Maximizing business impact through customer journey mapping

Customer journey maps allow brands to capture the decisions customers are making and how they are feeling. This insight can lead to powerful enhancements to make services more convenient for users. “It’s easy for companies to feel that customer journey maps are the silver bullet for customer experience,” says Lickenbrock. 

Lickenbrock spoke to CX Network ahead of her CXN Live: Customer Journey Management session. 

“When deciding how to activate [improvements] against journey maps you will need to prioritize the moments that matter the most to your customer.” Lickenbrock continues: “Ask yourself - is it the most difficult task, the most frustrating one or could it be a gap in the experience where you can fill an unmet need?”

By fully understanding the critical points in buyer journeys, companies can prioritize optimizing the moments that hold the most gravity and identify where convenience can be deployed as a differentiator. When executed to a high-standard, brands can monetize enhanced convenience service factors, notes Lickenbrock.

How to build customer-centric journey maps

“While customer journey maps are awesome, they are only one tool in the toolkit,” highlights Lickenbrock. She notes that sharing voice of the customer data is an equally vital tool. Official workflows should be in place to clarify how feedback is collected, how it is disseminated and how issues identified in customer feedback should be addressed.

Through her career, Lickenbrock has witnessed a lack of clarity around business processes create multiple experience fracture points. “When it comes to technology and experiences, as an industry, we often don’t know exactly what it is we are trying to enable. If we don’t understand and optimize our underlying process, we will simply digitize a bad process, which leads to a bad experience.”

Documenting the non-negotiable factors when building a new digital experience is crucial for when technical conflicts appear. “While there may not always be a technical resolution when we need to make trade-offs that take us away from 'good', we can at least become aware of impacts to experiences.” She adds that key leaders should be informed of these impacts so communication plans can be crafted to mitigate risk.

Experience restrictions dictated by technology are a frustrating reality for CX practitioners. Despite this, Lickenbrock urges professionals to be creative so they can deliver the best experiences possible.

Lickenbrock demonstrated this first-hand in a project building an application for inventory scanning. Restrictions with the technical environment were triggering a fragmented and lengthy process for users. “The original design was to have the user scan an item, then wait for the asynchronous call to confirm the item was recorded, which could take up to two minutes per item.  The process would be scan, wait a minute or two to see if there was an error, scan again, until the whole truckload was done.”

Using creative, human-centric experimentation, Lickenbrock and her colleagues redesigned the process flow to fast-track the user journey so items could be scanned in bulk and then the batch’s errors could be validated together.

“While we were not able to change the way the underlying technology worked, we were able to achieve a much better experience for the user by getting creative with the business process and presentation layer,” says Lickenbrock.

Learn more from Lickenbrock in her upcoming session at CXN Live: Customer Journey Management.