Experience Mapping — a useful tool to gain customer insights

Recently, I have been wor­king in a couple of pro­jects whose goal was to gain deep understan­ding of custo­mers using a par­ticu­lar ser­vice. Our aim was to pro­vide a founda­tion for ser­vice impro­ve­ment and this cal­led for an appro­ach slightly dif­fe­rent to pre­vious met­hods used to understand custo­mer behaviours.

The goal of these pro­jects was to

• Understand the custo­mers
  What are their lives like and why do they act the way they do?

• Sum­ma­rize the ove­rall custo­mer expe­ri­ence of the ser­vice
  What moti­va­tes the custo­mers in the first place, what hap­pens during the pro­cess, what makes them happy and what makes them frustrated?

• Deve­lop new ideas regar­ding the ser­vice
  How can we pro­vide the custo­mers with the right sup­port at the right time and in what channels?

What is Expe­ri­ence Mapping?

During these pro­jects we have been using expe­ri­ence map­ping, as a met­hod to focus on the big picture of the ser­vice and how it is expe­ri­enced from the per­spective of the customer.

The basic idea of expe­ri­ence map­ping is to

• See the pro­cess of the ser­vice through the eye of the customer
• Describe the custo­mer expe­ri­ence over time
• Mark posi­tive and nega­tive points in the experience
• Lay the grounds for cross chan­nel analysis
• Iden­tify oppor­tu­ni­ties for ser­vice impro­ve­ments and ser­vice innovation

Why use Expe­ri­ence Mapping?

The power of this tool lies in the simple fact that you are taking on the per­spective of the custo­mer over time, from the first ini­ti­a­tive to the goal. The pro­cess of selecting and pin­poin­ting custo­mer expe­ri­ences into the map, trig­gers cre­a­tive ideas and new per­specti­ves, which in my view is the very point of doing it.

Furt­her­more, custo­mers con­stantly move across chan­nels, una­ware of the invi­sible bor­ders set up by the com­pany inter­nally. Expe­ri­ence map­ping is hel­p­ful to rea­lise when these bor­ders cre­ate obstacles for the custo­mers, affecting the custo­mer expe­ri­ence and, ulti­ma­tely, the business.

Let’s look at an example!

Due to con­fi­den­ti­a­lity we can’t dis­play the actual maps deve­lo­ped during the pro­jects, but we cre­a­ted a fic­tio­nal example to illust­rate how we used the tool.

In this example the expe­ri­ence map descri­bes the custo­mer expe­ri­ence of a train jour­ney. The custo­mer in this case is the per­sona “Linda — the occa­sio­nal tra­vel­ler”. The map pro­vi­des an over­view of the custo­mer expe­ri­ence throug­hout the pro­cess, high­ligh­ting posi­tive and nega­tive expe­ri­ences along the way. We start at the impulse to tra­vel by train, pro­ceed to buy­ing a tic­ket, being on the train and even­tu­ally arriving at the des­ti­na­tion. The ver­ti­cal pla­ce­ment of the dots in the map reflects a rough esti­mate of the expe­ri­ences in rela­ti­vely posi­tive or nega­tive terms. The stars mark expe­ri­ences con­nec­ted to mem­bers­hip in the train company’s bonus system for travelers.

Furt­her exploration

This is a fun way of wor­king and we are cur­rently explo­ring dif­fe­rent ways of ela­bo­ra­ting with and pre­sen­ting expe­ri­ence maps. The Star­bucks example has been a source of inspi­ra­tion, as well as met­hods of expe­ri­ence map­ping taught by Coni­fer Rese­arch. Also, this blog post about custo­mer expe­ri­ence map­ping has inspi­red me to try out some new ideas.

Any ques­tions, com­ments or ideas — ple­ase let me know!

In part 2 of this series about expe­ri­ence map­ping I will dig dee­per into the how-to-part and describe how we went about when cre­a­ting an expe­ri­ence map for one of our clients.

Here is a link to the map in pdf.