User Journey Mapping
CUSTOMER JOURNEYS
Enhancing the customer experience can bring rich rewards. Across industries, satisfied customers spend more and stay more loyal over time. In banking, customers are seven times more likely to increase their deposits and twice as likely to open an additional account if they rate a bank as excellent (with a customer-satisfaction score of nine or ten out of ten) rather than average (six to eight out of ten). Similarly, pay-TV customers who rate their provider as excellent tend to stay with it for up to twice as long as they would a provider they rate as average or below.
Most companies conduct quantitative research on customers. Such data provide important insights, but to create distinctive customer journeys, companies must not only understand their customers’ behaviour but also develop deep empathy. In particular, companies need to empathise with customers when they experience difficulties and obstacles.
This means embracing new techniques for intimately understanding customer journeys: ethnographic observation and “shop-alongs,” where researchers watch or accompany customers in stores; customer diaries, where customers describe, hour by hour, their activities and reactions as they interact with products and services; co-design, where customers give feedback about early versions of proposed offerings; and continual live testing and design iteration with customers after launch.
Describing journeys from the customer’s perspective—“I wait in line” or “I receive a bill”—is also helpful in exploring what can go wrong and how to put it right. When an airport realised that customers queuing for security checks often worried they might miss their flights, it introduced new signs giving a rough indication of waiting times. Another company investigating customers’ experience of repairs found they preferred knowing when a technician would arrive to having a shorter wait with more approximate timing. This insight led the company to improve its control over scheduling and start tracking the whereabouts of field staff in real time—which in turn meant investing in GPS and dynamic dispatch technology, overhauling staffing levels and costs, and rethinking the operating model.
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
A customer journey can score low for satisfaction even when individual touch-points perform well. Customer satisfaction is low for the journeys that matter most.
