FCR Certification (Federal Employee Program): 2021 Call Center World Class FCR Certification (Federal Employee Program): 2020

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The 7 best research methods for customer journey mapping

Getting authentic insights from customers is essential to effectively map out their journey. And understanding how users really interact with your product is the best way to provide tailored experiences that fit your customers’ diverse needs.

But it’s often hard to know where to begin the customer journey mapping research process and which methods to use.

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This article outlines the seven most effective research methods for customer journey mapping. Use our guide to prioritize the right qualitative and quantitative research processes for your needs—and implement them right away.

Use product experience insights to map your customer journey

Hotjar helps you understand your users by combining observational data with voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights

7 effective customer journey mapping research methods

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how your users engage with your brand, from initial discovery—like searching online for a solution to their problem—to browsing your site, trying out your product, making a purchase—and beyond. 

Make sure your customer journey maps are informed by user-centric research rather than assumptions and guesswork.

Carry out both qualitative and quantitative research using the methods below to create a map that accurately represents your users' product experience (PX):

Qualitative research methods

Quantitative research methods are essential for effective customer journey mapping: they provide hard data that’s easy to track and compare over time. But qualitative methods uncover the how and the why behind the numbers, helping you deeply understand your customers' experience.

Hotjar Product Designer Iga Gawronska stresses the importance of diving into customer emotions in research:

"I think it’s important to map out the actions, and also the emotions and thoughts of the people that perform the actions, your users."

Use the following four qualitative research methods to get an in-depth understanding of how customers engage with your brand online.

1. Customer interviews

Customer interviews are one-on-one conversations with people who actually use your product or service. Conducting them in-person often yields the best results because it’s easier to pick up on non-verbal cues and the interview can flow more naturally—but video conferencing with tools like Zoom is a good secondary option.

By engaging in an open-ended conversation with customers, you’ll get unexpected insights and granular details about your customer’s journey, which helps you empathize with the user experience (UX).

Structuring your user interviews in different stages can help get the conversation going. Start with a warm-up that establishes trust and builds rapport, then home in on your core questions, and end with more informal, concluding thoughts from both parties.

Input your results into a user research repository as you go, so you don’t get overwhelmed at the end of the interview process. Some researchers make simple spreadsheets in Google Sheets or Excel, while others use dedicated tools like EnjoyHQ or Dovetail .

Once you’ve aggregated your interview data, you’ll start to notice trends and commonalities between interviewees and understand how they’re engaging with key touchpoints in your customer journey and what’s most important to them.

Pro tip : use a transcription tool like Otter.ai to stay focused on conducting your interview without having to take detailed notes. Having a written record of interviews at your fingertips also speeds up your data organization and analysis later.

2. Remote observation

Remote observation lets researchers see how users are behaving using online tools like video calling and screen recordings.

Remote research is convenient for both researchers and participants—neither party has to leave the comfort of their home or workspace and they can do what they need to do when it suits their schedule. Using remote research gives you insights into how your customers interact with key touchpoints on the customer journey in their everyday environment and context.

Here are two effective ways to observe your customers’ journey remotely:

Use a video conferencing tool like Zoom or Google Meet and ask users to share their screen with you while they’re interacting with your site, app, or product. Draw on the data you gather to inform your customer journey map.

Use a product experience insights tool like Hotjar Session Recordings and watch playbacks of real users interacting with your site or product across an entire session, as you observe how they scroll, what attracts attention, and where they backtrack or bounce.

Recordings are particularly valuable tools to understand the customer journey because they let researchers observe users remotely without them feeling ‘watched’ and behaving differently than usual.  

Filter your Hotjar Recordings to show certain user sessions based on referrer URL, the landing page they visited, whether they’re a new or returning customer, their session, the specific action they take, their location, and u-turns. This helps you spot trends, understand behavior patterns for different user personas , and dig deeper into the customer journey.

3. Lab observation

In lab observation, the researcher observes the participant in person, either in a formal ‘lab’ setting or another professional, controlled environment.

Lab observation can be complicated to carry out because of the cost and logistics involved, and it’s often more time-consuming than remote methods. But it’s a valuable research technique, with a reduced risk of technical difficulties and a great opportunity to build a friendly rapport with participants.

If you op for lab observation, record your conversations with participants or use a note-taking tool like Notion or Evernote to write down your observations while the participant is interacting with the site or product, so it’s easy to find the data later. As the participant explores key customer journey touchpoints , take the opportunity to ask follow-up questions to understand why your test customers are making certain choices.

4. Qualitative surveys

Qualitative surveys usually involve asking open-ended questions that prompt detailed, long-form user responses. They give you great customer insights to inform your journey map, are easy to put together, inexpensive, and work well with large numbers of participants.

The success of your survey depends on the UX research questions you ask . 

It’s important not to (knowingly or unknowingly) ask leading questions, as you’ll likely get biased responses from your participants, which won’t help you in accurately mapping out your customers’ journey. Let’s imagine you ask a research participant the following survey question:

“Did our ‘sign up for a free trial’ button catch your attention on our homepage? Why?”

This doesn’t work because the participant can’t really answer your question freely: you’re implying that your homepage CTA button should have caught their attention, so they’re more likely to answer ‘yes.’ 

Instead, you should ask:

“What site element attracts your attention most on our homepage? Why?”

Or, if they’ve already converted:

“What made you decide to click the ‘sign up for a free trial’ button on the homepage?’

Here, you’re letting the research participant fill in the blanks on their own, which will get you a more accurate picture of their user experience.

Pro tip: use Hotjar’s Survey tool and s urvey templates to quickly and easily create your own qualitative surveys and get all the details about your customers’ journey—in their own words. Filter responses and set up automations for your team to receive alerts when you get certain survey responses to uncover trends in your user data all in one place.

Use Hotjar Surveys to connect with customers and hear about all the stages in their journey with your brand.

Quantitative research methods to complement qualitative data

While qualitative research is the best way to build empathy with your customers and get a holistic view of their product experience, you also need quantitative data to get an objective, granular understanding of key moments in the customer journey.

Use these three quantitative research methods to gather precise information about your customers’ digital journey with your product:

5. Website analytics

Because website analytics show you hard data about how people are interacting with your site, they’re a great resource for customer journey mapping research. Investigate these key metrics to better understand how your users move across touchpoints:

Traffic source: are customers searching for your site on Google, clicking on a landing page, or visiting from a social media channel?

Bounce rate : do visitors arrive on your site and navigate away soon after? Or do they stay for a while, browse, and take a conversion action, like making a purchase?

New vs. returning customers: how many users are new leads and how many are existing customers?

Session duration: how long do customers spend engaging with your site on average?

While website analytics don’t explain why your users are taking certain actions, they clearly show what customers are doing on your site —and how they got there .

For best results, use a PX insights platform like Hotjar to fill in the gaps between the numbers with rich qualitative insights.

Matthew Nixon, managing director of  Molzana , illustrates how teams can combine website analytics and qualitative research tools for optimal customer journey mapping:

"Using tools like Hotjar adds color to our quantitative analysis. Before, events like button clicks, scroll rate, and video plays might not have been tagged. This is where Hotjar comes in; click and scroll maps allow us to quantify user behavior in a much more granular way, which complements the trend data we collect from web analytics."

Google Analytics is a great option for quantitative website or app data: it’s both powerful and relatively easy to set up and navigate. Use Hotjar’s Google Analytics integration to go deeper and gather both qualitative and quantitative insights to inform your customer journey map .

6. Quantitative surveys

Quantitative surveys ask customers closed-ended questions that can be answered quickly—by checking yes or no, typing in one word, or selecting a multiple-choice answer.

Quantitative surveys can take a bit longer to put together, but they’re quick and easy for customers to fill out. With Hotjar, you can quickly create quantitative surveys by modifying questions from our question bank, and build surveys your users can address in a click or two, without disrupting their experience. 

While quantitative surveys don’t give you the same level of in-depth information as qualitative, open-ended questions, they’re helpful to get a statistical overview on the customer journey, or if you’ve already identified a potential problem and want to better understand the issue.

Imagine you've discovered, through qualitative research, that several customers report difficulties browsing your website. Place a quantitative survey on key web or product pages to get more details about the exact issues they’re experiencing with questions like:

Did you experience friction when browsing our website?

What was the biggest problem you experienced when browsing our website:

Difficult to navigate on mobile

Bugs or glitches

Confusing navigation menu

Pages loaded slowly or incorrectly

I had trouble finding what I wanted

Collecting enough responses to quantitative questions helps you prioritize the most important elements of the customer experience to map out an improved user journey.

7. Customer satisfaction scores

Measuring customer satisfaction is important to understand which touchpoints are working well for your users, and which you need to improve. In particular, Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is a great indicator of overall customer loyalty and satisfaction. 

Researchers calculate this metric by asking existing customers how likely they are to recommend your product to their network on a scale of 1 to 10. Their ratings help you understand overall customer satisfaction levels, and also split users up into specific groups:

Promoters (9-10): your biggest fans. They’re highly likely to stay loyal to your company and recommend you far and wide.

Passives (7-8): middle of the road. These customers are more or less satisfied with your brand but would consider jumping ship to a competitor who meets their needs better.

Detractors (0-6): these users may have had a negative experience with your company that’s made them unlikely to return—they may even write negative reviews or testimonials about your product or services. However, negative feedback is also useful as it helps you understand which parts of your customer journey you need to focus on and fix.

While NPS scores give you an idea of how well your brand is serving your customers, they don’t tell you why customers are so loyal they regularly recommend your company. That’s why it’s a good idea to ask a couple of quick follow-up questions in your NPS survey , like “What can we do to improve your score?”

Use Hotjar’s non-intrusive Feedback widgets and Survey tools to get NPS survey responses from customers while they’re navigating your site.

Once you’ve calculated your NPS score, use your findings to identify how you can improve the customer experience and where the customer journey needs updating. For example, if many customers complained about friction in the checkout process, that’s a good indication you should focus on optimizing that part of your on-site customer journey.

Deep customer knowledge makes for easy journey mapping

Thorough research is the best way to build a customer journey map that lets you truly understand your customers and their user experience. It’s essential to use a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods to dig deep into how customers are behaving on your site and understand why and how they’re carrying out certain actions.

Combine these methods to understand your customers’ experiences from different perspectives and prioritize creating a stellar user journey.

Hotjar helps you understand your users by combining observational data with voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights.

FAQs about customer journey mapping research

Why is customer journey mapping research important.

Customer journey mapping is important because it helps teams understand how customers interact with their brand in the wild. Customer journey mapping research makes sure your maps are based on accurate user data rather than guesswork and assumptions. By doing research, teams dig deep into the customer experience, uncover the touchpoints that are most impactful, and optimize their products or services accordingly.

What methods are good for customer journey mapping research?

Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to get a full picture of how customers experience brand touchpoints and engage in strong customer journey mapping research. Here’s what we recommend:

Qualitative methods: customer interviews, remote observation, lab observation, and qualitative surveys

Quantitative methods: website analytics, customer satisfaction scores like Net Promoter Scores®, and quantitative surveys

Is quantitative or qualitative research better for customer journey mapping?

Neither quantitative nor qualitative research is better for customer journey mapping—both approaches complement each other and should be used together to get a full picture of how customers are behaving—and why they’re behaving that way. While qualitative research excels in uncovering genuine customer feelings and emotions, quantitative research is valuable because it gives research teams hard data that’s easily measurable and useful for analytics and spotting trends.

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How Customer Journey Mapping Improved NPS - Telecoms Case Study

It’s time for another case study from our operational excellence sherpa, Peter Evans. 

This time we look into a case of improving customer experience through customer journey mapping in the telecommunications industry. It’s a great case, so let’s set the scene with some background information.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is a strategic tool used by operational excellence professionals to understand and analyze the entire experience of a customer as they interact with a company, its products, or services. The method involves identifying and outlining each touchpoint or interaction a customer has with the company, from initial awareness to purchase, and even post-purchase support.

The main objective of customer journey mapping is to gain insights into the customer's perspective, needs, and expectations at each stage of their interaction with the company. By understanding these aspects, businesses can identify pain points, optimize processes and ensure customer experience stays consistently at a high level to retain and win more customers.

Customer journey mapping is simple in theory but difficult in execution. We’ll soon see why.

What is customer experience a key challenge in the telecommunications industry?

Telecommunications is famous for being a competitive, cut-throat industry. Not only is there fierce competition for new customers, telecoms companies consistently have some of the lowest net promoter scores (NPS) of any major services. 1 When the service is buried in cables or as invisible as a wireless network, it’s the customer experience that defines your brand.

A few reasons why customer experience is especially difficult to manage in the telecoms industry:

• Market saturation : In many regions, the telecommunications market has already reached saturation, with adoption rates and limited potential for new customer acquisitions. This scenario drives telecom companies to compete more aggressively to retain existing customers and attract new ones from competitors.
• High demands from consumers : As they are spoiled for choice, customers demand better network coverage, faster internet speeds, and seamless connectivity. This pushes telecom companies to continually improve their services to meet these expectations, fueling competition in the process.
• Price sensitivity : In many markets around the world, price is a significant factor affecting customers' choice of telecom service providers. Telecom companies often compete on price, offering various plans, promotions, and discounts to attract and retain customers. As we’ll see, this push also has some drawbacks.

Revisiting the Case of the “Join Journey” in Onboarding New Customers

This is where we get into exploring a real case of transforming customer experience from Peter Evan’s experience as a transformation leader in the telecommunications industry.

In the 2010s the telecommunications industry in the United Kingdom was full of challenges. Since the privatization of British Telecoms in the 1980s, the United Kingdom had pursued a policy of active liberalization in telecommunications services. After the sector had been opened up for competition, over 140 companies were issued licenses for cable telecoms services across the country. 

Ultimately, fierce competition in the UK telecoms sector led to a number of mergers and acquisitions, and today there are considerably less players in the market. This is the background where Peter was brought in by a major contender to align the journey of new customer onboarding for the different services they had brought together under one brand.

Aligning different entities with a common “join journey”

The “join journey” was an internal term to describe the customer on-boarding process in one of the major cable telecommunications companies in the United Kingdom. It included key sales processes including telesales. From there, this key journey continued to sign-up, installation and past the first bill or invoice. Essentially, this included all the first key milestones of new customers joining the service.

The need for a consistent join journey was clear. The company had grown out of a merger of up to 40 different companies, each with their own headquarters, operations and on-boarding processes. Peter was brought in as a Six Sigma professional to bring consistency across these different operations across the country. 

Around 2014 Peter had seen early versions of process mining tools but they were not mature enough to fit his needs in this project. Instead, “a couple guys basically took over a meeting room in one of our offices up in the Midlands, and started to build the map for the join journey .”

“Our company was built out of a merger of 40 companies. We started looking into 40 different systems. The processes were a mess. In the start, we didn’t understand the processes. We didn’t understand anything. So, we went through a period of fixing key areas. Making performance measurement visual. Understanding and drawing processes. Finding the best way of doing things and moving our way through the business.”

“We saw lots of brown paper, lots of post-its. People coming in and out of the room looking at sections of processes, drawing the map. Think of a big picture right from the point of telesales and the success and failure rates there. You could track and measure all kinds of detailed call center type stats right from sale up to the first bill.” 

According to Peter, there were already some process maps and definitions of how processes should look like in the business. “Nobody really understood it, and it was just thousands of boxes that no one wanted to look at. So we had to kind of re-describe the business from the point of view from the customer join journey .”

How the Leaky Pipe Diagram Turned from Problem to Solution

Shifting the focus of process mapping to the customer journey was controversial. One insight that they identified is that the company was signing up 2 million new customers a year only to lose 2 million customers in the same time period. The massive picture developed by Peter’s team became known as the “leaky pipe diagram.” And with this catchy name they had a clear mission.

The leaky pipe diagram gave an overview of where customers were lost along the join journey . Peter’s team looked into key challenges and did deeper research to understand where the leaks came from. One insight was that customer experience started from the moment of sales. If the customer experience didn’t live up to expectations, these customers would bail out. Peter’s team could map and diagnose those failure points.

Another point of interest from customer feedback was the complexity of the bill. At the time, customers didn’t easily understand what they were charged for. This could be another source of contention as customers had an easy option to switch over to another service provider.

The leaky pipe diagram allowed Peter’s team to identify points of failure and develop improvement opportunities. That’s where another key element of measuring customer satisfaction came in in the form of NPS.

What exactly is Net Promoter Score?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a widely used metric for measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction by evaluating the likelihood of a customer recommending a company, product, or service to others. 

NPS was developed by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix in 2003 and is based on a single question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [company/product/service] to a friend or colleague?" 

Customers are then categorized into three groups: Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), and Detractors (0-6). The NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, resulting in a score ranging from -100 to 100. 

The simplicity, ease of implementation, and ability to gauge customer sentiment have contributed to the widespread adoption of NPS as a valuable tool for businesses to measure and improve customer experience.

Using NPS as the Leading Indicator

In Peter’s business NPS was a common measurable goal that had a clear correlation with customer retention across the organization. By breaking down NPS across different parts of the customer journey Peter could identify leaks in the process.

Peter’s team worked hard on fixing the leaky pipe of new customer onboarding, breaking customer journey steps down to items that had a measurable impact on NPS. His team would regularly meet in groups of 20 or 30 people to diagnose and discuss how NPS could be improved across different areas.

As a starting point, the overall NPS for the organization was -19, so they had more detractors than promoters in their customer base. Within a year and a half, the team was able to drive NPS up to zero. The scope of improvement was unseen in the telecommunications industry, where retention and advocacy of happy customers is key. 

Along the customer journey Peter’s team improved their visibility and could see NPS per transaction, by sale or by bill. It became clear where the failures were. While NPS didn’t replace the importance of customer voice fully, it gave Peter’s team a clear understanding of where real value could be unlocked through process re-design or incremental improvements.

Importance of customer journey mapping

Flash forward to the present day. Today, many companies use process intelligence software to diagnose the as-is state of their processes. Nevertheless, the need for customer journey mapping remains.

Customer journey mapping remains a valuable tool for operational excellence within telecommunications and many other industries. Here are six key reasons where customer journey mapping is important:

• Enhancing customer experience : Customer journey mapping helps you tailor services to meet customer expectations better. By understanding the customer's perspective at each touchpoint, businesses can offer personalized and relevant services, which leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Identifying pain points : By mapping the customer journey, you can identify areas where customers face challenges, such as network connectivity issues, billing discrepancies, or difficulties with customer support. This enables them to address these pain points, improving the overall customer experience.
• Reducing churn : A clear understanding of the customer journey helps proactively address issues that may cause customers to leave. By solving these issues, companies can reduce churn and maintain a stable customer base.
• Aligning internal processes : Customer journey mapping enables you to identify areas where their internal processes can be optimized. By streamlining these processes, companies can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and deliver a better customer experience.
• Improving communication and collaboration : Mapping the customer journey encourages different departments to work together, fostering a customer-centric culture. This collaboration leads to more effective problem-solving and a unified approach to enhancing the customer experience.

Bottom Line

In this case we’ve revisited with Peter Evans the value of customer journey mapping in the telecommunications industry. We saw how a focus on the key onboarding process could be measured by Net Promoter Score and saw how a meticulous mapping of the customer journey enabled the business with the help of Peter’s team to fix a leaky pipe of new customer acquisitions and improve key elements of the customer join journey resulting in a significant improvement in NPS and customer retention.´

Other articles by BPM Sherpa Peter Evans

-> How lean process mapping transformed the aircraft leasing industry

-> What to do in the first 90 days of BPM implementations?

-> Benefits of business process management with Peter Evans

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Case Study: Starbucks’ Success Elevating Customer Experience with Customer Journey Mapping

Customers journey mapping to deliver great customers experiences.

Starbucks, the world-renowned coffee company, is known for its exceptional customer experience and innovative offerings. To stay ahead in the competitive coffee industry and maintain its reputation, Starbucks has consistently prioritized understanding its customers and their needs. One key strategy that Starbucks has used to achieve this is customer journey mapping.

Customer Journey Mapping Strategy

Starbucks embarked on a comprehensive customer journey mapping initiative, aiming to identify pain points in its customers’ experiences and develop solutions to address these issues. The company engaged in a cross-functional approach, involving teams from various departments such as marketing, store operations, and product development, to ensure a holistic understanding of the customer journey.

Understanding the Customer Journey

Starbucks conducted extensive research to gain insights into its customers’ interactions with the brand, both online and offline. The company collected data through customer interviews, surveys, and observations, as well as leveraging digital analytics and transactional data. This information was used to create detailed customer journey maps, highlighting key touchpoints, emotional states, and pain points.

Identifying Pain Points and Opportunities

The customer journey maps revealed several areas where Starbucks could improve its customer experience. Some notable pain points included long wait times, inconsistent product quality, and challenges in navigating the rewards program. The company also identified opportunities to enhance the in-store experience, such as incorporating digital technologies and personalizing customer interactions.

Developing a Customer Experience Roadmap

Armed with these insights, Starbucks developed a customer experience roadmap that outlined the strategic initiatives and improvements needed to address the identified pain points and capitalize on opportunities. Some of the successful implementations based on the roadmap include:

• Mobile Order & Pay: To reduce wait times and streamline the ordering process, Starbucks introduced the Mobile Order & Pay feature in its app. This allowed customers to place orders in advance and pick up their drinks without waiting in line, significantly enhancing the overall customer experience.
• Personalized Rewards: Starbucks revamped its rewards program to make it more accessible and user-friendly, tailoring offers and promotions based on customers’ preferences and purchasing habits. This personalized approach encouraged customer loyalty and increased engagement with the brand.
• Consistent Quality Standards: Starbucks invested in employee training and quality control measures to ensure consistent product quality across all locations. This focus on excellence helped reinforce the brand’s reputation for offering high-quality coffee and beverages.
• Digital Integration: Starbucks introduced digital touchpoints in its stores, such as interactive menu boards and mobile payment options, to create a seamless and engaging customer experience. These innovations helped bridge the gap between the online and offline customer journey.

The company’s attention to the entire journey has been a key factor in the development of the premium coffee category.

According to PeopleMetrics, Starbucks has been able to simplify and operationalize Customer Journey Mapping which has helped them unlock the intersection of convenience and connection by introducing enhancements to the customer experience across retail and digital that meet customers wherever they are, expanding the Third Place experience beyond the physical store.

Initiatives that have been uncovered through journey mapping exercises:

Starbucks is investing in its partners, creating personalized experiences for customers, and innovating its digital and retail strategy.

Investing in Partner Success

Starbucks is placing its partners at the core of its Reinvention plan. The company believes that investing in its partner base is key to delivering high-quality customer experiences, uplifting brand affinity and customer loyalty, and increasing value back to partners through wages, benefits, programming, and tools for continued personal growth. In fiscal 2023, Starbucks has identified a number of near-term solutions that will be implemented to ensure a thriving partner experience:

How to Improve Customer Experience

Wage and Recognition Innovation:

Starbucks is helping partners by giving them the hours they need, expanding digital tipping, and incorporating other opportunities to increase overall pay. The company is committed to paying partners competitively and has raised its starting wage in the U.S. to $15 per hour.

New Well-being Benefits:

Starbucks is offering enhanced sick pay, new savings and student loan management benefits, and additional mental health support to its partners.

Personalized Career Mobility:

Starbucks is introducing a new partner app and the development of personalized career paths to enable its partners to achieve their career goals.

Investments in Store Managers:

Starbucks is providing new leadership trainings, reinventing scheduling and decision-making tools, and creating career journey mapping to improve store manager retention and empower them to focus on core functions of the job that increase satisfaction and overall performance of their store partners.

These investments are aimed at empowering Starbucks partners to thrive at work, thrive as individuals, and thrive together. Stores managed by partners with over three years of tenure have 13% greater weekly sales and higher customer satisfaction, making it clear that investing in partner success is a win-win for both partners and the company.

Creating Personalized Experiences for Customers

Starbucks is committed to unlocking the intersection of convenience and connection by introducing enhancements to the customer experience across retail and digital that meet customers wherever they are, expanding the Third Place experience beyond the physical store. The company is investing in purpose-built store concepts, delivering beverage innovation, and expanding effortless digital convenience to create personalized experiences for its customers.

Investing in Purpose-built Store Concepts:

Starbucks is reimagining the store environment by introducing purpose-built store concepts that meet customers wherever and whenever they want and improve the partner experience. The company is investing an incremental $450M in the existing U.S. store base in fiscal year 2023 with continued investment in fiscal 2024 and 2025. Starbucks expects these investments will create efficiencies, unlock capacity for partners, and enable increased throughput to support increasing customer demand.

Digital and Physical Customer Journey Optimization

Delivering Beverage Innovation:

To improve partner and customer experiences, Starbucks has developed the Siren System, a proprietary new equipment innovation designed to meet the growing demand for customization of hot and cold beverages and warm foods. As part of the Siren System, Starbucks has redesigned its cold beverage station, which significantly reduces the time and number of steps to make cold beverages, unlocking productivity gains and ultimately freeing up time for partners to connect with customers.

In addition, Starbucks is developing a new way of extracting cold coffee and espresso with the Cold Pressed Cold Brew system. This new, proprietary technology delivers cold press coffee in a matter of seconds and in fewer than four steps, a step-change improvement when compared to today’s cold brew which is steeped for 20 hours and takes more than 20 steps to make. The Cold Pressed Cold Brew will begin testing in stores in fiscal 2023.

Expanding effortless digital convenience

Starbucks’ Reinvention Plan aims to create a seamless and personalized experience for customers, making it easier for them to get their favorite Starbucks beverage when and where they want. The company has recognized the increasing importance of digital convenience in providing a better customer experience. The COVID-19 pandemic has also highlighted the need for contactless ordering and payment options. Starbucks has responded by investing in and expanding its digital offerings, such as its mobile ordering platform, Starbucks Rewards program, and Starbucks Delivers.

Growing Starbucks Delivers program with DoorDash and UberEats

One of Starbucks’ major initiatives for expanding digital convenience is growing its Starbucks Delivers program. The company has partnered with DoorDash to expand the program to a national scale alongside UberEats in fiscal 2023. This partnership aims to improve delivery efficiency, expand delivery areas, and offer more delivery options to customers. Starbucks Delivers is expected to be available in over 10,000 stores across the United States by the end of 2022.

Increase Customer Satisfaction with a Digital Customer Experience Platform

Starbucks Rewards program with Starbucks Odyssey

Starbucks is also evolving its Starbucks Rewards program with Starbucks Odyssey, a Web3-enabled experience that will bridge the physical and digital customer experience. Starbucks Odyssey aims to unlock a new generation of experiential benefits for customers. Through Starbucks Odyssey, customers will be able to earn and redeem rewards, access exclusive content, and become part of a digital community built on human connection. Starbucks plans to roll out Starbucks Odyssey to all customers in the United States and Canada by the end of 2022.

The CDO TIMES Bottom Line

Starbucks’ successful application of customer journey mapping demonstrates the value of understanding customers’ experiences for customers, partners and employees and using these insights to drive improvements and innovation. By identifying pain points and opportunities in the customer journey, Starbucks was able to develop a customer experience roadmap that addressed these issues and reinforced its position as a leader in the coffee industry.

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• Deep Expertise : CDO TIMES has a team of experts with deep expertise in the field of Digital, Data and AI and its integration into business processes. This knowledge ensures that your organization can leverage digital and AI in the most optimal and innovative ways.
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• Competitive Advantage : Finally, by hiring CDO TIMES experts, you are investing in a competitive advantage. Their expertise can help you speed up your innovation processes, bring products to market faster, and stay ahead of your competitors.

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As the CDO of The CDO TIMES I am dedicated delivering actionable insights to our readers, explore current and future trends that are relevant to leaders and organizations undertaking digital transformation efforts. Besides writing about these topics we also help organizations make sense of all of the puzzle pieces and deliver actionable roadmaps and capabilities to stay future proof leveraging technology. Contact us at: [email protected] to get in touch.

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How to run a journey-mapping workshop: a step-by-step case study.

July 5, 2020 2020-07-05

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When journey maps are used in the right way — as a means to address a specific, known business goal — the benefits are vast. Our earlier research on practitioners’ journey-mapping activities identified several advantages, including aligning stakeholders around common goals and vision, enabling focus on customer needs, and helping team members establish a personal connection with the end users.

One of the biggest practitioner pain points revealed during the same research, however, is that many people are unclear about the specifics of the actual journey-mapping process. While we’ve previously provided a 5-step process for journey mapping , this article is a more detailed guide to one of those steps: the journey-mapping workshop.

Because the structure of a workshop is dependent on the skill level and preferred methods of the facilitator, there are many ways to lead a journey-mapping workshop. This article provides an overview of one way—a case study with examples from a recent workshop—but there could be many variations of the activities listed that could also be productive.

In This Article:

Before the journey-mapping workshop, during the journey-mapping workshop, after the journey-mapping workshop.

Before getting everyone together in the same room, take these steps to ensure that all contributors are engaged, prepared, and that they understand the purpose and scope of the workshop.

Step 1. Build a team: Journey mapping is a collaborative process. If you create your map in a silo without involving others, you run the risk that the people whose support you need to get things done post mapping will not believe in it or be passionate about your findings. Create a crossfunctional team of allies who can help you advertise the process and build buy-in for your recommendations. They will also be your workshop participants.

Step 2. Prioritize actors and scenarios: Decide whose journey (the actor ) and what journey (the scenario ) you’ll be mapping ahead of time. You should focus on one actor and one scenario per map , but that doesn’t mean you can’t have more than one scenario or journey map per workshop. You’ll just have to allow for extra time and figure out logistics (e.g., splitting up into small groups) to accommodate the additional complexity. If necessary, plan how you’ll split up teams before the workshop. Know who’s coming and assign each person to the most appropriate journey. (You wouldn’t want the designer of a small-business product working on the journey for consumer products.)

Step 3. Gather and share existing research: It’s often beneficial to start with what you already have. Gather and review any existing UX, marketing, analytics, or customer support data related to your journey, consolidate relevant insights, and identify knowledge gaps. Create a shared repository so everyone on the team has access to the artifacts you’ve gathered, which may include previous experience maps , research reports, data from diary studies , or brand or experience guidelines .

Step 4. Assign “homework”: Provide attendees with background reading ahead of the workshop. No matter how much you feel like you have shared, briefed, and campaigned, prime participants one last time before the workshop. Provide relevant background reading, existing research takeaways, and a few open-ended thought-starter questions to mentally prepare participants.

This particular journey-mapping workshop structure incorporates activities to lead participants through:

• Creating a current-state hypothesis map
• Evolving the current-state journey map based on customer input
• Prioritizing pain points within the journey
• Brainstorming new ideas and potential solutions with customers
• Creating a future-state vision through sketching and design-studio activities

It’s divided into three parts:

• Part I: Laying the foundation: Review of basic concepts and inputs for mapping
• Part II: Current-state mapping: Creation of an assumption map, review and evolution of the map with customers, and prioritization of pain points
• Part III: Future-state visioning: Brainstorming future-state ideas and interactions through sketching

Depending on the number of workshop attendees and the number of prioritized scenarios and actors, this workshop could be structured over a period of a couple to several days.

Part I: Laying the Foundation

The activities within the first segment of the workshop ensure that participants share the  mental model and the language of journey mapping, understand existing research, and agree on the workshop inputs — specifically, the journey-map stages, actor(s) and scenario(s) that will be used.

Step 1. Refresh and educate: Here’s something you may find shocking: Some participants may not even open your thoughtfully prepared workshop homework! That means you’ll have to find a creative way to ensure that attendees understand core concepts while not putting those who did diligently prepare to sleep. Blend teaching opportunities into methods for gaging the room’s level of preparedness with an activity such as trivia based on your provided background reading. Bonus: Trivia also acts as an energizer to start the day. Split the room into small groups so that those who were sincerely unable to prepare are not singled out and the vibe remains fun.

Step 2. Review actors and scenarios: Though you will have decided which actor(s) and scenario(s) to focus on before walking into the room, give your participants a chance to feel ownership over them (and ensure they understand these concepts). For example, enabling discussion over a quick interactive quiz like the one below helps participants connect with the narrative of the scenario and reinforces buy-in for the scenario.

Step 3. Review the research (again): Even if you consolidated and shared existing research with the team before the workshop, it’s possible that not everyone took the time to pore over it like you did. You should dedicate time within the workshop agenda to review the key findings. And even if the team is familiar with the research, it’s still better for everyone to be aligned on the takeaways as a group and for those takeaways to be fresh in everyone’s heads. The research review could take the form of one or two people simply presenting recent research findings, or it could be something more interactive.

For a recent journey-mapping workshop for a team very familiar with existing research, we did a quick postup of “what we know” about the journey. Participants worked in small groups to generate one research insight per sticky note, cluster them into groups, and then shared their themes back to the larger group. This approach has the bonus of providing an artifact that the team can hang and reference in their workspace as they begin mapping

Step 4. Provide facilitation training for participants: If customers will join your workshop, help your participants prepare. As the workshop facilitator, you’ll likely have more small groups than you can actively lead, so you’ll need to empower your attendees. Remember: This is a crossfunctional team, so not everyone is familiar with user research! Provide some guidance. I prefer to do two things: First, plan a training segment within the workshop to review facilitation guidelines . Secondly, provide teams with printed interview guides with suggested lines of inquiry related to their scenario.

Part II: Current-State Mapping

In the second segment of the workshop, teams go through a series of activities to create a draft map, update the map based on customer input, and identify pain points.

Step 1. Map the current state: Here, each team concentrates its collective knowledge into a map specific to its assigned scenario. It’s helpful to remind participants that they are creating an assumption map, meaning that there may be gaps or unknowns. At this point in time, it’s okay to make some assumptions, because they’ll continue to adapt the map and make adjustments with additional research. That’s why we make maps with sticky notes — so we can tear them off or scribble over them with Sharpies as learning evolves!

Step 2. Interview customers: The act of consolidating what the team knows from existing research creates a current-state assumption map. At this point, customers who align to each group’s primary actor or persona join the teams. Recruit your customers based on relevant screening criteria . (For example, for journeys related to opening a new credit card, it’s ideal to recruit participants who are actively looking for a new credit card or who have recently opened a credit card.) Using the provided facilitation guide, small groups interview the customers, asking open-ended questions about their experience with the journey they are assigned.

Step 3. Evolve the map: Once customers have shared experiences without seeing their team’s assumptions, the discussion moves to the wall. Teams walk customers through their assumption maps, continuing to ask open-ended questions and encouraging customers to share stories. It can be useful to provide some tangible tools to customers to lower their barrier to engagement. For example, in this journey-mapping workshop, we gave customers stickers to represent agreement or disagreement, and asked them to physically contribute to the map to reflect their experience and help us validate or evolve our assumptions.

Step 4. Generate and prioritize pain points: After time for in-depth discussion and map adaptation, allow the groups to focus on frustrations that occur throughout the journey. These frustrations, also called pain points, will serve as an input for the future-state visioning. Make pain-point generation easier for attendees by providing a fill-in-the-blank structure for them to fill in:

• I need ______ in order to ______.
• I need ______ so that ______.

Example: “I need a simple way to compare options so that I don't get overwhelmed.”

Give participants a time limit to silently generate needs statements on sticky notes, have them place the stickies on the pain-points swim lane of the map, and then discuss and affinity diagram them. After discussion, use dot voting to identify which pain points are most critical.

Part III: Future-State Visioning

The workshop concludes with a third segment: future-state visioning. Here, participants brainstorm ideas with customers, then use rounds of sketching, presentation, and critique to create future-state flows.

Step 1. Generate “big ideas”: Using the identified pain points as catalysts, both internal workshop participants and customers come up with abstract ideas that align to known frustrations within the journey. It’s useful to encourage the teams to think big and use metaphors to express their ideas so that they don’t jump to specific solutions (e.g., features) too soon. Use a time limit and provide a quantity goal (e.g., try to generate at least 5 ideas in 5 minutes) to keep participants from over-censoring their ideas. After this round of idea generation, participants post up and present their ideas to the rest of the team.

In this workshop, we followed the presentation of ideas with a round of impact and effort voting. Customers and internal participants whose primary job responsibility was user research voted on the most impactful ideas by placing a set number of gold stars on the corresponding stickies. Remaining internal team members voted on the most feasible ideas by placing the same number of green dots on the ideas. The result was a visual ranking of the ideas that takes both feasibility and impact into account. This is a good time to break, thank customers for their time, and continue the workshop with internal participants only.

Step 2. Sketch individual future-state flows: Armed with the ranked “big ideas,” internal participants begin the task of translating the ideas into a set of interactions using the design-studio technique of timed rounds of sketching, presentation, and critique. First, individuals silently sketch flows based on the most feasible and impactful big ideas. Next, they present their ideas back to their team for critique. In the example below, we used tangibles (i.e., sticky notes) to capture the critique discussion: The team members called out aspects of the sketches they thought were particularly powerful or well-aligned to known frustrations on green sticky notes (green = good). For aspects of the individual flows that could be improved, they wrote comments on yellow sticky notes (yellow = ideas). These sticky notes were placed directly on the sketches for reference.

Step 3. Create consolidated future-state flows: In the final workshop activity, small groups combine the most powerful ideas and strongest aspects of their individual sketches into one group sketch, reflecting a future-state journey for their scenario. Small groups then present their consolidated journey back to the entire workshop team.

Move quickly after the workshop in order to maintain momentum and make use of the excitement generated in the workshop.

Step 1. Share takeaways: Capture the workshop outputs by taking photos of each artifact and action shots of internal participants and customers working through the activities. (Of course, make sure you have consent ahead of time.) Share these artifacts in a central repository for reference, and capture and share next steps and action items in one place for the entire team.

Step 2. Bring the ideas life: The team members left the workshop with several strong flows and new interactions captured in sketches. Now, they can use iterative design to create low-fidelity prototypes of these flows and test them with customers, continuing to make adaptations based on user feedback.

Step 3. Keep refining the process: As you apply the workshop structure to additional journeys, continue to tweak and refine the activities to be the most successful and productive for your team.

This article provides guidance on a specific set of activities; however, there are many ways to run a journey-mapping workshop. The overall structure and activities are a starting place, created for one specific context. Use this as a starting place and adapt it based on your needs, scope, and limitations.

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Case study: Stimulating the customer journey

“ If marketing has one goal, it’s to reach consumers at the moments that most influence their decisions.” Court, Elzinga, Mulder & Vetvik [1] in The Consumer Decision Journey

Brands need to have knowledge of their touchpoints if they are to be able to influence the moments that matter. Stimulating the customer journey is impossible if you have no idea where to act. Touchpoints are the places where the brand touches the consumer . This could be advertisements, websites, social medias, store environments, employees or review sites, to name a few examples.

In this article, I will continue the working with the Lemonade brand. I will cover what a customer journey is, then I will map out a sample customer journey for Lemonade before suggesting ways it could be stimulated.

This is part II of the Lemonade case. Read the first one here: Case study: Changing public perceptions of insurance .

What is a customer journey?

The customer journey is a collection of touchpoints that some group of customers undertake in their purchase journey. Customer journeys are a marketing tool useful to conceptualize how a consumer becomes a customer. It is an extension of marketing funnels and emphasizes that customer movements toward purchase are not linear.

In theory, the customer journey represents the total brand experience for a given group. Don’t forget the given group part. Brand experiences are highly subjective and can vary significantly between consumers. They are generalizations. To be able to make a generalization of something as complicated as a purchase journey, you need to be specific. That’s why you should approach it based on segments and from the customers point of view.

Mapping out the customer journey

In part I, I said that two of the main challenges Lemonade was facing was forming meaningful relationship with consumers and gaining market share and profitability as the brand expands into new markets.

For this customer journey, the group of customers I will focus on are millennial rent insurance seekers in France. Successful market penetration in Europe is critical for Lemonade. This segment relates directly to that challenge and is the brand’s target demographic.

It’s also an interesting case given that Europeans may be quite skeptical US based insurer and are likely to need more convincing to form trust and a meaningful relationship. Particularly now as it appears that Covid-19 is making people more keen on domestic product and services and perceptions of foreign brands are declining [2] . In France, 47% of people say that they are less favorable towards US based brands and 44% are purchasing fewer products from American brands than they did before Covid-19.

This creates a challenging environment for brands such as Lemonade who is just making their entrance in Europe.

Below is a simplified generalization of the customer journey. It is put forward in a linear way for a more straightforward representation but in reality it is a continuous cycle in which previous experiences influence perception and future behaviour [1] . That is, to process from awareness to purchase may be months but also seconds. For example, a PPC ad may cause a purchase because the person was previously in touch with public relations activity. Conversions may be attributed to recommendations or ads. There is no one path.

Pre-purchase: Awareness

Lemonade generates a lot of awareness from public relations (PR). Likely it is a result of the disruptive approach they adopt to the insurance section. PR also aids in generating word of mouth (WoM). Together these make up the dominating touchpoints at the awareness stage.

However, the brand also invests significantly in Display and PPC ads. By looking at SEMrush data, we can gauge that PPC ads appear slightly more targeted than display and are thus the bridge between awareness and consideration in the journey.

Pre-purchase: Consideration

When aware of and considering Lemonade, the customer typically browses informational pages on Lemonade’s website. He or she also takes advantage of recommendations; both in the form of online reviews and advice from friends and family. Given that insurance is generally what we would call a high involvement category, it is likely that younger people in particular turn to recommendations from peers, family and friends. In turn, I’d say these touchpoints are the most critical within the consideration stage.

The social media ads are complementary to this and serve as reminders and increase salience for the brand which in turns works to maintain Lemonade’s place within the consideration set.

Maya, the friendly bot, represents the first step of purchase in the customer journey. She is a defining factor in the quality of customer experience and her performance in answering informational questions influences whether purchases go through on the website or mobile app.

Post-purchase: Retention

Maya is also a significant touchpoint in the retention section of the journey as she takes on the role of customer service. She is central in the consumer to brand dialogue and largely determines how consumers evaluate their first weeks in business and is instrumental in establishing a loyalty loop [1] .

Email has a similar function. It works to both facilitate purchases and nurture people on their way to become loyal customers. Organic social media also has its role here as a platform for those who are fans of the brand.

Claims fulfillment, led by another bot by the name of Jim, may very well be the most crucial touchpoint of the entire customer journey. Based on the quality of brand experience on this point, people are likely to either become advocates for the brand (or in the least passive loyalists) or it can prompt them to terminate the subscription [3][4] .

Fast and effortless claim resolutions is a defining element in Lemonade’s positioning against the competitions. Therefore, the brand must deliver on its promise on this touchpoint specifically.

Post-purchase: Advocacy

Jim is the gatekeeper to the advocacy stage. A pleasant brand experience with Jim increases the chances that customers recommend Lemonade to their friends and families. A negative experience however is likely to break the loyalty loop and lead people away from the brand.

Those that do become advocates appear to engage with the brands on certain touchpoints. To begin with, Lemonade runs an Art Studio on their Instagram page. Here the brand commissions artists to create vivid work, often using elements of the brand identity and nurtures a community of brand enthusiasts.

Second is the Lifestyle Blog Lemonade hosts on its website. Here advocates can spend their time reading up on the brand’s history and values. In addition, they can also learn practical things about insurance and broader interest areas that all relate to moving into adulthood. These are platforms that people simply wouldn’t invest their time in unless they were devoted to the brand.

Last, and another journey-defining touchpoint, is when customers go mishap-free and donate their leftover payments to a cause of their choosing. Just like with Jim, this is a touchpoint relating to the positioning and brand promise. For each and every customer in the journey, this has the potential to be a huge point of delight that could then cause ripple effects throughout the entire thing through eager word of mouth activity and recommendations.

How can we stimulate the customer journey?

Brands need to understand their touchpoints and how they are navigated by people if they want to influence the customer journey [5] . The touchpoints are endless and to establish an understanding of every single one is an impossible task. That’s why grouping is a powerful exercise.

You can group touchpoints in many different ways. One is to base it on control and the ease to which the brand can influence it. You can do this by mapping out which points are owned by the brand, partners, customers and which are social and external [6] .

Once you have done that, you can better realize what you can influence and pick out those that are relevant to your objective.

Stimulus #1: Increasing engagement through value- and self-congruity

When people experience congruence with a brand and its values, they are more likely to engage with it and become more loyal [7] . This was one of the initiatives lined out in part I . By communicating the brand values though an encompassing campaign, you can increase the inanimateness of the consumer to brand relationship.

Self-congruity between an individual and a brand also has a biasing effect on the functional aspects of the service [8] . For example, feeling a harmony with Lemonade’s values could create an automatic impression of improved satisfaction with functional touchpoints such as interactions with the bots and make customers more forgiving when a bot-related brand experience is subpar.

Stimulus #2: Get the proofs in place

Authenticity is critical when building an emotional relationship. If you can’t back up what you stand for, then no one is going to take you seriously.

When Ørsted rebranded from DONG Energy, it made sure to have the proofs in place. The brand realized as a former oil company it couldn’t expect people to buy in on the new emphasis without walking the talk. That’s made it made sure that no communication was without a factual basis. You might think that this is a no brainer, but so many companies fall in the naive trap of thinking that a visual overhaul is sufficient. It most definitely isn’t, least not in the energy sector. Hence the term greenwashing.

Lemonade can draw inspiration from this and use proofs as a guide for communication. While most other initiatives are based on emotions, this is an opportunity to introduce facts and figures to back it all up. It is a long-term initiative that goes hand in hand with the company’s strategic objectives.

Stimulus #3: Referral scheme

The last suggestion is to implement a referral scheme. Referred customers stay longer with the brand and have a considerably higher lifetime value [9] . People tend to trust recommendations made by peers. Nielsen considers recommendations from friends and family to be the most influential of all marketing vehicles.

Social aspect are already a major part of Lemonade’s customer journey so they can take advantage of this. Referral schemes are often criticized for incentivizing disingenuous opportunists who are only in it for the payout [10] . Whether that is detrimental in the whole is worthy of a debate. But that does not have to matter for Lemonade.

To minimize this threat, and align the program better to the brand values and positioning, Lemonade could offer referrers a proportional match on their cause donation that systematically increases as more friends are recruited by the same referrer. The incentive would then encourage both sides to engage as both referrer and referee participate in making a social impact. Participants could also feel as brand co-creators which increases commitment and has a positive effect on the overall brand experience [11] .

A referral scheme like this is a win/win/win initiative. The referrer can self-express through expertise and early adoption, the referee gets valued recommendation easing his or her decision making, and Lemonade increases its social impact.

Final thoughts

This was the second part of the Lemonade case study. While part I is more strategic, this article focuses more on implementing tactics. I’ll put in the same disclaimer as before. The data this is based of is all on the web and not from any experiences with the brand. It shouldn’t be taken as more than an analysis and suggested actions based on public data. It is however, my hope that you find this valuable and will be able to draw inspiration for this when facing a similar case on your job.

• Ind, N., Iglesias, O., & Schultz, M. (2013). Building Brands Together: Emergence and Outcomes of Co-Creation. California Management Review , 55 (3), 5-26. doi: 10.1525/cmr.2013.55.3.5
• Ind, N., Iglesias, O., & Markovic, S. (2017). The co-creation continuum: From tactical market research tool to strategic collaborative innovation method. Journal of Brand Management, 24 (4), 310–321. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41262-017-0051-7
• Markovic, S., & Bagherzadeh, M. (2018). How does breadth of external stakeholder co-creation influence innovation performance? Analyzing the mediating roles of knowledge sharing and product innovation. Journal of Business Research, 88 , 173–186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2018.03.028
• Kapferer, J. (2012). The new strategic brand management . London: Kogan Page.

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