When organizations strive to create customers for life or create exceptional customer experiences, there is understandably a large focus on journey mapping. As customer experience expert Kerry Bodine mentions in her blog, journey mapping does a great job of capturing important content, such as your customer personas, key customer touch points and the timeline for that journey. All of this is foundational knowledge that an organization must have. But, once you’ve created your journey map . . . now what? How do you turn that insight into action?

It’s time to establish the emotional and intellectual connection between your team members and your customer’s journey. While journey maps are helpful and wonderful tools, they are typically shared with only a few select people in an organization – usually internal customer experience teams and high-level leaders – and not the people in the field that actually have to deliver the customer experience! One of the reasons why they aren’t used beyond a small, initial team is because the information isn’t packaged in a compelling way – making it difficult to successfully create those emotional and intellectual connections that are essential to building powerful customer experiences.

This is when you might start to leverage creative methods (such as Learning Maps) that use facilitated dialogue, conceptual illustrations and metaphors to help people discover your customer journey in a visual way and encourage conversations that create a common understanding.

People will tolerate the conclusions of their leaders, but will ultimately act on their own. And so, it’s best for people to come to their own conclusions. It can be very powerful when you allow everyone in your organization to discover the why, what and how behind your customer strategy. Done in the right way, everyone can have the information that helps them understand the business environment, what the competition is doing, how market forces are impacting your business and what that means for your customers. These marketplace realities will help your people grasp the importance of building customer relationships and enable them to understand how their role affects the entire customer experience – both customer- and non-customer-facing interactions.

Four Musts:

  1. You must connect your customer’s journey to your specific customer strategy and the interactions you believe your customers want to have with your organization and its solutions or products.
  2. You must be able to articulate an aligned view of what your customer-first culture is. Start by asking yourself: how do we want everyone in our organization to act when it comes to our customers?
  3. You must empower the managers in your business to act like owners, so they can make the right decisions for their teams and enable their people to do the right thing for your customers – at every touch point.
  4. Finally, you must be able to help your frontline understand how they support your strategy, while still being able to deliver an authentic experience.

The journey map is only the beginning.

June 21, 2016

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