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When In Doubt, Always Walk In The Customer’s Shoes

How many times do we remark when faced with a frustrating

experience at a restaurant or a hospital or while speaking to a

customer service rep that “these people just don’t understand how I

feel and what I have to go through”.

Too often when we think of a customer, our view is filtered through the lens of our job or

profession or company. Let’s consider the typical experience in a hospital: In most cases,

hospitals are designed by specialty, patients are considered as objects having some sort of

illness to be objectively evaluated, their health condition to be observed, recorded and

discussed among other specialists. The hospital system is designed with the convenience of the

specialist in mind, rarely for the needs of the patient. A hospital, just like most organizations,

views each customer from their own departmental, siloed lens.

However, from research we know that, patients care about their experience of health care as

much as clinical effectiveness and safety of the hospital. They want to feel informed, supported

and listened to so that they can make meaningful decisions and choices about their care. They

want to be treated as a person not a number. In a recent HBR

blog post, Bill Taylor narrates a heart-warming story of a young

man, his dying grandmother, and a bowl of clam chowder from

Panera Bread – a story that offers big lessons about service,

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brands and the human side of business – a story that underscores why efficiency should never

come at the expense of humanity.

So in thinking about designing experiences that have the power to “move” people, find a way to

empathize and feel the journey deeply from the customer’s perspective.

The Customer Experience Journey Map

The Customer Experience Journey Map or simply, Experience Map is a powerful tool to help

bring the outside world into an organization. It is essentially a diagram that illustrates the steps

your customers go through in engaging with your company, whether it is a product, an online

experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination. It is a tool that can help bring

customer stories to life. The entire story. Not just the piece a silo or function within an

organization would normally encounter. As an organization maps out the customer’s story, the

organization’s own story becomes visible. You see the parts or functions that are broken and

need to be fixed or realigned to the objective of creating customer “wow”. You also identify

touchpoints where you have the opportunity to make a difference. As Dev Patnaik said, “People

discover unseen opportunities when they have a personal and empathetic connection with the

world around them”.

Sometimes customer experience journey maps look at the entire continuum of engagement.

For example, starting with a brand engaging with a customer through advertising or in-store, to

the customer buying the product or service, using it, sharing the experience with others (online

or in-person) and then finishing the journey by repurchasing the product or service, advocating

it to others or switching to a competitor’s product. At other times, journey maps are used to

look at very specific customer-company interactions. For example, having a cup of coffee in

Starbucks.

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The Experience Map can help you understand and uncover insights to questions such as:

What’s it like to be your customer, across all the different channels and touchpoints and

throughout the customer lifecycle?

Is your customer experience delivering on your brand promise?

What are the critical moments of truth?

Are you delivering a good experience in these critical moments?

Here are some examples:

Lego Experience Wheel

What we like about it:

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Captures the entire journey in a formal yet easy to consume manner, a powerful aid for

designing experiences

The customer is at the center

Captures the life cycle of the experience: what happens before, during and after

Starbucks Experience Map

What we like about it:

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Maps positive and negative sensory cues from the experience against touchpoints from

the customer journey

Notes and commentary provide details about the encounter

Captures the specific purpose/situation of the experience (coffee during work hours vs.

coffee hangout with friends) and not any particular customer persona.

Rail Europe Experience Map

What we like about it:

Captures customers’ journeys across all touchpoints to allow organizations to more fully

understand where they should focus their budget, design and technology resources.

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Overall “diagnostic” evaluation to hone in on a set of recommendations and focused

initiatives.

Creates a shared empathetic understanding of customers’ interactions across all

touchpoints over time and space.

Shopping for a Home Theater System– Frog Design’s Experience Map

What we like about it:

Based on the conventional sales funnel (awareness, research, purchase) but has another

increasingly important step: OOBE, or out-of-box-experience. This captures the

emotional aspect of the customer experience; the OOBE is almost theatrical in some

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respect. Additionally, careful consideration of this step, ensuring customers are

delighted by the “first-dekho” of the product, find it easy and intuitive to install and use

helps to minimize expensive calls into customer service help lines.

Considers four key parameters:

o Actions: What is the customer doing at each stage? What actions are they taking

to move themselves on to the next stage?

o Motivations: Why is the customer motivated to keep going to the next stage?

What emotions are they feeling? Why do they care?

o Questions: What are the uncertainties, jargon, or other issues preventing the

customer from moving to the next stage? As you can from the diagram above,

home theater has a larger proportion of questions than almost anything else at

each stage, which indicates this is an area that manufacturers and retailers

should be attacking aggressively.

o Barriers: What structural, process, cost, implementation, or other barriers stand

in the way of moving on to the next stage?

The Experience Map is meant to be a catalyst, not a conclusion. A good experience journey map

should be circulated across an organization and should be easy to read and go through –

without explanations. They are meant to engender a shared reference of the experience,

consensus of the good and the bad. Most importantly, it is a means to something actionable:

throw light on the journey and help to identify opportunities, pain points, and calls to action.

© Rupa Shankar www.cxpdesign.com

About CXP Design

CXP Design (www.cxpdesign.com), founded by Rupa Shankar, is a platform for marketers, technologists, designers and leaders to discuss and gain a deeper understanding of cross-channel customer experience design, develop empathy for customer needs and learn how to create products and services that deliver "wow" experiences for customers.

When we check into a hotel. When we shop on-line. When we buy a pair of shoes. When we get on

a flight. These are experiences by which we measure brands every day. However, most companies

are without the tools to purposefully design those experiences for maximum value. That’s where

CXP Design comes in.

Day in, day out, we live, sleep, eat, breathe and unravel the riddle that is human experience, leading

to more loyal and committed customers for our clients.

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Rupa is an Associate Director at Happiest Minds Technologies (www.happiestminds.com), a next-

generation IT Services & Solutions company at the forefront of Providing Advisory, Implementation and

Managed Services on Social computing, Mobility, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Cloud computing,

Security and Unified Communications. At Happiest Minds, Rupa is responsible for uncovering and

activating innovative digital and social engagement strategies for its clients, spearheading the

development of frameworks and solutions for different industry verticals and enhancing the global go-to-

market strategy. She taps into her past work as both a design practitioner and marketer to help Happiest

Minds clients envision and define broad, end-to-end customer experiences.