There’s great value in making customer experience mapping a core competency within any organization:

1. Shift your culture to be more customer-centric

2. Improve the customer experience you deliver

3. Prepare for a customer co-design session

4. Design new processes and solutions for and with internal customers

Our clients and CSM practitioners report that they’ve received great benefits from using the Customer Scenario Mapping technique internally as a tool that helps them become more customer-centric, even without direct customer engagement.

Ideally, you should then take the opportunity to validate the results of internal mapping sessions to the end-customers, whether in a subsequent customer co-design session or in some other engagement, such as a focus group, survey, interview, customer community, or customer advisory board.

REASONS TO MAP YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE WITHOUT END-CUSTOMERS

Customer experience mapping (or our particular variant, Customer Scenario® Mapping) should be part of your toolkit for understanding and improving the end-to-end customer experience you deliver. Using these techniques, you typically assemble a team of employees to map out the end-to-end customer experience journey you want to provide to a typical customer as he or she navigates through his activities in connection with your brand and your organization.

Customer Scenario Mapping without Customers Yields Great Results!

Faithful readers know that we strongly advocate customer co-design for both improving customer experience and for gaining insights about new products, services and processes. We often neglect to mention that for each customer co-design session that we or our clients have run, there are, on average, 10 internal customer mapping sessions that have also taken place. There’s great value in making customer experience mapping a core competency within any organization—whether or not you have the guts and the backing to engage directly with customers.

There are four situations that we have found in which it’s beneficial to do customer scenario mapping without direct engagement with end-customers:

1. Shift your culture to be more customer-centric

2. Improve the customer experience you deliver

3. Prepare for a customer co-design session

4. Design new processes and solutions for and with internal customers

Shift Your Culture to Be More Customer-Centric

How often have you witnessed finger-pointing among different organizational units vis à vis customer issues? “If only the folks in the credit department realized how insulting it is to deny credit and/or to take so long to approve it that our clients go elsewhere. If only our legal department realized how difficult it is for our clients’ lawyers to accept our terms and conditions. If only the product development group would think more carefully about migration issues!” Instead of pointing fingers, get everyone together to map the customer experience.

There’s a lot of value in running Customer Scenario Mapping sessions with cross-functional teams playing the role of customers—putting themselves in your customers’ mindsets’ to address current or potential customer pain points.

In this type of mapping, you want to involve knowledgeable stakeholders from different departments, functions, and business units. It’s a great way to build a shared vision of what the end-to-end customer experience should be and to get everyone on the same page.

This exercise will help your internal teams become both more customer-centric and more cooperative with one another. You put them in their customers’ shoes and let them show how, as customers, they would want to work with your organization to get things done. The very act of assuming the persona of a customer is a very powerful way to help employees think from the customer’s point of view and to see the value of becoming more customer-focused.

For example, a financial services firm wanted to design better cross-channel experiences for customers in different segments. They discovered that their contact center personnel were great at role-playing customers and knew these different types of customers well. These customer service representatives did a great job of mapping out what customers want to do. The CSRs were able to quickly pinpoint the showstoppers for each customer segment.

The CSRs co-designed with product managers, marketing managers, Web site and IVR designers, and customer service operations executives to anticipate and eliminate many issues that had arisen in the past as a result of a new product launch. As a result, they were able to make the online experience, the IVR experience, and the assisted-service experience more consistent, appropriate and seamless across channels. And they were able to agree on and to eliminate the biggest customer-dissatisfiers across several product lines.

The customer service representatives who participated in this internal mapping activity were really impressed. “This is the most efficient way that headquarters has found to solicit my input,” they said. “This is the first time, I’ve felt really heard!” The product managers, marketing managers, and customer experience designers were also delighted that they now had a new language and a much better shorthand with which they could warn one another about potential customer issues. “Don’t do it that way, it won’t work for Ted Techie, and Naïve Nellie will be completely lost.”