I don’t know about you, but any time I hear someone say they’ve figured out a way to take something to ‘the next level’, I almost immediately ask myself what the current level is. That way, after I listen to what they have to say, I can make an accurate evaluation of whether their recommendation(s) did, in fact, advance things beyond the current level. And if so, I can then determine just how significant that advancement was.
So, if you’re like me, after reading the title of this blog, you might be wondering what the current level of Customer Experience Mapping is. Let’s start with the basics.
Current State of Customer Experience Mapping
Currently defined, Customer Experience Mapping (CEM) “is a process for discovering how your potential customers or new users feel as they engage with your product [or solution]”1. During this process, all the touchpoints (tasks, activities, platforms, etc.) a customer will go through as they engage/progress with your company are examined from the customer’s perspective. Questions typically asked during the CEM process are as follows:
- Who are the customers (or customer personas) engaging with your organization?
- What are these customers looking to achieve (or get out of) through their engagement?
- What tasks and activities do customers have to accomplish to achieve what they’re looking for as they engage?
- What phases will customers be going through as they progress in their engagement?
- What pain points might each of these personas be facing during each of these phases?
Leveraging the Answers Arrived at During the CEM Process
The answers to these questions (and so many others) as you progress through the CEM process not only helps you and your organization “discover insights and reduce friction” for customers, but also ensures that all customer “touchpoints function holistically in a positive manner” 1. Upon completion of this process, a Customer Experience Map (or Customer Journey Map) is generated to visualize the experience.
What do almost all Current Customer Experience Maps Have in Common?
A quick Google search for ‘Customer Experience Map’ or ‘Customer Journey Map’ will generate an abundance of examples of the maps produced during the CEM process. And if you were to review these examples, you’d likely start to pick up on some commonalities:
- These maps tend to provide a high-level overview of some of the phases of the end-to-end Customer Experience/Journey
- Most of the time, the Marketing and/or Sales phases tend to be the phases highlighted
- There is a heavy focus on what the customer will be thinking/feeling as s/he engages
- The high-level customer touchpoints are typically identified
- These maps tend to visualize the ideal scene (i.e., if everything goes according to plan)
- General indications of customer desired outcomes/objectives are provided
The number of available examples that can be found online, the growing number of experience/journey mapping tools being made available, and the increasing belief that “the customer experience is the key to building successful relationships that translate into loyal customers”2 might lead you to think that the current level of CEM is high.
So how do we take CEM to the next level?
Identify the End-to-End Journey
We can start by ensuring that all phases of the end-to-end Customer Experience/Journey are mapped. The current CEM process tends to focus heavily on mapping the customer experience during the Marketing and/or Sales phases. Yes, sometimes the Onboarding phase is included as well. But, as a whole, current Customer Experience Maps tend to leave out the customer experience during the Adoption and/or Renewal phases. Or, if these phases are included, they typically are lumped into one overall phase often labeled as the ‘Loyalty’ phase. If the goal is to create an overall experience that motivate customers to remain loyal, then we need to ensure these latter phases in the end-to-end Customer Experience/Journey are also mapped with the same rigor and scrutiny as the earlier phases.
Identify All Stakeholder Experiences
As we are mapping all phases of the end-to-end Customer Experience/Journey, we can ensure that we are identifying the correct customer stakeholders that need to be engaged during the mapping process for each individual phase. For example, the customer stakeholder(s) you will be engaging during the Marketing and/or Sales phases likely won’t be the same customer stakeholder(s) you will be engaging during the Onboarding and/or Adoption phases. There may also be different customer stakeholders that will be engaging during the Renewal phase. The various customer stakeholders (and their respective personas) need to be accounted for to ensure you are capturing the wholistic customer perspective.
Including the Organization Perspective
These two recommendations should raise the bar for current CEM. But perhaps the greatest way to improve current CEM is to couple it with a mapping process for delivering the identified customer experience from an organizational perspective.
Yes, current CEM identifies the experience customers are seeking. What it doesn’t address, however, is the role the organization will play in creating/providing/delivering/enabling the identified customer experience.
Let that sink in for a moment.
In addition to looking at customer expectations/desired outcomes, we should also be identifying the expectations/desired outcomes of the organization. For example, what does an organization require for a customer to be considered ‘Onboarded’ or what adoption rates is an organization striving to get customers to achieve? More importantly, we should be looking for ways to align (and achieve!) the expectations/desired outcomes of both customers and the organization.
Internal Stakeholders
Beyond looking at customer stakeholders and personas, we should also be identifying the individuals and/or teams within the organization who will be responsible for engaging and moving customers through each phase of the end-to-end customer experience/journey. The organization stakeholders who engage customers in the Sales phase, as an example, will not be the same organization stakeholders who engage customers during the Onboarding and/or Adoption phases. By looking at both customer and organization stakeholders/personas, we can position the correct organization stakeholders/personas to engage with the correct customer stakeholders/personas at the correct moments throughout the end-to-end customer experience/journey.
Organizational Tasks and Activities
And what about the tasks/activities the organization will undertake to both provide customers with what they’re looking for while simultaneously achieving organizational objectives? For example, if customers need/want to do ‘x’ task during the Onboarding phase, what are the exact proactive steps the organization will take during onboarding to help customers perform this task with as little effort or frustration as possible? Likewise, if customers have indicated they won’t see value from a solution unless they see high adoption rates amongst their team members, what proactive communications will the organization engage customers with during the Adoption phase to help drive increased adoption rates amongst their team members and by what medium(s) will these engagements occur? Organizational tasks/activities need to be designed in a way that support and enhance the experience customers go through as customers are performing tasks they want/need to perform and/or engaging in activities they want/need to engage in.
Status Checks
Finally, how will the organization know if a customer is progressing along the identified ideal scene experience, and perhaps more importantly, what will the organization do should a customer deviate from the ideal scene in a negative way? There needs to be status checks inserted into each phase of the end-to-end customer experience/journey to verify if either the customer and/or the organization are progressing in a way that is beneficial to both the customer and the organization. Likewise, when those status checks are performed, should the outcome result in situations where a customer (or the organization!) are not progressing according to the ideal (or desired) scene, the organization needs to map out the specific tasks/activities that will take place to get things back on track.
Specific Suggestions to take CEM to the Next Level
Because the current CEM process doesn’t tend to account for the role the organization will play in creating/providing/delivering/enabling the identified customer experience, here are my two suggestions for taking CEM to the next level:
Suggestion #1 – Modify the current definition of CEM as follows:
Customer Experience Mapping (CEM) “is a process for discovering how your potential customers or new users feel as they engage with your product [or solution]”1. During this process, all the touchpoints (tasks, activities, platforms, etc.) a customer will go through as they engage/progress with your company are examined from the customer’s perspective.
The CEM process is also a process for discovering how your organization will enable/deliver the above-mentioned experience with customers. All the proactive activities and touchpoints (messages, meetings, platforms, etc.) your organization will execute as they engage/progress with your customers are examined from the organization’s perspective.
By looking at the customer experience from the perspective of your customers as well as how your organization will enable/deliver that experience, the CEM process not only helps you and your organization “discover insights and reduce friction” for customers, but also ensures that all customer “touchpoints function holistically in a positive manner” 2.
Suggestion #2 – The outcomes of the CEM process should be two maps:
Map 1 – A Customer Experience Map designed from the customer’s perspective. These are the maps that you see today.
Map 2 – A Customer Experience Enablement Map designed from the perspective of the organization. These are the maps that you rarely see today.
Both maps could be used to support development or enhancement of the other. After all, organizations need to ensure customers are having a great experience. Likewise, customers want to have confidence that organizations are positioned to deliver a great experience. Combined, then, these two maps represent a major portion of the overall customer experience.
Expanding the definition of CEM and ensuring the CEM process produces both a Customer Experience Map as well as a Customer Experience Enablement Map would dramatically take CEM to the next level.
Sources
1 Customer Experience Mapping: What Is It And How To Do It? by Andrew Broadbent
2 Why Customer Experience Matters (and What You’re Doing Wrong) by James Kessinger
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Mike Zahller is the Head of CX Enablement, XaaS Center of Excellence, Global Serivces - HPE/Aruba
Mike has an extensive background in the areas of Marketing, Sales, Customer Experience, and Customer Success which he has leveraged to design and enable Custom Experiences/Journeys which not only help Customers achieve their desired outcomes, but also help organizations achieve their strategic objectives. Mike and his team continuously coordinate with multiple delivery teams/stakeholders throughout Aruba and HPE in an effort to enable Customer Experiences/Journeys for the various SaaS, NaaS, XaaS, and Support services HPE/Aruba offers.
