Earlier this month, we covered the first two steps in the customer journey mapping process–building the right team and mapping out your current customer journey. So at this point in the process, you’ve gathered customers’ perceptions and emotional reactions to your current customer journey. But what’s next? How should you go about creating the ideal customer journey for your brand and customers? Let’s keep the customer journey mapping train rolling, and dive into step three! Think Big
Mapping out your ideal customer journey is all about “thinking outside the box.” While it may be difficult at first, it’s really important to not get bogged down by all the details. So, try not to get caught up in how difficult or impossible an idea might be to implement. Instead, make sure the entire team considers what’s best for your customer with the understanding that you can focus on how to feasibly implement ideas later. When your team comes together for this step, it usually makes sense to take a similar approach to the one you did for mapping your current customer journey (think: a long wall and lots of post-it notes). It might helpful to have a copy of the current journey map on hand, as it can serve as a reference point in identifying pain points and ensures you’re not forgetting any crucial touchpoints. Keep Customer-focused
Giving your team a set amount of time, such as 30 minutes, is an effective way to get started. During this time, each team member should write down all of their ideas on post-it notes and place them on the wall without any group discussion. Then, the group can come back together to walk through everyone’s ideas. You’ll likely experience some conflicting viewpoints during this part of the process So, keeping the team focused on what’s best for the customer experience at the end of the day is crucial to this part of the process. While mapping out an ideal customer journey might just be the most exciting of the whole journey mapping process, it can also be the longest part because you’ll need to work to come to a group consensus as much as possible. Coming to a group consensus will come in handy when you present your proposed customer journey map to your leadership team along with your proposed action plan and timeline. Having a united front in these types of meetings will help you garner buy-in much faster. It also ensures the actual implementation process of this initiative is smoother since you’ll already have cross-functional supporters behind the change.Although mapping out your ideal customer journey can take some time, this step is critical to the success of the overall initiative. It’s important to allow for a ton of creative, outside-the-box thinking, but, at the end of the day, coming together to reach a group consensus will help throughout the rest of the process. Don’t forget, you can get our complete guide to Customer Journey Mapping here. It gives you step-by-step instructions on how you and your team can effectively and efficiently map out your customer journey.
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