The content of this briefing is taken from Econsultancy’s Customer Journey Mapping Best Practice Guide.
This abridged version will cover:
- Pre-workshop
- Agree who attends
- Find a place
- Agree who moderates
- Create an agenda
- Include personas and hypotheses
- Mapping software.
- During workshop
- Successful facilitation
- Being the customer
- Teamwork
- Capturing conversation,
- Post-workshop
Introduction
Customer journey workshops help stakeholders to create a ‘working journey’. Projects usually begin with a current state journey map to identify pain points for prioritising and fixing.
There may be a number of workshops required. It is common that the initial workshop includes many stakeholders, and then the workshop output is taken to different teams, departments and experts to refine and build the maps, with a final workshop to present the final map.
Some customer journey mapping projects are simple enough to complete with one or two rounds of stakeholder and expert interviews, agreed customer personas, development of agreed layers and a creation of a customer journey hypotheses (which can also be referred to as a ‘heuristic map’) for workshopping, reviews and completion.
Other mapping projects may need multiple rounds of stakeholder reviews, workshops and iterations before it is time to book that big room and get the Post-it Notes and pens out.
For the purpose of this briefing, imagine that the team has got to the stage where:
- Terms of reference for the project are agreed – all teams and individuals are moving collectively and have a shared vision of success and project outcomes
- The right expert stakeholders have been involved at the information and data gathering stage
- The map types and layers have been agreed (see Econsultancy’s Best Practice Guide)
- The right data and information has been used
- The personas have been agreed
- The team has developed hypothesis maps that need to be fully populated in the workshop
- The team has broadly agreed to the number of workshops or iterations of the maps that can fit within the project timeline
1. Pre-workshop
To get to the stage above, the team will have almost certainly decided who will need to attend the workshop to act as a source of information around specific customer touchpoints and possibly any projects or changes that have been planned that will impact the customer journey and their experience.
Customer journey workshops are an amazing way to bring teams together around the unifying and energising concept of “are we doing everything that we can to anticipate, meet and beat our customers’ expectations?” It may sound obvious, but there are some specific things to consider ahead of time to ensure the success of the workshop(s):
Agree who attends
Econsultancy’s Customer Journey Mapping Best Practice Guide looks at which teams and departments could be involved in customer journey mapping projects, whether as sponsors, data and information providers, active developers of the journeys or teams that will make the subsequent required changes. They are categorised as:
- Any teams that represent the ‘voice of the customer’
- Marketing
- Digital
- Sales/business development
- User experience (UX)
- Product owners
- Technical leads
- Loyalty
- Insights
- Senior leaders and executives
Other teams or specialists may be included as the project dictates, such as manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, compliance, human resources or finance.
Chris Donnelly, Founder and CEO of Verb Brands, a digital agency working with luxury fashion, hospitality and lifestyle brands, said that some of the brand’s best customer insight sits within the company: “The Mount Street boutique manager or the hotel concierge will have the best understanding of who the customer is and what they want. Brands should integrate these people within their strategy.”
Karl Brown, Head of Customer Experience at Direct Line Group, talked about how his business successfully involves departments that may not be thought of as consumer facing: “When looking to deliver significant change it is important to involve all areas in ideation sessions to ensure all elements of the experience are considered, including back office functions who are often forgotten.”
When it comes to workshops, attendees do not necessarily have to be the most senior stakeholders from a team or department, but the attendees must:
- Be senior enough to have a broad view of the touchpoints and any ongoing projects or plans that could impact the customer experience
- Have the sufficient power to make any quick key decisions or agree immediate actions to rectify things that cause significant customer pains, e.g. changes to a specific web form
- Be prepared to work collaboratively.
Contributors to Econsultancy’s Customer Journey Mapping Best Practice Guide also talked about the critical role of customers. There are many situations in which including customers in initial mapping workshops would not be suitable, and of course, there may be sensitivities around sharing business data.
However, some contributors said that they have worked on projects where the voice of the customer is represented in the room by an individual or a small group, and the customer has actively participated in the mapping project.
Identify a suitable place and space for the workshop(s)
The majority of customer journey mapping workshops still use physical maps upon which attendees can stick, place, draw or highlight their inputs. Some maps are small and simple enough that a large sheet of paper on a boardroom table is suitable for the teams to work on.
Other maps can be large and complex, needing long walls, more space and more time for teams to develop the maps in sprints.
Virgin Atlantic is developing large enough dedicated space for its customer journey mapping, and will invite consumers in to provide feedback and to help validate the maps.
This means that physical maps can exist, live and ‘breathe’ in a room, and not be moved around the organisation, or quickly digitised and shrunk in size. Most maps usually have to vacate the space that they were created in fairly quickly.
Agree who moderates and facilitates the workshop
Enterprise companies tend to have their own dedicated customer experience teams and so have the capabilities and capacity to run customer journey mapping projects.
Working with consultants and specialists can speed up a project, but also provides an unbiased, critical but diplomatic friend who can ensure that no single team or individual dominates. They can also capture important exchanges and conversations during the workshops that might not be reflected in the maps.
In large groups, it may be necessary to work with more than one moderator and facilitator, such as if more than one customer persona and more than one goal or journey is being reviewed and worked on.
Create an agenda
An agenda should broadly contain:
- Introductions – specifically if there are teams and individuals who do not know each other or work together
- Brief statement of terms of reference of the project and broad desired outcomes
- Statement of desired outcomes from the workshop(s)
- Overview of timings and phasing of the workshop(s)
- If the team have not worked on previous mapping sessions, it is helpful to state desired behaviours and what should be avoided as well as places to park any ideas or issues that should be reviewed, but outside of the workshop
- Presentation of the personas and maps
- A run through of workshop phases and tasks for attendees – for example:
- Each will take one persona and add high level information to the current state customer hypothesis map (e.g. emotions, pain points)
- Each team will present back to the wider group
- Wider group will build and develop map
- Wider group agrees priority high-value quick wins and fixable pain points for immediate action
- Post-workshop – identify teams and experts who will review digital versions of maps and priority actions and provide feedback
- Summary of next steps and follow ups.
Develop and print or pin up your personas and hypothesis/heuristic maps
Again, there are many possible approaches here. Even large organisations will use the classic approach of using masking tape, long rolls of paper, a ruler and Sharpies to draft the agreed layers of the heuristic or customer journey hypothesis maps.
Printing handouts of the organisation’s personas is also helpful so that teams can constantly refer back to the customer and information about them. This lo-fi approach does not have to mean low quality.
Mapping software
Most of the interviewees for this report use visual designers and digital tools to help with the mapping process. There are a number of tools that can help marketers create personas from templates and also template customer journey maps. Some are free and low cost.
Others are enterprise level tools with additional features such as workflow management and reporting. Here are some tools that were mentioned by our interviewees:
- UXPressia – low-cost web-based persona and customer journey mapping tool
- Smaply – low-cost web-based persona and customer journey mapping tool
- Whimsical – low-cost web-based flowchart, wireframe and mind mapping tool
- Canvanizer – low-cost, simple web-based mapping tool
- CFN Insight – enterprise-level mapping and customer experience workflow software that includes reporting.
Consider which layers should appear in the map and how many people will need to collaborate on the document physically and digitally before choosing the software and tools required.
This software is useful ahead of the workshop, when considering which layers and information to add to the hypothesis maps and to create large printed maps to work on in the workshops.
It is also useful to help capture the outputs during the session, on top of any video or photography that might be used to record outputs.
2. During the workshop
Most workshops are energising and highly successful sessions. Usually, attendees arrive with a positive mindset and understand what is required of them.
Contributors to Econsultancy’s Customer Journey Mapping Best Practice Guide spoke about occasional understandable disagreements between some individuals and teams, but not one spoke negatively of any projects they had been involved in.
Successful facilitation
It is important that workshops are run well by facilitators with the ability to channel energy and input from attendees. Successful workshop facilitators need to:
- Be seen to have gravitas by senior stakeholders and give space to others in the room to speak and contribute
- Be able to keep the workshop(s) on track
- Direct teams to park specific issues or pain points that could dominate the discussion
- Resolve disagreements or lengthy discussions that could lead to conflict and project derailment
- Get teams to openly address issues that they may be reluctant to discuss
- Get teams to balance their opinions with facts/data
- Draw quick wins from the workshop
- Reflect the progress being made to keep momentum and energy levels up
- Recognise blockers and when to move the session on.
Bring the customer in and ‘be the customer’
This does not have to be literal. There is no need to grab an actual customer out of the store, off the street or beam them in via a video link.
Example personas and journeys could be introduced not just by highlighting the persona and map, but perhaps playing a video of a real customer’s journey.
Other ways to bring the customer into the session is to bring in real artefacts, such as phones or devices they use, receipts or invoices, photos and even printed transcripts from them.
Consultant Aliza Pollack has had success with this approach. She says using video provides “an unforgettable story of a person which resonates with busy, marketing clients and product designers who are often stuck in their own respective discipline weeds”.
She continues: “In talking with consumers, I like to have them bring any artefacts that can ground their experiences in some reality in order to manage gaps in recall and biases.”
Another approach is to assign individual stakeholders or have small stakeholder teams act as representatives of the consumer (through transcripts or video), having those stakeholders own that persona representation.
They must be that person in the workshop and think like them, consider their motivations and their emotions.
This approach can encourage ownership and empathy. When someone has to be someone else, they have to think hard and laterally about motivations and why people do what they do, and often behave in different ways to ourselves.
This approach does not completely eliminate personal biases and opinions, but it does set up important context around behaviours that is great fuel for any product or communications development.
Figure 1: A mapping workshop at Tribal Worldwide London
Source: Tribal Worldwide London
Collective, small team or individual work
The interviewees for Econsultancy’s Customer Journey Mapping Best Practice Guide mentioned that, in most cases, their workshop sessions include sprints of activity where everyone or small teams work on all or some parts of the journey. After these sprints, there are sessions of collective reflection and iteration, with individuals or teams providing further context, information or data.
Finally, there is usually a summary session to prioritise actions, usually by quick fixes or identifying those that are high priority/value that may need further investigation post-workshop.
The role of teams and individuals in the workshop will be entirely dictated by the project goals and its complexity, as well as by the number of people available, and their roles.
Some projects have a scribe – someone who does not participate but takes notes and even starts to digitise the physical map during the session using journey mapping software.
Capture the wider conversation
As well as asking attendees to build and iterate the maps and add their individual and collected views to them, it can be useful to record sessions.
Marketing elements of the customer journey can be subjective and there may be additional value that comes from the sessions that could help shape messaging and campaigns in the future, but has no bearing on the map itself.
One of the occasional outcomes of the workshop is the recognition that more information or data might be needed. Brandwatch’s Head of User Experience Research Evi Malisianou explains that some assumptions from the workshop may also need to be validated: “If there are different opinions, that is a clear indication of lack of information, in which case we need to dig deeper and do more research.
“Our processes and methodologies are user-centred so when we identify opinions that are based on assumptions, we will aim to put these in front of our users. Product decisions should not be based on unvalidated assumptions.”
3. Post-workshop
While phases of the project may be completed, the maps are living and breathing visualisations of the work that still has to be done to help customers reach a nirvana-like state where there is zero pain or friction.
UXPressia’s CX Lead Consultant Yana Sanko backed up this theory: “The last thing you want is for your customer journey map to become a wallpaper. It should be evolving together with your company and its customers. Generally, it’s a good rule of thumb to plan for revision and update time as soon as you are done mapping and prioritising ideas.”
The amount of post-workshop activity required will be determined by the complexity and scope of the project. In most cases, a workshopped map will be produced for one or several rounds of feedback from experts to refine key areas and to help prioritise actions further.
These workshopped maps are most frequently digitised by using journey mapping software, but in some cases can be designed to sit in a place where the wider organisation can see and provide further feedback and challenge to the journey.
Chris Donnelly, Founder and CEO of Verb Brands, spoke of a customer journey map, painted creatively on a blackboard in the staff break out area of the brand’s office. It was purposefully placed where employees made drinks and meals to allow them to linger and reflect on the customer journey.
They could also consider how their day-to-day activity affected the customer. All employees were invited to add their thoughts and feedback with chalk provided next to the map.
“It really worked, according to the brand,” Donnelly says. “It helped those who weren’t involved in the mapping workshops to feel that their feedback mattered and that they were involved, but it also provided really useful further insight and information.”
Taking this into consideration, the post-workshop map should have a point where the project team feels that it is well developed enough to be able to inform and drive change, but also should be reviewed either on an ongoing basis or at agreed check in points.
Each customer journey mapping project has its lifecycle, whether that is a few weeks or a few months, but it is important to create the projects with the understanding that external and internal factors can all impact the customer experience.
A ‘living document’ does not imply that there is no record or measurement of success. It is essential to keep records of different version of maps to compare with past and future journeys, as well as measure the impact of any changes.
This important cyclical relationship between past and future projects is summed up by Malisianou: “Customer journeys should be informed every time a research study is complete and has gained insights that can inform a current state journey.”
Customer Journey Mapping Best Practice Guide.
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