How To Use Journey Maps To Kick-Start A Customer Experience Transformation | Forrester
Customer Experiences
Journey maps are powerful artifacts that can catalyze your organization’s customer experience (CX) transformation.
This guide will show you how to leverage existing journey maps to spur enthusiasm for and investment in CX. You’ll discover how journey maps can serve as a springboard to:
• Prioritize CX projects that will have the greatest business impact.
• Improve the efficacy of CX measurement.
• Design experiences that drive loyalty.
Why You Can Get More Mileage From Existing Journey Maps
Numerous organizations create journey maps, store them in a content repository, and then neglect further engagement. Consequently, CX professionals often face frustration, having invested significant time and effort into journey mapping without reaping positive ROI.
To ensure your maps pave the way for success before embarking on transformative initiatives, consider the following questions:
- Do your journey maps have a clear purpose?
- Do they comprehensively cover your CX ecosystem’s breadth and depth?
- Are they centered around customers’ goals?
- Have customers validated them?
- Have they been internally shared and easily understood?
- Do key stakeholders, including executives, commit to them?
To enhance this situation, shift your perspective on journey mapping, or any CX tool, from the end goal to focus on the outcomes it can generate. Journey maps are adaptable tools that, within a broader ecosystem alongside methodologies like design thinking and agile development, as well as complementary artifacts like empathy maps, can identify opportunities to retain customers, enhance employee experience (EX), reduce costs, and boost customer satisfaction.
Use Journey Maps To Prioritize CX Projects
Seventy-seven percent of CX organizations lack a systematic approach to prioritizing projects. If your team falls into this category, it exposes you to various risks, including inefficient resource utilization, negative ROI, diminishing stakeholder buy-in, and stagnant or declining customer satisfaction. For many, these challenges are already pressing, with 48% of CX leaders identifying buy-in as their most significant obstacle.
Implementing a prioritization framework based on customer journeys for CX projects can ensure resource efficiency and focus on projects with both high feasibility and significant business benefits. By mapping journeys from the customer’s perspective, CX teams gain clarity on the location of pain points, allowing them to address the most critical issues as perceived by customers rather than relying on internal stakeholders’ assumptions.
Commencing with quick wins can demonstrate momentum and attract investment for more substantial projects. For instance, KPMG’s mapping of seven journeys unveiled 30 potential projects. The organization developed a framework to evaluate projects based on customer desirability, feasibility, and project viability, streamlining the selection process and enabling the identification of the top two projects to initiate.
Improve The Efficacy Of CX Measurement
Despite drowning in data, many CX professionals still thirst for meaningful insights due to challenges in measurement strategies. The common pitfalls include measuring the wrong metrics and overreliance on surveys, with 70% of companies not progressing beyond surveys for CX measurement.
This limited approach fails to capture the evolving sentiments of customers throughout their journey. Journey maps offer a solution by providing an outside-in perspective, breaking the pattern of organizing measurements based on internal touchpoints.
For instance, a shoe retailer addressing a decline in customer satisfaction around returns may attribute it to the in-store experience. However, a journey-centric view could reveal the root cause:
- an error in the purchasing department’s size chart, leading to ill-fitting shoes.
- Adopting a holistic perspective helps identify genuine problems and assess the effectiveness of remediation efforts.
- preventing wasted resources on initiatives unlikely to yield significant ROI.
Embed Customer Insights Into Your Organization
Prioritizing a journey-centric approach is advantageous for business, as organizations adopting a customer-journey-at-scale strategy often experience revenue growth of 10% to 20%, cost reductions ranging from 15% to 25%, and notable improvements in customer advocacy by 20 to 40 percentage points.
Lloyds Banking Group exemplifies this success, whose journey-centric digital transformation contributed to an estimated £500 million (approximately $589 million) in savings and revenue increases over three years. Embracing journey-centricity is an ongoing process that should adapt to your business’s evolving needs.
Here is a concise overview of activities that can steer your organization toward journey-centricity:
Design Experiences That Drive Loyalty
Customer journeys represent the tangible experiences of customers and are pivotal for organizations transitioning from an inside-out to an outside-in perspective. This shift yields substantial benefits, as demonstrated by Lloyds Banking Group (LBG), which, within two years, realized significant improvements:
- Enhanced digital offerings: Mobile customers gained access to both basic and advanced features, such as booking branch appointments.
- Increased customer satisfaction: LBG witnessed a surge in positive feedback, with a remarkable 78% increase in satisfaction for a previously challenging aspect of the corporate pension journey.
- Enhanced employee productivity: Value-add capacity for employees rose by 40%.
- Sales growth: Improved tools and processes for online personal loan applications led to a 40% increase in overall credit acceptance and the path to purchase, with average loan amounts rising by £700 ($826) at subsidiaries Halifax and Lloyds Bank.
- Accelerated speed to market: LBG reduced the time to bring ideas to live products or services from 12 to 18 months to just four to five months. LBG’s success stemmed from adopting journey-centric thinking across its digital and broader organizations. According to Jon Webster, former CIO of digital and transformation, the organization shifted focus from solving isolated online issues to holistic customer experience improvement, addressing touchpoints, policies, and procedures. LBG concentrated on transforming 10 key customer journeys, emphasizing speedy resolution of customer pain points to facilitate rapid innovation.
Next Steps
How do you initiate your CX transformation using journey maps? For newcomers to journey mapping, kick-starting with an initial success story is key. Employ a quick-fire approach, addressing a well-known, preferably time-sensitive problem that a core group of stakeholders can quickly resolve and measure. This approach swiftly demonstrates the practical and valuable aspects of journey mapping in solving broader CX issues.
Factors such as company culture, skill sets, budget, urgency, and bandwidth influence the decision to create journey maps in-house or enlist an outside firm. For firms where journey mapping is established, assemble an action-oriented, cross-functional team to create a journey atlas—a catalog of customers’ journeys across their relationship with the company.
Scale, pain points, misalignments, stakeholder willingness to act, and external factors like technology or regulatory changes should guide the prioritization of journeys.
Review the journey atlas with stakeholders, conduct a prioritization exercise, and then address priority journeys in order. Assign ownership to business units or individuals with authority. Over time, enhance your CX team’s skills, consider adding journey mapping to competency models, and formalize it as an accreditation for employees, promoting accountability and sustainability.
The Table of Contents of “How To Use Journey Maps To Kick-Start A Customer Experience Transformation” Guide:
- Journey maps are powerful artifacts that can catalyze your organization’s customer experience (CX) transformation.
- Why You Can Get More Mileage From Existing Journey Maps
- Use Journey Maps To Prioritize CX Projects
- Improve The Efficacy Of CX Measurement
- Embed Customer Insights Into Your Organization
- Design Experiences That Drive Loyalty
- Next Steps
Number of Pages:
- 10 pages
Pricing:
- Free
