each customer group as they interact with the company from start to finish.
What Is Not Customer Journey Mapping?
Many people mistake journey mapping for an inside-out view of their interactions to a customer, not taking into account that the customer is actually doing many things invisible to the company or not actually seeing that outbound lob that a company is pushing out. Many companies also focus on their email or Web sites—the easiest place to track a customer. That results in seeing a digital clickstream that shows the company where its customers move around its mobile or digital properties. Unless that's the company's only way of interacting with its customers and vice versa, then it only sees a portion of the big picture.
CJM is also not looking at a company's database using analytics around aggregate performance or response metrics. Remember, customers are feeling beings who can think, and mapping will need to evaluate emotional elements as well as rational.
Finally, it's not the equivalent of any single-dimension measure, such as Net Promoter Score or a social sentiment measure. Both of these elements serve a purpose, but they tend to measure only those willing to take the time to give a company a score and don't usually measure what or why, which are critical components a decision maker needs to know to create a journey that is frictionless, simple, and effective.
EXHIBIT 3.7 Airline/Flight Customer Journey Map
Source: East Bay Group, 2021
What Makes a Good Map?
The best maps provide:
A visualization of customer interactions through many filters (emotional/ rational) organized by the customer's perspective.
A living document that evolves with the constantly changing organization it supports.
A harmonized reflection of the voice of the customer (VoC) as well as the voice of the institution (VoI) and the voice of the employee (VoE).
CJM Outcomes
The outcomes of customer journey mapping are varied. Most at least provide insights into the company that help to bring a reality forward that it's not what a company has designed and wants to sell but what the customer wants to buy. In addition, it exposes where to spend resources to ensure that the company is competitive and has its finger on the customers' pulse. Some of the more tactical outputs tend to be:
Low-hanging fruit. Quick fixes or opportunities that don't require a lot of time or resources to provide revenue or customer engagement/retention.
Performance metrics/dashboard recommendations. What key pivot points really make a difference versus sometimes too inwardly facing metrics.
Input into standard operating procedures (SOP) document. How you should be interacting, over what channel, and with what messaging and cadence. This ties to communication and precision campaign plans as well.
Road map initiative charters. Next steps for bigger projects.
Post-project planning for continuous improvement. Mapping will be revisited at frequent intervals to ensure that there is progress and to reveal other areas requiring improvement or offering opportunity.
Our goal for this chapter has been to give the reader a grounded perspective of how Learning Relationships enable enterprises to develop more personalized and collaborative interactions with individual customers. Our next step is to begin to understand the business sense of building a customer-strategy enterprise. Learning Relationships, after all, result in many pragmatic and financial benefits, not only for the customer but also for the enterprise that engages in them. The objective of increasing the overall value of the customer base by getting, keeping, and growing one customer, and then another and another, is achieved through these highly interactive relationships.
The enterprise determined to increase the value of the customer base will start with a commitment to increase customer value through better experiences and then move to implement the strategic levels of the Learning Relationship. The tasks needed to make this happen are: identifying their customers individually, ranking them by their value to the company, differentiating them by their needs, interacting with each of them, and customizing some aspect of the business for each. From the enterprise's perspective, these tasks are by no means chronological or finite. We will examine each of them more carefully in the next chapters.
Notes
1 1 Harvard Business Review, “Know Your Customers' ‘Jobs to Be Done’,” September 2016.
2 2 See Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi, The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty (New York: Portfolio, 2013); they described a survey of some 97,000 consumers conducted by their employer, the Corporate Executive Board (CEB).
3 3 Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine, Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business (New Harvest, 2012).
4 4 Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine, Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business (New Harvest, 2012).
5 5 Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine, Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business (New Harvest, 2012).
6 6 Effortless Experience, Kindle loc. 1012-1019.
7 7 Outside In, Kindle loc. 287.
8 8 Outside In, Kindle loc. 288.
9 9 See Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., Extreme Trust: Turning Proactive Honesty and Flawless Execution into Long-Term Profits (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2016).
10 10 Full disclosure: One of the textbook's authors (Rogers) serves as the Chairman of the Board, and the other (Peppers) serves on the board of SuiteCX. Valerie Peck formerly served as a Senior Vice President of Peppers & Rogers Group and is also the Founder of East Bay Group Consulting. SuiteCX's competitors include UXPressia, Decooda International, Strativity Group, and MURAL.
11 11 Oracle, “Global Insights on Succeeding in the Customer Experience Era,” February 2013, available at http://www.oracle.com/us/global-cx-study-2240276.pdf,
