Customer Journey Mapping – Involve Customers and Map Moments of Truth

Is Customer Journey Mapping really a valuable exercise? As we all know, they are often used as a blueprint for teams. Unfortunately, Customer Journey’s are often:

a) created without customer input or verification
b) created without input from multiple groups in the company
c) created and then left in a virtual closet some place, never to be looked at again until it’s the yearly planning period
d) created focusing on one person, treating different customers the same and not accounting for different personas, segments, etc.

Instead of focusing on Customer Journeys, companies should consider looking at specific Moments of Truth – when customers make key decisions such as learning about a specific topic, downloading content, signing up for an event, subscribing to a service, etc. These can be triggered by the customer’s desire to address a pain point or to complete a specific job or task.

This is not to say there isn’t value in looking at the Journey holistically, Instead, each Moment of Truth represents a distinct opportunity to either delight or disappoint a customer in their journey with your product. Collectively, these moments are much more predictive of both success and sentiment – and they’re more actionable than a rigidly plotted Customer Journey

These moments should be looked at closely with the goal of eliminating any potential friction during a customer’s interaction with your offerings and by figuring out how to not only enable a customer to complete his task, but create a habit (if you want them to come back) or a growth loop where one person’s participation will encourage others to find the site and engage.

So what do I recommend:

Like the book Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything recommends, make these behavior changes small that they’re easy to do and easy to measure. Focus on those key moments of truth. When I worked in ecommerce, we used to break down the checkout process into small pieces: an item placed in a shop cart, customer picks shipping, customer picks payment options, customer clicks to buy, customer receives first notification, etc. By measuring each step, it was easier to identify, analyze and address any outages (issues).

Secondly, think about giving your customers an actual seat at the table so they can join the working session to define your product or service, about getting them form habits on your properties, and engaging in a way that will enable others to easily find your platform.