Have you gone through some journey mapping exercises, only to find that the maps don’t deliver what they experts said they would?
Have your maps failed you?
What happened? Did you pick a scenario, put some paper on the wall, distribute Post-It Notes, and tell people to start writing down the steps to fore said scenario? And then said, “Now what?”
It’s really a shame that so many people experience and tell this same story, which ends in frustration and disbelief.
Done right, though, journey maps are powerful tools to help you understand the customer experience, identify painpoints and moments of truth, and prioritize redesign elements that matter most to the customer.
So I was thrilled to work with GMC Software to co-author a whitepaper titled “Don’t Waste Your Time with Journey Maps.” The paper is based on the following problem statement:
Customer journey maps are useless because they’re just not actionable. They don’t allow the customer experience professional to identify and to improve those items or areas that have the greatest impact on the customer and his experience.
Of course, you know how I feel about journey mapping by now, so I hope you’ll take a moment to download the whitepaper, read it, and use the tips I provide to make sure your journey maps are not a waste of time.
As a follow-on to the whitepaper, I had a lively conversation with Mirza Baig as we recorded GMC Software’s first podcast and launched their InspireCast series. The three-part “CX Talk” interview was released last week, and we covered the gamut of CX topics, which you can hear by clicking on the links below:
Customer journey mapping for business (part 1: challenges and best practices)
Customer journey mapping for business (part 2: ownership, measurement, and maintenance)
Each segment lasts 15-20 minutes, so if you can’t listen to them all now, please bookmark these and come back to finish listening later. Mirza asks me some great questions and probes deeper into some of the content in the whitepaper.
Remember: You can’t transform something you don’t understand. Journey maps are a critical tool to help you understand the current state of the customer experience. And they can do so much more.
If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it. –Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird
Image courtesy of GMC Software
Original Post: http://www.cx-journey.com/2016/04/have-your-journey-maps-failed-you.html
