Customer Experience Management is a hot topic, and understanding and “managing” customers’ cross-channel journeys sits at its heart. We have developed an approach to quickly and efficiently make progress in customer journey mapping and thereby ‘engineer’ your customer experience.

Many companies concentrate their journey mapping efforts on “getting the processes right”. This approach is likely to see quality and consistency improvements, but often at the cost of the customer feeling ‘processed’, plus opportunities can be lost because the customer doesn’t want to “do it your way”.

We believe that Customer Experience designers must understand that how the customer felt about the experience is very often more important than what was physically done.

Another common approach is to design the experience from the inside out, starting with the corporate desired outcomes. This can result in journeys that describe rather one-way “what we’ll do to you” communications (i.e. contact/DM plans) rather than engender genuine engagement and dialogue.

In our experience “inside out” is also a mistake. Customers view their journeys differently to the way organisations do, so we believe that experience design must be “outside-in”.

Sophisticated companies design ‘blueprint experiences” for key journeys. These are based on customer needs & wants, and the journeys almost always extend beyond the internal processes of the company, and sometimes cover important elements of the experience that are not within the company’s control.