Tag Archives: journey maps

5 Essential Customer Experience Tools to Master

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5 Essential Customer Experience Tools to Master

by Braden Kelley

There are so many different tools that customer experience (CX) professionals can use to identify improvement possibilities, that it can be quite overwhelming. Because CX is a human-centered discipline, it doesn’t require a lot of fancy software to do it well. Mastering these five (5) tools will help you and your customers:

1. Customer Research

Go beyond surveys and purely quantitative measures to include qualitative research that helps you uncover:

  • The jobs your customers are trying to get done
  • Insights across acquisition, usage and disposal
  • Their most frequently used interfaces
  • Their most frequent interactions
  • Where customers diverge from each other on these points

2. Customer Personas (Go beyond the demographics!)

  • Include THEIR business goals
  • What they need from the company
  • How they behave
  • Pain points
  • One or two key characteristics important for your situation (how they buy, technology they use, etc.)
  • What shapes their expectations of the company

3. Customer Journey Maps

  • Make sure you map not only the customer touchpoints and pain points, but any points where lingering actually creates value. Focus each journey map on a single customer persona.

4. Service Design Blueprints

  • Uncover the hidden layers of a service’s true potential. Service design blueprints can become a visionary force to steer the course of exceptional customer experiences. Weave a masterful tapestry of intricate details into a big picture that creates a clarity of execution.

5. Customer Experience Metrics

  • Every customer experience (CX) leadership team must decide how to measure changes in the quality of their customer experience over time. This could be customer churn, first-contact resolution, word-of-mouth, CSAT, customer effort (CES), or whatever makes sense for you.

Conclusion

The right set of customer experience (CX) tools will enable you to create a shared vision of what a better customer experience could look like and empower you to make the decisions necessary to create the changes that will realize the improvements you seek.

Great customer experience tools will also help you identify:

  • The moments that matter most
  • The tasks your employees need the most help with
  • The information, interactions and interfaces that are most important to your customers
  • Where different customer personas are the same and where you need to invest in accommodating their differences
  • How to efficiently prioritize your CX improvement investments

Let us help you supercharge your customer experience!

Reach out to us at:

https://www.hcltech.com/contact-us/customer

Download the Customer Experience Tools Flipbook

Image credit: Unsplash

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of August 2023

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of August 2023Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are August’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. The Paradox of Innovation Leadership — by Janet Sernack
  2. Why Most Corporate Innovation Programs Fail — by Greg Satell
  3. A Top-Down Open Innovation Approach — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  4. Innovation Management ISO 56000 Series Explained — by Diana Porumboiu
  5. Scale Your Innovation by Mapping Your Value Network — by John Bessant
  6. The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Future Employment — by Chateau G Pato
  7. Leaders Avoid Doing This One Thing — by Robyn Bolton
  8. Navigating the Unpredictable Terrain of Modern Business — by Teresa Spangler
  9. Imagination versus Knowledge — by Janet Sernack
  10. Productive Disagreement Requires Trust — by Mike Shipulski

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in July that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last three years:

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Where People Go Wrong with Journey Maps

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Where People Go Wrong with Journey Maps

by Braden Kelley

When it comes to doing great customer experience work on behalf of HCLTech clients, journey maps are foundational. But it is harder to create meaningful, actionable journey maps than people might think. Here are a few ways people stray from the optimal path when it comes to journey maps:

  1. Not creating meaningful personas first
  2. Not talking to their chosen group of people before building personas and journey maps (do your research)
  3. Not validating the high-level journey phases internally and externally before beginning to map
  4. Building a journey map for multiple personas without consciously identifying and understanding the risks
  5. Accepting sticky notes during journey mapping sessions as-is — don’t probe to make sure meanings are clear
  6. Failing to cluster similar sticky notes and request permission to combine where appropriate
  7. Not having workshop participants vote on the importance of touchpoints, the intensity of pain points, and impact of experience improvement opportunities

A journey mapping workshop is an incredible opportunity to surface assumptions, uncover the hidden and build alignment, motivate action and create long-term momentum and commitment for people-centric improvements.

Creating Journey Magic

Improving customer experiences is an investment with real returns. These returns can go beyond the financial into the realm of psychological and social benefits. If you didn’t care about these people, you wouldn’t invest the time (and money) to go beyond your marketing or process funnel-based understanding of them and dive deep to understand what their experience and interactions with your organization really look like in a journey mapping workshop.

A well-researched, lovingly crafted journey map can be a thing of beauty that many organizations share far and wide and even print poster-sized and mount in the hallways of their headquarters so that everyone can remain anchored in the experience of those they serve and laser-focused on the latest experience improvement projects.

Continue reading the rest of this article on HCLTech’s blog

Image credits: Pixabay

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An Introduction to Journey Maps

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For Mapping Customer, Employee, Patient and Other Journeys

An Introduction to Journey Maps

by Braden Kelley

Journey maps are a key part of visualizing the experience of a defined group of people. Customers may be the most typically selected group, but many other stakeholder groups are equally valid, including employees, patients, students and partners, to name just a few. This is why it is important to keep the term ‘journey maps’ as generic as possible.

They are incredibly useful for aligning project teams — and even the broader organization — around a shared vision of the journey a critical group of people go through from an agreed starting point to a common ending point. Journey maps also help to identify potential areas of improvement in the pursuit of an increasingly exceptional experience.

A journey map breaks down a journey into a handful of phases (typically 5-9), the steps the target group goes through in each phase and the touchpoints that occur at each step in the journey. Journey maps are the prerequisites for the powerful insight generation and analysis that comes next as you dig into the touchpoints and the relevant pain points and experience improvement opportunities within your working group.

Continue reading the rest of this article on HCLTech’s blog

Image credits: Pixabay

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