by Braden Kelley
Well-crafted journeys look at touchpoints not through the lens of what the organization has built, but through the lens of what the target individuals are looking to achieve. Touchpoints are central to a successful journey map because they are the places where the persona and the organization come together. They are conversation starters. As workshop participants identify touchpoints, they will often also identify pain points and experience improvement opportunities. If they don’t, consider probing to understand either why a particular touchpoint provides such a good experience or to find missed pain points or experience improvement opportunities.
When building the journey, if you find people jumping repeatedly to add ideas for experience improvement and your collection of identified pain points needs to catch up, try asking people to identify what is preventing the achievement of select experience improvements.
In general, it is best to begin a journey mapping session by:
- Verifying high-level journey stages
- Identifying steps and/or actions in each stage
- Finding related touchpoints that occur in each step/action
- Capturing where pain points exist
- Selecting where improvement opportunities lie
When you reach the end, begin again, and probe to find what is missing. The more complete the download from the group’s collective consciousness across these different categories, the higher the quality of the journey map and the base from which to identify the moments of truth and the persona’s emotional experience along the journey.
Moments of truth can easily be identified too carelessly and broadly, so beware! Moments of truth, by their very definition are those moments that drive purchase, retention, loyalty and word-of-mouth when done well, or their opposite when done poorly.
The Path Forward
Anybody can fill in an empty template and say they have created a journey map, just as anyone can brew beer at home if they buy the equipment and the supplies, but doing so doesn’t make them a brewmaster. Craft matters. Research-informed personas matter. Getting workshop participants deeply immersed into the mindset of the target persona matters. Going beyond what people are doing to what they are thinking and feeling matters. Understanding why we are gathering this set of information for the journey map and why people are adding these particular sticky notes matters. Digging below the surface of what someone has written to understand what they truly mean matters.
Remember, the goal is to build a holistic view of the experience. To do so, we must be exhaustive in our information gathering, intuitive in how we bring it together and deliberate in how we identify what is missing and how to get it. We must be insanely curious about our target persona and unapologetic about trying to make the journey map truly represent the experience of the people it is intended to represent. Tell a story. Bring it to life. And use it to make the persona’s experience great.
Continue reading the rest of this article on HCLTech’s blog
Image credits: Pixabay
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