What You Need to Know About Customer Experience Maps

For starters, it's a good idea to understand as much as possible about the clientele. Who is your company trying to appeal to with its products or services? How well is your company catering to them?

Feedback collected through various forms of customer surveys is vital to the process, says Jill Hewitt, user experience designer at Catalyst, a marketing agency that focuses on improving customer relationships for Fortune 1,000 companies. One great way to gather pertinent info, Hewitt says, is through customer interviews and online focus groups. The benefit of having online groups, she maintains, is that they don't allow for "groupthink," and are the perfect forum for honest criticism since the participants generally don't have access to other commenters' complaints until they've submitted their own. After sufficient feedback has been collected and coupled with demographic information, these criticisms can help organizations determine which experiences are trends versus anomalies. Companies can then use this information to determine what stages of the customer journey present the biggest challenges and draw up composite characters who confront these recurring issues.

WILL A USER MAP HELP A COMPANY PLEASE EVERYONE?

One thing to remember is that, try as a company might, not everything concerning customer experience is going to be in its hands—there will always be outside factors that cannot be controlled. With an airline, for example, a number of issues could arise that affect a passenger's travel experience. During a storm, it's highly likely that a flight will be delayed. If there are babies on the plane, their crying might keep the passenger up.

What companies can do, however, is to make sure those understandable and likely disturbances are addressed as well as they can be. JetBlue offers earplugs and sleep masks to each of its flyers; US Airways does not. These represent clear choices both companies have made, preferences they've expressed for certain clientele. On the other hand, US Airways often makes a concerted effort to put families seated in different aisles together by asking passengers traveling alone whether they're willing to switch seats and be compensated with a free drink. In these cases, it's quite apparent which airline offers the better experience for passengers seeking a quiet and comfortable flight, and which airline caters to passengers flying with family  members.

It's important that companies figure out who their most valued customers are, and what they can do to appeal to those customers in any given situation.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPS VERSUS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAPS

One way to identify your key customers is by crafting personas and customer journey maps, which take into consideration experiences that a great number of typical customers are going through.

Constructing personas based on customer archetypes can be hugely beneficial to companies. For one thing, it can help them figure out the customer segments (by demographics, behaviors, personality types, etc.) they truly need to focus on. It also helps with sharpening the focus of customer experience maps. Likewise, it lets stakeholders in the company put a face to the hypothetical customer by giving him or her a tangible identity. "When you think about experiences at a generic level, you sort of lose all the texture and the grit of what the customers really go through," Forrester’s Costa says. "When you bring it down to an individual's level, you really get to see all the ups and downs, the emotional states, the friction points, [and] the pain in the experience that they come out with." Some journey maps even include headshots or illustrations representing the customer, just to remind the employee consulting the map that there are actual people going through these troubles.

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