Customer Experience

We believe that the experience of using a product or service goes beyond the product or service itself. We look at all of the customer touchpoints to help companies put in place the components that make an experience great.

Check out our blog posts on Customer Experience

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer Journey Mapping is the process of visually mapping the customer’s interactions across the various touch points of the customer experience. The key to journey mapping is that it not only identifies the interactions but also the emotions the customer is feeling throughout those interactions. One of the most powerful tools in a journey map is the identification of the customer goals and pain points and using those to identify the opportunity areas for action.

Internal Journey Mapping Workshops

We often start the journey mapping processing by bringing together a cross functional internal team to create a draft of the customer journey from the internal point of view. This allows us to understand many of the touchpoints and known hassles before we head into customer research. It also helps to get the internal teams, beyond just customer experience, engaged and invested in the journey mapping process.

Co-Creating Journey Maps with Customers

The key to developing an impactful journey map is conducting research with real customers to understand their journey. You can use a variety of research methods to gather the insights on your customers’ journey. We find that one of the most powerful ways to develop a journey map is to co-create the map with real customers. We do that in a 3-hour interactive hands-on workshop that includes lots of engaging exercises.

Designing the Customer Journey Map

We customize the journey map layout, components, and design for each of our projects depending on industry, product, customers, what you will be using the map for internally, etc. You can use your journey map to understand where customers are feeling emotional lows (unsatisfied, disappointed, frustrated, etc.) and strategize around ways to make those experiences a high. Conversely, you can look at the highs and strategize about ways to leverage those highs for loyalty, referrals, etc.

Talk to us about developing journey maps based on personas.

Your customer journey map could look something like this…

Putting the Journey Maps to Work

Once you have created customer journey maps, the next step is socializing the maps. There are lots of ways to make the maps actionable. One of our favorites is hosting a journey mapping day with internal teams. We create custom games and exercises that employees engage with that help them dig deep into the customer journey and start to see how their role impacts customer experience and also opportunities for improving the customer experience.

Employee Experience

Building a culture of happy and engaged employees is important for many reasons not the least of which is the impact to customer experience. We approach employee experience design and improvement in a similar fashion to customer experience. We start with conducting “research” with employees in the form of focus groups, interviews or interactive workshops. In our workshops we bring employees together and use exercises and games to dig in and better understand their overall experiences and also ideate around the opportunities for improvement. Employees find the workshops fun and enjoy having their voice heard in a constructive way. The output from these workshops is mapped similar to a customer journey map. After the maps are created we work closely with teams to build the strategy and action plans to move towards building a culture of happy employees. Check out our blog post to learn more about how we approach mapping the employee journey.

Here is an example of a sample journey map that shows the employee journey from when they first look for a job to ongoing loyalty and advocacy.

In the realm of employee experience, the happiness of your customer support agents is an important focus. Check out our blog post about how improving the customer service agent experience can ultimately improve the experience of your customers.

We believe strongly in improving employee experience — so much so that we developed a whole toolkit to help companies embark on a successful Employee Journey Mapping initiative. The toolkit includes step-by-step instructions, tools, templates, and checklists to help you hit the ground running. Download it here. Reach out to us if you need some help using the toolkit or want to just talk about Employee Journey Mapping!

Clearworks

Customer Experience