Decoding the Customer

CX professionals are often the guardians of the customer journey within their organization. This comes with the responsibility of ensuring that the organization continually evolves towards customer-centricity, which is no small task. CX professionals may be able to influence changes that are deliberately made with the customer experience in mind. But businesses are constantly evolving and changing, launching new products and implementing revised systems, and most of these changes fall outside of the remit of a centralized CX team. This business evolution has an impact on resulting customer experiences, so it is equally important, though more challenging, to ensure that decisions made by other teams within the organization are done with the customer in mind. Without this, CX professionals, will constantly find themselves “fixing” a broken customer journey. It is much more effective to foster awareness about customer experience impact to help the business proactively and deliberately evolve towards customer-centricity than to be in a constant mode of fire-fighting.

The good news is that CX professionals can leverage their understanding of the customer journey, Customer Lifetime Value, and the financial ramifications of on-ramps and off-ramps to help businesses understand customer experience impact and make the right choices.

In episode 21 I spoke with Marnitz Van Heerden of Hollard insurance who described how his organization has evolved from one with a centralized CX team, to a federated model, whereby responsibility for customer experience is distributed across the business teams. The federated model is the ultimate goal for many businesses, but the reality on the ground is that most CX practitioners still operate in an environment where CX is managed centrally. In this case, CX practitioners have to plan and prioritize their efforts.

If you’ve ever mapped the customer journey, you know that it can be daunting to tackle a long laundry list of pain points within the customer journey. I suggest starting by evaluating your journey in terms of the on-ramps and off-ramps. Look at where you have your busiest off-ramp, or where you are losing the most customers. You should consider this as your starting point for affecting CX change, because it’s where you’ll be able to demonstrate business value. So if for example, if your customer journey research indicates that customers are off-ramping at sign-up or after their first month of usage of your product, look into which one of these represents the bigger impact in terms of opportunity cost or lost customer assets, and tackle that one first if you can. As you improve the experience and are able to impact on the flow of the off-ramp, you can show how each retained customer, through their CLV, reflects money which didn’t walk out the door.

One of the tough realities of the business world is that decisions are often made in a vacuum. Operations, IT and other teams will make decisions or launch initiatives with their own KPIs in mind. These objectives may or may not directly align with CX. This is where things can get interesting, because an IT or ops team might be really excited about a new platform or process that will help them achieve their department goals, while being oblivious to what this means for CX. The key is to insert customer-centric thinking into that vacuum!

CX professionals can do this by helping their colleagues understand how their efforts impact the customer experience, so they can factor it into their decision-making criteria. The goal is to mitigate business changes that might inadvertently create a negative experience, and gradually get others in the organization to be thinking about things in a more customer-centric way.

My suggestion here would be to first use your customer journey to identify what elements of customer experience are most likely to upset or delight your customers. Whatever moves the needle either extremely positive or extremely negative, can be used to help other teams evaluate the impact of their efforts. Next, try to include this as a formal component of the planning process. Whether that takes the shape of a customer impact assessment as part of CapEx approval or some sort of CX rating that has to be incorporated into new project approvals, see if you can establish some governance that gets teams to proactively acknowledge how their projects, initiatives and other business changes might affect customer experience.

It’s also important to incorporate CLV so that leaders understand the financial ramifications of customer impact. Often this is overlooked, only for teams to realize later that their $1 million in efficiency savings cost the business $10 in lost customers. When the vetting of new projects includes a business case with a customer element, this is much more difficult to ignore.

If you really want to get the c-suite’s attention, you can link a monetary value to your customer experience impact. In this Mini Masterclass, we’ve explored this from the perspective of mistake-avoidance, but the same fundamentals can be applied to quantify the ROI of customer experience as the result of deliberate improvements to the customer journey. If you are interested in learning more about this, please check out my Ultimate Guide to the ROI of Customer Experience which includes an overview of popular methodologies and expert guidance on how to pick the right approach.

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

[Intro music] Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. This is episode 24.

If you’re new to the show, welcome. If you’re a returning listener, it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX mini masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and are designed to give you punchy, bite-sized overviews of key customer experience concepts are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a customer experience professional.

And if you’re looking to learn about how customer experience best practices are put into action or to be inspired by global customer-centric thought leadership, be sure to check out my longer-format interview episodes, which are published on the first Thursday of each month. Last week, we explored customer journey on-ramps and off-ramps and how these can be used to demonstrate the return on investment from customer experience. Today, we’re going to look into how you can help your organization evaluate customer impact when making major business decisions. We’re going to stay with the concepts of on-ramps and off-ramps and explore how you can leverage your knowledge of the customer journey to prioritize business initiatives, create your customer experience roadmap, and guide your organization towards making the right customer-centric decisions, which will ultimately drive profitability.

If you happen to be out for a run or cooking dinner while you listen to this, and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Let’s dive in. So we’ve all been in that situation where, as customer experience professionals, we’re sitting in a meeting, listening to a colleague explain some new platform or process, when suddenly we’re filled with terror as we realize that this change will totally undermine the customer experience.

We sit there and think, while fuming to ourselves, “How could they do this? Didn’t they realize how this would damage the customer experience? We’re going to be losing customers left, right, and center.” Well, the answer is that in most cases, your colleagues weren’t thinking about the customer. And this probably wasn’t happening out of malice, as most people aren’t out to get the customer.

They just aren’t always thinking about things from the customer’s perspective when they make decisions. Siloed business management can be the root of this, but these kinds of oversights can also just be the result of a lack of widespread understanding of the journey among others in your organization. And you can’t prioritize customer experience in your decisions if you don’t understand the impact of business changes on the customer experience or haven’t quantified the financial ramifications. That’s where we as customer experience practitioners come in.

It’s our job to elevate the topic of customer experience, make customer experience a strategic priority, and help people understand how upstream changes to systems or processes can result in downstream catastrophes that push customers towards off-ramps on their journey. In episode 22, I talked about how to calculate customer lifetime value, which is a really effective way to associate monetary value with customer relationships and begin to position customers as assets within the business. In episode 23, I covered how you can use customer lifetime value and your customer journey to prove the return on investment of customer experience efforts, by demonstrating how negative or positive experiences can result in the gain or loss of customers as assets. What we’re going to cover now builds on those two episodes and looks at how we can leverage this in preemptive business planning that will help an organization steer itself towards decisions that result in better customer experiences.

Because, as many of our mothers told us when we were growing up, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Today I’d like to talk about two different types of preemptive planning. First off, let’s touch on customer experience roadmaps and prioritizing customer experience efforts. In episode 21, I interviewed Marnitz van Heerden from Hollard Insurance, who described how his organization has evolved from one with a centralized customer experience team to a federated model, whereby responsibility for the customer experience is distributed across the business teams.

The reality is that most customer experience practitioners operate in an environment where customer experience is managed centrally. And in this case, these customer experience practitioners have to plan and prioritize their efforts. And you know, if you’ve ever mapped the customer journey or done a customer experience evaluation or diagnostic, that it can be really daunting to tackle the long laundry list of pain points within the customer journey. You start racking your brain: where to start?

It feels like so much is broken. Well, I can help you with some tactics for how to do that. I suggest starting by evaluating your journey, or your customer experience diagnostic results, or your survey results, in terms of the on-ramps and off-ramps. Now, remember that these are points where customers either initiate or terminate interactions with an organization while fulfilling some broader need in their life.

Look at where you have your busiest off-ramp, or where you’re losing the most customers. You should consider this as your starting point for effecting customer-centric change, because it’s likely to be where you’ll get the most bang for your buck and where you’ll be able to demonstrate business value. As you improve the experience and are able to impact the flow of that off-ramp, you can show how each retained customer, through their customer lifetime value, reflects money which didn’t walk out the door. Conversely, you can also prioritize your biggest opportunity to amp up your customer on-ramp, and focus on a couple of opportunities to improve customer acquisition in conjunction with opportunities to reduce customer attrition.

Remember, the key is to maximize your efforts where they’ll have the most impact, and to demonstrate the return on investment by quantifying the value of gained or retained customers. So for example, if your customer journey research indicates that customers are off-ramping at sign-up, or after their first month of usage of your product, look into which one of these represents the bigger impact in terms of opportunity cost or lost customers, and tackle that one first if you can. And it’s not always about the first point where customers are lost or gained. Customer experiences have a cumulative effect.

So at the point that a customer is leaving, it may be because they’re totally fed up with the previous five interactions they had with your organization, and it was really just the last one that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And if you’re struggling to clarify the impact of this sequence of experiences, you may want to look into the results of survey questions about likelihood to remain a customer, or likelihood to recommend the product or service to others, and how this changes throughout the journey. Through doing this, you can track how experiences, positive or negative, change the customer’s emotions about the overall journey. Since customer lifetime value is underpinned by the length of the customer relationship, return on investment in this case will be based on improved duration of the customer relationship.

If customers are telling you that they are increasingly happy and more likely to stay on as customers, you should see this as an increase in retention and thus customer lifetime value. To put this into real monetary terms, if customers generate, say, $100 in profit per month on average, and you can improve the average duration of the customer relationship from 10 months to 12 months because you’ve improved a variety of experiences during the journey, you’ve just increased your customer lifetime value by $200, or 20 percent. So that’s just one way that you can start to connect the short-term efforts and incremental changes to the journey back to the higher-level financial picture. Next, I’d like to talk about customer experience impact in the context of business changes that happen outside of the realm of the customer experience team.

These are business changes that might be driven by other objectives rather than purely customer experience. This is where things can get interesting, because as IT or Ops teams might be really excited about a new platform or process that will help them achieve their goals, they might be totally oblivious to what this means for customer experience. The key here is to help your colleagues understand how their efforts impact the customer experience, so this can be factored into their decision-making criteria. The goal is to mitigate business changes that might inadvertently create a negative experience and gradually get others in the organization to be thinking about things in a more customer-centric way.

In my personal experience, I think that the customer-centric option is often just as efficient and just as cost-effective as the non-customer-centric option, but you need to be proactive and deliberate about making the right choice. My advice here would be to first: use your customer journey to identify what elements of the customer experience are most likely to irk or delight your customers. Maybe it’s wait time, stock availability, or service interactions. Whatever moves the needle extremely positive or extremely negative can be used to help other teams evaluate the impact of their efforts.

Next, see if you can include this or these elements of experiences as a formal component of the planning process. Whether that takes the shape of a customer impact assessment as part of a CAPEX pipeline, or some sort of customer experience rating that gets incorporated into new project approvals, see if you can get teams to proactively acknowledge how their projects and initiatives and other business changes might be pushing customers towards off-ramps or discouraging them from taking on-ramps. Then, bring in customer lifetime value so they can understand the value of customers that are walking out the door. For example, if a new system is projected to generate, say, a million dollars in efficiency savings, but would cost the brand $10 million in lost clients, then the business case becomes not so great.

Yet so often businesses, especially large ones, will focus on the internal number rather than thinking about the bigger picture and impact on customers as assets. It’s sometimes confounding to me how businesses don’t think about this in advance. But hopefully these tips will help you leverage your customer journey and your knowledge of customer lifetime value to help change this. Thanks for listening.

If you’re enjoying the show, please share the program with others who might be interested, or head on over to iTunes and rate this podcast. It helps others find the show too.

I’ll be back next Thursday with another CX mini masterclass, but I’m always reachable in the meantime, should you have questions or requests.

And speaking of which, I’m hoping to do some future episodes based on listener questions. So please send me your most burning customer experience questions, and you might just get your very own dedicated CX mini masterclass episode. You can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is @juliaahlfeldt, and my full contact details are listed on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

[Outro music] [Outro music fades]

If you’d like to check out more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services  (including journey mapping, CX strategy development, experience innovation, leadership workshops and CX ROI measurement) or get in touch via email. 

At the end of the day consumers have many ongoing needs in their lives. Whether that’s putting food on the table or managing their finances, these needs don’t go away. The more journeys I map, the more I believe that most of our needs are ongoing in some way. That’s why I have become a proponent of circular maps as a way of visualizing the nature of experiences around these continual needs.

One of the added benefits of circular maps is that you can use them to easily show where a consumer decides to engage or disengage with a specific brand. I call these “on-ramps” and “off-ramps”. They represent opportunities to potentially gain or lose customers.

In episode 22, I covered Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), and defined this as the monetary value – often measured in contribution to profit – that is derived from a customer during the course of that customer’s relationship with the company or organization. Anytime a customer engages with a brand or takes an on-ramp, there is a financial upside, and each time a customer decides to disengage with a brand, the business takes a financial hit. This creates a way to overlay ROI onto the customer journey, and it should make your executive team’s ears perk up.

You can use your understanding of on-ramps and off-ramps to build the business case for change:

This view of on-ramps and off-ramps can help organizations evaluate the impact of business decisions so they can prioritize those that minimize the risk of losing customers and maximize the potential of gaining new customers. This is also a great way to show the value of the journey map as a way to put your map to good use.

If you want to delve deeper into the topic of CX ROI calculations, including an overview of popular methodologies and expert guidance on how to pick the right approach, be sure to check out my Ultimate Guide to the ROI of Customer Experience.

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

[Intro music] Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX mini masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-sized overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer-centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

In December, I did a series of CX mini masterclasses around customer journey mapping. Last week, to kick off the January mini masterclasses, I spoke about calculating customer lifetime value. And today, I’m going to bring these two concepts together to help you create a strategy and approach for demonstrating the return on investment from customer experience management. If you’re out enjoying a beautiful winter’s day in the northern hemisphere or staying cool in the shade of a hot summer’s day south of the equator, and here’s something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down.

You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered on today’s show in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Right, so, if you’re new to the concept of the journey map, you might want to hit the pause button on this episode and go back and listen to episode 16, which covers the concepts of experiences, journeys, and touchpoints. If you’re looking for guidance on how to build a journey map, I cover that in episodes 18, 19, and 20. For those listeners who are familiar with journey maps and have built a map, you probably got to the point in your mapping process where things started to look a little, hmm, circular, or perhaps where it became unclear where the journey started or ended.

That’s fine, and in fact, the more and more journey maps that I help create, the more I become a fan of circular maps. At the end of the day, consumers have many ongoing needs in their lives. Whether that’s putting food on the table or managing their finances, these needs don’t go away. And to be honest, I believe that most of our needs are ongoing in some way.

That’s why I love circular journey maps as a way of visualizing the nature of experiences around these sort of continual needs. And one of the major benefits of circular maps is that you can use them to easily show where there are on-ramps or off-ramps, or where consumers decide to engage or disengage with a brand or organization. So why would this be important for proving the ROI of customer experience? Well, if you joined me for episode 22, you’ll remember that we defined customer lifetime value as the monetary value, often measured in contribution to profit, that is derived from a customer during the course of that customer’s relationship with a company or organization.

That means that any time a customer engages with a brand or takes an on-ramp, there’s a financial upside. And each time that a customer decides to disengage with a brand, the business takes a financial hit. You can probably imagine where I’m going with this, but associating financial impact with on-ramps and off-ramps is a highly effective way of getting your executive team to sit up and pay attention to your journey map. If you can leverage your journey to show where customers are most likely to off-ramp, how many customers leave because of a specific experience or series of experiences, and what that disengagement costs the business, you’re well on your way to making a strong business case for fixing pain points along the journey.

Conversely, if you can use your journey map to show when, where, and why customers are likely to start engaging with your brand during the customer journey, and what these new customers are potentially worth to the business should they take an on-ramp, you’re similarly on your way to making the business case for investing in engaging experiences that will attract and retain customers. This is a highly effective way to tie business value back to the customer journey and to put your journey map to work as a tool for evaluating the potential impact of major business decisions. Ideally, businesses should be making those major business decisions with the customer in mind, but I find that this is so often not the case. In next week’s CX mini masterclass, I’m going to dive into the ways that you can help your organization evaluate customer impact when making major business decisions.

And there you have it, the beginnings of ROI for customer experience. Thanks for listening. If you’re enjoying the show, please share the program with others who might be interested, or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show too.

I’ll be back next Thursday, but I’m always reachable in the meantime, should you have questions or requests for future shows. You can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My contact details are also listed on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

[Outro music]

If you’d like to check out more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including journey mapping, CX strategy development, experience innovation, leadership workshops and CX ROI measurement) or get in touch via email.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the monetary value – often measured in contribution to profit – that is derived from a customer during the course of that customer’s relationship with the company or organization. CLV is a great way to help executives conceptualize the financial upside of customer-centric strategies. One of the most prominent and respected thought leaders in the field of customer experience, Jeanne Bliss, often talks about how businesses should regard customers as assets, and customer lifetime value is a great way of positioning customers as assets because it associates a monetary figure with each customer. In episode 21, I interviewed Marnitz Van Heederden, who shared the inspiring story of how he kick started customer-centric change in his business by demonstrating customer value.

To calculate this metric, one should look at the average profit yielded from each customer (or the revenue minus the costs) in a given year, multiplied by the average number of years that a customer is retained. If the relationships have a shorter time-frame, you could just as easily quantify this in terms of weeks or months, though most businesses can and should look at these relationships from a long-term perspective, so I recommend years as the unit of measure in most cases.

So if the average customer generates $100 of profit for the company each year, and normal duration of the customer relationship (aka retention) is 2 years, the mean CLV among the company’s customer base would be $200. It’s not a stretch to see how this approach helps CX professionals position customers as assets, which is important if you want the business to start making customer-centric strategy decisions.

If you are stumped for how to quantify a profit figure for each customer, I suggest phone-a-friend to one of your colleagues in finance and ask for their help. You’ll want to gather the average revenue figures and the ballpark operating cost for each customer relationship.

If the value of relationships is something that typically grows over time, you could also include this as a growth factor during the course of the average duration of the relationship.

Customer lifetime value isn’t a magic number, but it does have a lot of potential applications, and can be very useful for demonstrating the ROI for overarching customer-centric strategies. Major department-level initiatives that impact customer spend, cost of maintaining the customer relationship and efforts that impact customer base growth or retention, should all roll up into CLV, so you can use this metric as a way to connect and unite broad customer-centric objectives into a bottom-line impact through CLV.

I’d suggest looking for ways to utilize this metric in dashboards that are assessed alongside financial results in major business performance or strategic reviews. If you can tie major business change efforts back to CLV as either a projection or a post-mortem, that’s great. It will help executives and department leaders understand how their actions connect back to customer-centric strategy.

Just be aware that customer lifetime value is slow to change, is a lagging indicator, and is influenced by a lot of different factors. It may be difficult to pinpoint how minute or incremental changes to the customer journey impact CLV, so don’t expect tweaks to the customer experience to make big waves with CLV. This metric has limited potential as a tool to quantify cause and effect from smaller scale changes. (But don’t worry I cover that in Episode 23!)

If you want to delve deeper into the topic of CX ROI calculations, including an overview of popular methodologies and expert guidance on how to pick the right approach, be sure to check out my Ultimate Guide to the ROI of Customer Experience.

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

[Intro music] Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in to my first CX mini masterclass episode of 2019. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, it’s great to have you back. Each month I publish four podcast episodes. The first episode of the month is a longer format interview episode, designed to share ideas about best practices and inspiring stories from leaders in the field of customer experience. During the rest of the month, I publish weekly CX mini masterclass episodes like this one, that are designed to be punchy, bite-sized overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer-centricity.

Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional. Today we’ll be exploring the concept of customer lifetime value, how to calculate this, why it’s an important metric for the customer experience profession, and how you can use it to demonstrate the ROI of customer experience. If you’re busy driving to work or out walking the dog while you listen to this, and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

Seeing as we’re at the start of a new year and many people are busy reflecting on their plans for 2019, I thought it would be appropriate to explore the concept of customer lifetime value, as this is core to demonstrating ROI, something that is crucial to the success of any customer experience strategy. Most of us have learned at some point, and often the hard way, that we absolutely have to demonstrate the business value of customer experience management, otherwise our efforts will not be prioritized by business leaders. The good news is that customer lifetime value is a great way to help executives conceptualize the financial upside of customer-centric strategies. So, what is customer lifetime value?

Simply put, it’s the monetary value, often measured in contribution to profit, that is derived from a customer during the course of that customer’s relationship with the company or organization. One of the most prominent and respected thought leaders in the field of customer experience, Jeanne Bliss, often talks about how businesses should regard customers as assets, and customer lifetime value is one way of positioning customers as assets, with a monetary figure associated with each. To calculate customer lifetime value, one would look at the average profit yielded from each customer in a given year, multiplied by the average number of years that a customer remains an active customer. If the relationships have a shorter timeframe, you could just as easily look at this in terms of weeks or months, though most businesses can and should look at these relationships from a long-term perspective.

If the value of relationships is something that typically grows over time, you could also include a growth factor during the course of the average duration of the relationship. Again, if you’re having a tough time visualizing the calculation, don’t worry about it. I’ll include this in the show notes for this episode. Just go to my website and look for episode 22.

So why is this an important metric for customer experience professionals to use? Well, because it ties customer-centric strategy back to a financial benefit. It demonstrates the value of each customer and therefore the business benefit to keeping customers. Each customer lost equates to a loss in profit, so it makes customer churn look like a very expensive proposition.

For those who work in businesses that are highly focused on customer acquisition, customer lifetime value can also help demonstrate why it’s important to focus on retention as well as acquisition, because the profit from each customer usually grows over time. Now, how can you use customer lifetime value to demonstrate the ROI of customer experience management? As with many things in life, there isn’t a silver bullet here. Customer lifetime value can be very useful for demonstrating the ROI of overarching customer-centric strategies, but be aware that it is a metric that is slow to change, and there are countless different factors that contribute to customer lifetime value.

So it probably isn’t the best metric for calculating sort of cause-and-effect style results from one specific campaign. I think that customer lifetime value is most useful as a metric to be included in strategic dashboards to be reviewed by senior leaders. Major department level initiatives that impact customer spend, costs of maintaining the customer relationship, or length of retention should all roll up into this metric. So use it as a way to connect and unite broad customer-centric objectives into a bottom-line impact through customer lifetime value.

So there you have it. That’s my introduction to customer lifetime value. I hope that you’ve enjoyed today’s show. In next week’s episode, we’re going to look into how you can leverage your journey map to demonstrate ROI using customer lifetime value.

Thanks for listening. If you’re enjoying this program, please share it with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate this podcast. This helps others find the show too.

I’ll be back next Thursday, but if you have feedback, requests for future shows, or would like to get in touch in the meantime, you can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My contact details are also listed on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll be back next week. [Outro music]

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including journey mapping, CX strategy development, experience innovation, leadership workshops and CX ROI measurement) or get in touch via email.

Marnitz is a CX leader at one of South Africa’s largest Insurance companies and the #2 national provider of short term insurance. When he started his role at Hollard 8 years ago, CX was still considered a largely operational function. During his tenure at the company, he has driven the evolution of CX from operational to strategic, and most recently into a decentralized (or “federated”) model, whereby CX is owned by business teams rather than by a dedicated central function.

Marnitz has been successful in fostering buy-in for CX strategy, but this wasn’t all sunshine and roses. Marnitz refers to this process as “pushing the boulder uphill”, and he started by proving the numbers because in his words, “money talks”. To do this, he positioned customers as assets, and then built business cases around CX strategy to attract, retain and grow relationships with customers.

Early on, Marnitz recognized that the business case alone would not foster wide-scale adoption of CX, and that he would need to hone his stakeholder management and diplomacy skills if he wanted to see his CX strategy flourish.

During our conversation, Marnitz shared several of his tactics for engaging with stakeholders to foster buy-in for CX. Customer experience management is new to many in the business world, and people are often resistant to change, so it’s important for CX professionals to wear their “diplomat hat” when engaging with teams that are new to CX strategy.

When Marnitz started off influencing change through the centralized CX team, he used the SCARF model to engender buy-in and drive change through the organization. This model addresses the most common needs and concerns in a work setting:

By assuring team members that CX strategy would not erode these attributes, and by demonstrating how it could, in many cases, enhance and individual’s experience through this framework, Marnitz and his team won over stakeholders and garnered widespread support as CX moved from an operational function within the COO’s directive, to a strategic function within the marketing vertical.

Ultimately CX strategy and vision must be owned by the entire business, not by one team. Most recently, Marnitz has led Hollard through a transition to a decentralized approach to CX, meaning that customer experience management is defined and deployed by each business team within the organization.

This transition required a different type of stakeholder engagement, as Marnitz was now aiming to engage buy-in and foster ownership among his peers. To do this, he led the process of helping the business teams define what good looks like so that they can truly own that definition and be accountable for the outcomes. Following this, he has pivoted to influencing change through supporting his colleagues as they implement CX strategy and their other goals. This has meant further refining his approach, which he now defines as an authentic relationship building approach.

It was inspiring hearing how Marnitz has led Hollard through its CX evolution, and how he has grown through this journey as well. Marnitz’s story started with a clear vision and strategy, and he started things by proving the value of CX and positioning customers as assets. In my upcoming CX Mini Masterclass episodes, I’ll be exploring customer value and how you can help your business understand this business case and make decisions that will benefit CX in the long run.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business define customer experience strategy that delivers results, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email. To hear other episodes of Decoding the Customer, click here.

Journey mapping is like creating a mosaic. When you think about how to map the customer journey, approach it as a process of bringing together lots of different pieces of information to create a bigger picture. The key is to understand both the bigger picture that you are aiming for and the “tiles” that you’ll need to gather to create your mosaic. (Incidentally, most team use post-it notes to gather information, so I find that the mosaic/tile analogy works quite well as a way to explain the process to team members.) As the smaller pieces of information come together, the map will begin to take shape and the “picture” will emerge. You may want to adjust your vision of the output as things evolve, but it is really helpful to start with some idea of the desired end result.

The very first step is to identify the type of map that you are aiming for (if not, check out episode 18 which covers the different types of maps, as this step is key to the success of your mapping efforts). Once you’ve done this, think about how your map will be used and what visual representation will be most useful for your team. There are so many different formats, and no single right answer, so look for examples that will resonate with your audience and fulfill the desired use of the map.

As an example of the inspirations that you can easily find, here are several sample maps that I found online:

These maps are quite different, and would have distinct uses. Whichever map you choose, remember to keep it simple and always positioned from the customer’s perspective.

Once you have a vision for your map, understand what types of information you’ll need to gather. These are your mosaic tiles. Again, this needs to align with the intended use of you map, but common types of information often include customer actions, emotions, sentiments, touch points, moments of truth, expectations, outcomes, etc.

I often start by creating a grid layout with the journey phases at the top and the information categories on the vertical axis, as a framework to start gathering and categorizing your journey data. If you are unsure about how to create this layout, don’t worry! I’ve provided a sample template that you can download and use as a guideline for mapping.

Click here to download my journey mapping template

Once you have your plan in place, it’s time to engage with teams and make the journey mapping happen. Here are some tips and suggestions for how to make this engagement as successful as possible.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when figuring out how to map the customer journey, especially if this is your first time making a map. Journey maps are living documents and should evolve with the needs of customers. Enjoy the process and don’t lose your way in the pursuit of perfection.

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

[Intro music] Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. This episode is the third installment in a three-part series on journey mapping that I’ve been doing during the month of December.

The first two episodes looked at the differences between the different types of journey maps and how to prepare for journey mapping. Today, we’re going to dive into how to actually build the journey map. These recent episodes on journey mapping are part of my CX mini masterclass and have been developed to help walk you through the steps for creating a great journey map. And even though this is the last installment of my December episodes on journey mapping, the fun doesn’t stop here.

I publish episodes each Thursday and will be back in 2019 with a fresh batch of CX interviews and case study episodes at the start of each month and more weekly CX mini masterclasses every week thereafter. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to be inspired by thought leadership in the field of customer experience, this podcast will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional. If you’re relaxing by the fireplace, chilling on the beach, or otherwise enjoying the holiday season while you listen to this, and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

Just go to the episodes tab and look for episode 20. Okay, podcast listeners, this episode is our time to explore where the magic happens when we start mapping the journey. In episode 19, we talked about creating a customer persona and empathy map, as well as defining your key stakeholders and deciding on your mapping format. This is where the pieces now come together.

If you haven’t listened to episode 19 yet, I’d suggest that you hit the pause button on this one and quickly go back and listen to that episode so you can hear my tips on how to prepare for journey mapping. It will make what we talk about today much more helpful. Mapping a customer journey is a bit like designing a mosaic, or a picture that is created by tons of little tiles that come together to make a bigger picture. The key to creating the mosaic is to understand both the bigger picture you’re aiming for, as well as the smaller pieces required to create that picture.

To understand the bigger picture, start by defining the type of map you’re trying to make, which by the way, is step one in this process. So check out episode 18 for details on the different types of maps. Before you bring people together to document the journey, reflect on the intended use of the map. Is it to create a common understanding of customer experience?

Is it to help business process teams identify experience pain points so that they can be addressed? The desired output in these two cases would be very different maps. Think about the end goal, how you’d want to use the map, and what would be the best format. I’m not saying that you need to create a picture before you actually have the tiles, but you should definitely clarify what you’re aiming for.

If your team needs some context for this, think about printing out some example maps or creating some objectives for how the map will be used, and make sure this list and information is featured prominently when you engage with your journey mapping collaborators. And if you’d like some inspiration for how maps actually look when they’re finished, head on over to the show notes for this episode, and I’ve included some sample maps that might inspire and spark some ideas. Once you’ve defined the high-level vision and goal for your map, it’s time to bring together the smaller pieces. Identify the types of tiles for your mosaic, or the kinds of information that you’d like to gather about the journey.

This can be things like customer actions, customer sentiment, touchpoints, moments of truth, etc. There isn’t a magic formula for the right mix of tiles, but this should be driven by what you want to know about the journey and what information will be most useful to your organization. Before I start mapping, I sometimes make a kind of grid to gather the information on a large scale, with the phases of the journey running along the horizontal axis at the top, and the journey information categories running along the vertical axis along the side. You can then expand this into a big format on a boardroom wall or use it as a canvas for gathering tiles.

It provides some direction and structure for those who are participating in the mapping process without becoming overly restrictive. And if you’re having difficulty visualizing this, don’t worry. I’ve made an example template that you can download. Head on over to my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com and look for the show notes for episode 20.

There you’ll find a handy template that you can download and use. With your vision established and the mapping structure in place, it’s time to engage with your journey mapping team. Whether you’ve structured this as a journey mapping sprint with a small team or a larger more iterative process incorporating many stakeholders from different departments, you can invite them to share their perspectives. Hand out the post-it notes and markers, and encourage people to put themselves in the customer shoes.

Teams will occasionally gravitate toward an inward-looking view of the journey, and back-office teams might be uncomfortable relating to the customer at first. All of this is totally normal, and it will be your job to help guide them back out of the woods. As long as you’ve provided your colleagues with enough context about the customer through the persona, empathy map, and voice of the customer data, and you keep the process focused on the customer, you’ll be set up for success. Remember that even if your journey map isn’t perfect, that’s okay.

An imperfect journey map that is embraced by the organization is much more powerful than a perfect map that never sees the light of day. The act of constructively engaging with your colleagues is an important step in driving customer-centric change. If you’re embarking on customer journey mapping and have questions or need help, please don’t hesitate to contact me. You can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message.

My email address is on my website, and my handle is @juliaahlfeldt.

So, that’s a wrap for this episode, my December series on journey mapping, and hey, 2018! I hope that you’ve enjoyed this show, and I’m looking forward to bringing you more in 2019. [Outro music]

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including journey mapping workshops!) or get in touch via email. 

People often want to dive straight into journey mapping, and that enthusiasm is great, but if you want to get the most out of your journey mapping efforts, it’s best to do a bit of preparation. The good news is that this preparation is fairly straightforward, and needn’t be overwhelming. Here are the steps you need to take to prepare for building a great journey map.

Note that these steps assume that you’ve already decided on the type of journey map that you are looking to create. If you haven’t already done that, be sure to go back and check out episode 18, and the show notes, which will help you clarify which type of map is best suited for your needs. Once you’ve sorted that out, you can roll up your sleeves and get planning.

Journeys are about the experiences of the end user. You want to create a visualization of experiences from the customer’s perspective, not the company’s. To do this, it’s imperative that you identify a user. This could be a fictional representation of the larger customer base or a particular segment. I suggest making this “customer” real and relate-able by developing a customer persona that will remind you and your mapping team whose journey you are mapping.

Since journey mapping is all about looking at the experiences from the customer’s perspective, it’s important to understand that perspective. Unless you have the luxury of bringing real customers into the mapping process (which is great if you can do it, but uncommon in my experience), you’ll need to incorporate their perspective through some sort of proxy. Usually this takes the form of customer data and insights. Here are some suggestions on data sources that are helpful for establishing the voice of the customer:

You don’t need all of this data to map the journey, but you do need some form of insight from the customer’s perspective. Ideally, enough to make an empathy map, which will give your team guidance on what customers are thinking and feeling throughout the journey.

Click here to download my empathy map template

If you don’t have enough information to build a basic persona and share some insights about the customer’s perspective, go out and gather it before you dive into mapping, or you’ll end up with a very inward-looking map.

Once you have your customer insights, it’s time to think about your collaborators for the journey mapping. You’ll want to work with team members who will help you create the best map and be partners when it comes time to socialize the outputs within your organization, so choose carefully. You will probably want team members with firsthand insight into the customer experience, team members who play a major role in defining and delivering experiences, and team members who will be able to help you drive customer-centric change.

If you have plentiful information about the journey and a concise group of journey mapping collaborators in mind, you might be able to structure your journey mapping efforts as a “sprint” workshop with a small group. Set aside a day or two to create your first draft of the map with this small team. If you would like to engage a large group of collaborators, I suggest developing your map as an iterative process. Think about building your draft map on the wall of a boardroom and then inviting teams to contribute individually over the course of a week or two. Both of these approaches work, but are best suited to different scenarios.\n\nOnce you’ve completed this preparation, you’re ready to move on to the actual mapping process. Check out episode 20 for a step-by-step guide to building your journey map.\n

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

[Intro music] Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. This is episode 19, which is the second in a three-part series on journey mapping that I’m doing during the month of December.

As always, episodes of my show are published each Thursday, and today I’m going to cover some of the pre-mapping considerations that will help you set the stage for creating a great journey map. My previous CX mini masterclass looked into the different types of journey maps and how these are used. It’s imperative to understand what type of map you’re aiming for before you get started, as different kinds of maps serve different purposes. So if you haven’t listened to episode 18 already, I’d encourage you to hit the pause button on this one and quickly go back to episode 18.

It’s well worth a listen if you’re planning to do journey mapping. This episode will cover next steps once you’ve decided what type of map you’re going to make… …but before you actually kick off the mapping process. If you’re busy wrapping presents or shoveling snow off the driveway while you listen to this…

…and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Just go to the episodes tab and look for episode 19. And for this episode, as a special holiday gift to you, my listener…

…I’ve included a sample template that will help you prepare for journey mapping that you can download on my website. More details on that in just a bit. People often want to dive straight into journey mapping, and while I love that level of enthusiasm, to make the most of your efforts… …I suggest that you take just a little bit of time to prepare for the process.

Doing so will help ensure that you gather the right information and lay the foundation for how your map will be used after it’s created. And today, I’m going to walk you through just how to do this. So, once you’ve decided on what type of journey map you’re making, whether it’s a life-cycle map, a sub-journey map, or a user experience map… …you need to figure out whose journey you’re actually mapping.

In other words, you need to clarify your end user. And this is what makes a journey map different from a process map. A process map is generic and devoid of an individual’s perspective and emotions. But a journey map should integrate how a user perceives the experience and how they feel along the way.

I suggest doing this by creating a sample persona. A persona is a fictitious character that represents your customer… …and becomes the lens through which you see the journey. The persona could represent a customer segment or maybe even a large swath of your customer base.

But the more specific you make your persona, the easier it is to integrate emotions and specific responses into the journey. Your business definitely has more than one customer type, and I’m not saying that you could make one generalized persona for everyone… …but it’s important to pick one for this journey mapping process. Once you’ve identified your user, it’s time to bring his or her voice into the process.

Do this by gathering data about their experience. This will help you clarify who they are, what need of theirs is the focal point of the map, and what are their experiences as they go about fulfilling this need. The more qualitative voice of customer data you can get, the better. But your data sources need to be tailored for the type of map that you’re creating.

To prepare for life-cycle mapping, you’ll want to gather insights about customer sentiment from a really broad range of experiences. Data from social media or previous customer research projects can be helpful resources for this. To prepare for sub-journey or user experience mapping, you still need to understand the voice of the customer and their emotions… …but the scope of the experiences is smaller, so you can dive deeper into the world of insights and feedback.

Beyond consolidating general feedback and existing research resources, you might also want to gather operational data relating to specific touchpoints… …so that you can understand how and when customers interface with a brand. If existing data sources are limited, a little bit of mystery shopping or possibly focus groups can be really helpful in bringing this together and filling gaps. Regardless of which type of map you’re creating, customer insight is definitely a deal breaker for journey mapping.

You have to have some understanding of how customers feel and perceive the experience, otherwise you simply cannot map the journey. Most organizations gather this information through a lot of different sources, so you’re likely to end up piecing together a hodgepodge of data to create your picture. And the picture won’t be perfect and it probably won’t be complete, but you still have to have something. Ideally, you’ll be able to gather enough voice of the customer information to build an empathy map for your persona…

…which is a structured way to present what a customer is thinking, feeling, and doing. This empathy map adds an extra layer of richness to the lens through which you are creating and viewing your journey. An empathy map isn’t a deal breaker, but it can be very helpful. And if you’d like to see a sample empathy map, head on over to my website and look for the show notes for this episode, episode 19.

I’ve included a handy empathy map template that you can download and use. Right, so once you’ve identified whose journey you’re mapping and you’ve gathered enough customer information so that his or her perspective can be represented… …it’s time to switch gears and develop your plan of attack. In other words, how are you going to do the journey mapping…

…and who within your organization is going to be part of your team for this process? Journey mapping is about creating a visualization of the customer experience that organizations can use to inform customer experience strategy… …product development, customer engagement strategy, things like that. But the process of engaging with different stakeholders in your organization is almost as important as the final mapping output.

Customer experience professionals are part problem-solver, part diplomat, and part change-maker. And this is where the latter two come into play. Journey mapping is an opportunity to get people excited about the customer experience… …and help them understand how they impact the journey through their day-to-day responsibilities.

So, think about who has the most context for the customer journey and will be able to provide insight to address your blind spots. Think about which teams are most influential in defining and delivering customer experience. And think about who in your organization will be able to help you drive customer-centric change. You’ll want representation from each of these groups within your mapping team.

Once you’ve identified your stakeholders and your mapping participants, think about the best way to engage with them. If your group is small and you have a lot of really good customer data that you can easily share with your team members… …you might be able to create a journey map through an interactive workshop set out over a couple of days, or kind of like a journey mapping sprint. In this situation, pick your stakeholders carefully, as you’ll need to keep the group small and will want participants who can add insights…

…but will also be collaborative partners as you socialize your journey map once it’s created. If your stakeholder group is quite large and there are gaps in your understanding of the customer experience, you might want to create your map through an iterative process… …that is broadly inclusive and gives a lot of different people an opportunity to provide their input and insight over the course of say a week or two. In this scenario, consider putting the map up on a boardroom wall or in some common area and then inviting teams and individuals to come through and provide their input.

This will allow you to gather information in stages and build the map slowly over time. So, there you have it. Those are my tips for pre-planning your journey mapping exercise. I hope that you enjoyed this CX mini masterclass.

To get a summary of these steps, head on over to my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com and check out the show notes for this episode, episode 19… …where you can also download the empathy map template that I mentioned earlier. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll be back next week. [Outro music]

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including journey mapping workshops!) or get in touch via email. 

Customer journey mapping is a major buzz word in the business world, and for good reason. Journey maps are an important strategic focal point for businesses that are looking to affect customer-centric change. Why? Well, because in order to improve customer experience, you have to understand the experience so that you can clarify what’s working and what’s not. It’s also important to establish a common language so that teams can effectively collaborate around solutions, and journey maps help with just that.

In my previous CX Mini Masterclass episode, I explored the definitions of touchpoints, experiences, and journeys. If you are interested in the conceptual theory behind journey maps, I’d highly suggest that you check out that episode and the accompanying shownotes, here. This episode takes you through the first step towards creating a journey map, which is clarifying which type of map is best suited for your needs.

There are many different kinds of maps. I’ve broken them down into 3 main categories and highlighted the potential use for each:

Before you and your team dive into journey mapping, it’s important to clarify your motivation for creating a customer journey map. Reflect on why you want to create the map and how you think it will be used. There is often a temptation to dive into sub journey maps or UX maps, but if your organization hasn’t clarified the high level journey, think about doing this first. It will help set the tone for future mapping efforts.

If your organization has already made a lifecycle map, think about the purpose for your next level of map and that will help you steer things in the right direction.

If you are curious about what to do next, stay tuned — these topics are covered in my next 2 mini masterclasses: Prepare for customer journey mapping (E19) and How to map the customer journey (E20).

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

[Intro music] Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thank you for tuning in. This episode is the first in a three-part installment on customer journey mapping that I’m doing during the month of December.

These weekly episodes are part of my CX mini masterclass series, which is something a little different from my typical CX expert interview shows. My aim with the mini masterclass is to provide an overview of theories and concepts that are central to the customer experience profession through a short and easily digestible format. So whether you are new to the field of customer experience, preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics… …this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

If you’re busy putting up holiday decorations or jogging off all that delicious eggnog you’ve been enjoying recently and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Just go to the episodes tab and look for episode 18, which is this one. Today we’re going to kick off the topic of journey mapping with an overview of the different types of journey maps…

…the kinds of information often included in journey maps, and how they can be utilized to help organizations achieve their customer-centric goals. Assistance with journey mapping is one of the top requests that I receive from clients. Yes, journey mapping has become an increasingly popular buzzword in the business world, but for a very valid reason. Journey mapping is a starting point for many customer experience management strategies.

If you want to improve your customer experiences to drive retention, you first have to understand what’s broken. If you want to implement customer experience metrics and dashboards, you need to understand what you’re measuring. And if you want to drive customer-centric culture change, you need to foster a common awareness of the customer experience among employees and teams. And the list goes on and on, but the point is that journey mapping is a central building block for those and many other customer experience strategies.

Before we dive into the nitty gritty of journey mapping, let’s first clarify what we’re talking about. Episode 16 of my mini masterclass series covers the difference between touchpoints, experiences, and journeys… …so if you haven’t listened to that episode already, I’d encourage you to hit the pause button on this one and quickly go back and check out episode 16 before continuing with this one. I think it provides a really nice baseline understanding of the concepts that we’re going to talk about today.

Right, so, customer journey map is a term that gets thrown around, and I’ve seen a lot of different interpretations. Some of them echo the intention and purpose of maps as customer experience tools, and others, not so much. If you Google “what is a journey map”, the search returns a surprising diversity of responses, so I’ll give you mine. A journey map is a visualization of a customer or consumer’s emotions, perceptions, and their sequential experiences as they fulfill a need.

You’ll notice that I haven’t said anything about a company or brand yet, because that’s actually not what journey maps are about. The journey is about the customer or consumer doing what they need to do to address a perceived gap in their consumer ecosystem. Some people refer to this as “jobs to be done”, and the concept is applicable to individuals, households, even enterprise-level or B2B clients. The consumer or customer is trying to achieve something, whether that’s addressing a transport need by purchasing a car or meeting a connectivity need for their small business by upgrading their broadband internet service.

People are out there constantly fulfilling various needs in their life or for their businesses, and through this process, they interact with a lot of different organizations and brands. I’m stressing this point because it’s an important one. When we start documenting journeys, we really have to approach the exercise from the perspective of the end user. The moment that we start looking at things from the company’s perspective, we’ve lost the plot.

Now that we’ve covered what we mean by the concept of a journey map, let’s talk about what journey map structure looks like. A journey map usually visualizes the customer experience as a series of events broken down into phases. These phases could be things like identifying a need, exploring my options, buying something, I go to sign up, getting help after I purchase something, etc. For the very highest level journey map, which I and many others refer to as the customer lifecycle, these phases sound pretty generic, but that’s okay.

Some of these journey phases or stops along the journey are incorrectly referred to as touchpoints. The term touchpoint typically refers to a specific channel of interaction. So if you’d like more information on the definition of touchpoints, again, go back and check out episode 16. I cover that in a lot of detail in episode 16.

So what does a good journey map look like? The answer is it depends, and this is where we get into a discussion of where to begin, or rather, what to do before you start your journey mapping exercise. Maps are a means to an end. They are tools to help organizations realize customer-centric goals, but they aren’t the goal in and of themselves.

A flawless map that dies a sad and lonely death on someone’s laptop is way less effective than an imperfect map that is widely used and at least serves the purpose of a starting point for socializing the concept of customer-centric change. I typically group maps into three different categories: customer lifecycle maps, sub-journey maps, and user experience maps. Each has a different use, and the type of map informs the mapping methodology and the structure of the output. So it’s important for anyone who finds themselves responsible for orchestrating journey mapping to clarify the intended use right off the bat.

Let’s quickly run through these maps and talk about how they’re often used. The customer lifecycle map is the highest-level map and the least granular of the three I’m going to talk about. If an organization has never mapped the journey before or is documenting the customer experience as part of launching a customer experience function or rolling out a new brand-wide customer strategy, I often suggest that they start with a customer lifecycle map. These maps include a consumer’s entire relationship with a brand and their interactions beyond brands.

They’re often used as tools to create organization-wide awareness for the journey or to rally teams around a common understanding of a customer promise. So they look at things from a very strategic high level. Since lifecycle maps are tools for communication and alignment, the objective is to keep them simple and easy to understand. This means keeping the visualization to one page.

I know that sounds impossible, but it’s not. It’s totally possible and in a future episode we’re going to talk about just how to do that. The next category of map is the sub-journey. These journeys are essentially a zoomed-in view of one or two phases of the lifecycle map.

For teams that have already mapped the customer lifecycle and are looking to understand a specific sequence of experiences in more detail or trying to pinpoint opportunities to improve interaction, sub-journey maps are a really great option. These maps can become a little more granular and may ultimately extend onto a couple of pages, but it’s important to keep the detail under control so the final product isn’t overwhelming for the readers. Remember, as customer experience professionals, we’re always thinking about the end user and what their needs are. These maps may include information about customer actions, expectations, emotions through the different stages of their experience, things like that.

These visualizations could also possibly incorporate details about various touchpoints and maybe a little bit of information about how the business delivers the customer experience. The third and final category of journey map that we’re going to talk about today is a user experience map. These maps are the most detailed and granular of the experience visualizations. User experience maps help you define your taxonomy and interface with a customer by understanding the flow of various tasks that the user will undertake through different touchpoints.

Now, I’ve included user experience maps as a category of journey maps, but personally, I think this is where experience visualizations can and, to be honest, sometimes have to become a little bit more inward-looking. I find user experience maps are most frequently used by teams that manage digital touchpoints, often when a new experience is being launched or an existing touchpoint is being overhauled. They are a great reference point for wireframes, functional specifications, and content strategies. So when the teams are getting more tactical, often times they’ll use a user experience map.

So, that’s my overview of the three main categories of journey maps and how they can be utilized to help organizations achieve their customer-centric goals. For those of you that have been tasked with journey mapping, remember that your work can become the focal point for customer-centric change. And while that’s a big responsibility, it’s also an amazing opportunity to engage with colleagues and to step into the customer shoes. I’ll be back next Thursday with another CX mini masterclass episode that will cover how to map the journey and some planning considerations before you get started.

That’s where the rubber really meets the road. So if you have journey mapping on your to-do list for 2019, you won’t want to miss this next episode. I hope that you enjoyed this CX mini masterclass. If you’d like to get in touch before next week’s episode, you can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message.

My contact details are listed on my website. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll be back next week. [Outro music]

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including journey mapping workshops!) or get in touch via email. 

Julia and Iain catch up at Comair’s new restaurant adjacent to their flagship SLOW in the City lounge.

The travel experience is an incredibly relatable one. We all travel, whether it’s our daily commute or a flight to a holiday destination, moving from point A to point B is a universal human experience. Given the breadth of consumer travel, it means that brands in this industry need to service the full spectrum of customers and face an endless set of expectations to live up to. Comair is in the travel business, with one of the most complex forms of travel – airline travel – at the core of their offering. The organization operates British Airways in South Africa, along with a regional discount carrier and package holiday provider, Kulula. The brand also operates the highly successful SLOW lounges, a luxury lounge experience available to premium BA fliers and through selected partner businesses.

Among consumer travel experiences, the air travel experience can be a particularly difficult one to deliver. Not only do brands have to face a broad spectrum of consumer expectations, they also have to contend with factors like weather and 3rd party providers, that are out of their direct control.

And when air travel goes wrong, it can elicit an emotionally-charged response from consumers. After all, we normally travel to get somewhere, not just because we enjoy being in transit, so when things don’t go to plan, it can impact our lives and be very upsetting. For this reason, airline customer experience management isn’t for the faint of heart, and I take my hat off to those brands that are surviving, and in the case of Comair, thriving.

Iain shows me around the SLOW lounge, including the co-working spaces.

Part of Comair’s recipe for success is their ability to think laterally innovate around customer needs, even if that means expanding beyond the confines of the traditional airline value proposition. Comair’s SLOW lounge is a prime example of this. The organization launched its own brand of lounges, and has expanded the experience to include a co-working space and an open-to-the public fine dining restaurant next to their SLOW in the city lounge (which isn’t even at an airport – it’s in Sandton, Johannesburg’s financial center).

The evolution of this offer was inspired by the needs of customers. The Cape Town – Johannesburg flight route is one of the top 10 busiest in the world. There are many customers transiting between these two cities, and Comair identified the need for an “office away from the office”. It’s pretty innovative for an airline to get into the business of co-working spaces, but Comair’s lounges have been a huge hit with customers.

Comair has the added challenge of operating many brands under one roof, especially since these brands serve different segments of the market. The SLOW lounge is very clearly a premium offer, while Kulula is more akin to a discount carrier like Southwest Airlines in the US. Without a strong element of cohesion, it would be easy for an organization operating such diverse brands to feel that it had “multiple personalities”, but Comair has avoided this through its uniting purpose statement of “we lift you up”. It’s a mantra that permeates all of their brand strategies and operations, including the company culture and employee engagement.

The SLOW in the City lounge offers a mini-oasis for the busy traveler.

Employee engagement is a huge area of focus for customer-centric brands. As a customer experience professional, I find that my CX strategy advisory work often circles back to team culture and accountability, so it should should come as no surprise that a leading customer-centric travel brand like Comair has employee engagement as a key area of focus. (For more on employee engagement, check out my conversation with Jason Bradshaw, Chief Customer Officer of Volkswagen Australia in episode 12.)

Comair’s success has been aided by their shareholder support for customer experience. Time and time again, I speak with executives who are struggling to implement CX management due to a lack of shareholder support. Without investor and board-level buy-in CX initiatives will flounder or be sidelined in favor of strategies that deliver short term results (sometimes at the expense of brand integrity or long term customer loyalty). Comair has engaged its shareholders to support CX, and the leadership team has continually made the case for investment in the evolution of Comair’s various customer journeys. Look no further than the organization’s 2018 annual report, which includes just about as much emphasis on customers and other stakeholders as I’ve ever seen. This, alongside financial results that are the proof in the pudding: Comair has an unbroken record of profitability since the company’s inception 71 years ago. It’s an inspiring case study for airline customer experience management.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business define customer experience strategy that delivers results, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email. To hear other episodes of Decoding the Customer, click here.

In my first CX Mini Masterclass episode, I explored the definition of CX. In the second CX Mini Masterclass, I looked at the difference between customer experience and customer service. This episode tackles a concept that is so frequently misrepresented in CX, that I personally believe it’s a surefire way to identify someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about with CX: customer touchpoints. People often use this business buzzword when they are actually describing a customer experience, so in this episode I also covered how touchpoints related to experiences and journeys. Here are my definitions of each:

It’s important to note in the examples listed above that each journey probably includes many different experiences, and that each experience probably incorporates lots of different micro interactions. There isn’t a set “scale” for journeys. When mapping journeys and experiences, you can zoom in or zoom out as needed. The examples of customer experiences that I’ve listed above have enough steps and interactions that you could probably even map them as little “sub-journeys” or “episodes” in their own right.

If your head is spinning, don’t worry. I’ve got several CX Mini Masterclass episodes in the works dedicated to practical how-to’s about journey mapping. Stay tuned in December!

If you’d like to check out more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

[Intro music] Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thank you for tuning in to the third installment of my customer experience mini masterclass series. These weekly episodes are designed to be punchy, bite-sized overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer-centricity.

Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional. If you’re busy driving to the mall to get holiday gifts or baking some Christmas cookies while you listen to this, and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Today we’ll be unpacking what customer touchpoints, experiences, and journeys are all about.

If you listened to my last episode, you’ll remember my comment about how a person’s use of the word touchpoint is a quick and sure-fire way to assess how much they really know about customer experience. When people talk about customer experiences, they love to bat this term around, and very often they do so incorrectly. There are times that I’ve been guilty of this myself, so I don’t want to throw too many stones, but what I would like to do is equip you with the right definition. I decided to include the definitions of experiences and journeys into the mix because these three concepts are inextricably linked, and I figured it would just be easiest to cover all of them together.

So buckle up and let’s dive in. All right, let’s start with touchpoint, the controversial one. This term is so frequently misused. So what is the right definition?

A touchpoint is the channel of interaction that facilitates a customer experience. So if I go to the gym for a workout, the physical gym is a touchpoint. If I call my bank asking for a resolution support on a query that I made, the contact center is my touchpoint. If I pick up my phone and order something through the Amazon app, then the app is the touchpoint.

We can think of customer touchpoints as sort of conduits for experiences. This sounds pretty simple. And I can imagine that you might be scratching your head and wondering why or how this definition gets bungled so frequently. The most frequent misuse of this term is when people use the word touchpoint when they actually mean experience.

They’ll say something like, “Speaking with a store associate is an important touchpoint in the shopping experience.” Speaking with an associate is an important component of the customer’s experience, but the touchpoint in this case would actually be the store, or possibly even the store associate as a representative of the brand. My first two CX mini masterclasses explored the concept of customer experience. So if you aren’t clear on that definition, I’d encourage you to go back and listen to those episodes for a comprehensive answer. But essentially, customer experience broadly encompasses all the ways that a customer interfaces with a brand.

Customer experiences, when we’re referring to them specifically, are the culmination of actions and interactions that a customer has or does as they’re going about their lives, fulfilling various needs. When an experience is instigated by the customer, it’s often considered a sort of job to be done, or something that the customer is trying to achieve. So for example, if I go shopping on a Saturday morning, perhaps it’s to pick up a new pair of shoes for work or maybe just to entertain myself. But either way, I’m doing this to achieve some bigger objective, whether I as the consumer am thinking about it in this way or not.

And this is where the concept of customer journeys comes into play. A customer journey is a series of experiences that a customer has while they’re trying to fulfill some larger need in their life. So if we take my Saturday morning retail therapy example, perhaps I want to maintain my professional appearance and have identified that a new pair of shoes would really help me do this. Or maybe this is just part of my routine to unwind after a busy week at work.

Either way, my customer experience is part of a broader objective that likely incorporates many different experiences. We can think of customer experiences as little episodes or components within the journey. And we can think of touchpoints as the conduits for these experiences. Now what’s important to note, and it’s something that a lot of people lose sight of when they’re mapping journeys, is that a customer’s experience rarely involves just one brand or one organization.

If we keep running with my shoe shopping example, before I hit the shops, I might have asked a friend for recommendations or checked out the most recent posts from my favorite fashion blogger. Maybe I even perused a few online retailers or checked my inbox for emails about shoe promotions. But as is most often the case, my journey will involve a lot of different touchpoints, some of them controlled by the brand of shoes that I ultimately ended up buying and some of them not. It can be easy to forget that the consumer landscape is filled with interactions, and a customer’s journey is almost never a linear path that’s laid out by a single brand.

The digital realm in particular has given rise to an explosion of touchpoints, making journeys all that much more varied and unique. In coming episodes, I’ll be covering journey mapping and how CX professionals can help their organizations navigate this complex world. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this CX mini masterclass.

Next Thursday’s episode of Decoding the Customer will be an interview format show, and after that, I’ll be back with more mini masterclass episodes every week through the rest of December. I’ll be focusing on customer journey mapping, where to start, how to facilitate mapping with your team and classic pitfalls to avoid.

If you have journey mapping on the horizon for 2019, be sure to tune in in December. If you’d like to get in touch in the meantime, you can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My contact details are listed on my website. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you next week.

[Outro music]

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email. 

In the previous CX Mini Masterclass episode, we defined customer experience as all the ways that a consumer interfaces with a brand. This includes things like price, product, store environment, communications, service interactions and many other elements of experience. Customer service is an important component of customer experience, though it is just one piece of a large and multifaceted jigsaw puzzle.

Customer service has always been a difficult thing to define. If you were to ask 5 people for their definition of service, you’d probably get 5 different answers, but there are some common themes. Customer service usually refers to company/customer interactions within a couple of broad categories:

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to the longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

[Intro music] Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thank you for tuning in to the second episode in my CX mini masterclass series. These weekly episodes are designed to be punchy, bite-sized overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer-centricity.

So whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional. If you happen to be busy carving a Thanksgiving turkey or mashing some potatoes while you listen to this, and you hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. To my listeners in the US, Happy Thanksgiving!

Tomorrow is Black Friday, which marks the beginning of the US holiday shopping season, a time when we all hit the malls and pick up goodies for our friends and family and interact with the brands that we know and love and have some extra customer service interactions with store representatives. So, it’s an apt time to be looking at the difference between customer experience and customer service. Any customer experience professional can relate to that cringeworthy feeling when someone asks you, “So, you work in customer service, right?” It’s even more disheartening when a colleague asks this. These questions leave many of us thinking, “Is my job totally misunderstood?” It can be difficult to come up with a response to others in the moment, but those of us working in this profession have a responsibility to help provide clarity.

And so in this episode, we’re going to dive into the age-old question: What is the difference between customer experience and customer service? In the previous customer experience mini masterclass episode, we defined customer experience as all the ways in which a consumer interfaces with a brand. This includes things like price, product, communication, a web interface, and so on. These factors come together to create customer experience.

So the short answer to today’s big question is that customer service is one of these elements within customer experience. So we can think of customer service as one piece of the customer experience puzzle. But, it’s a really important piece, so it’s worth unpacking this concept of customer service so that we can really understand the difference. So, if you were to ask five people for their definition of customer service, you would most likely get back five distinct answers.

And indeed, many customer experience professionals battle with the use of this term within their organizations. Why? Because it’s super vague, open to personal interpretation, and it’s something that people already think they understand. It isn’t hard to imagine why this might spell trouble.

But I’ll get to how we can address that can of worms in just a little bit. Okay, so, back to your poll of friends and family now, and colleagues. If you were going to ask them for their definition of service, you’d hear things like employee knowledge, politeness, respect, ability to quickly resolve issues, going above and beyond the call of duty to assist a customer, things like that. And while these kinds of answers might seem really broad and varied, they’re actually some common themes that we can use to create a clear definition of customer service.

The first of these themes is the human aspect of customer experience. Customer service often refers to the person-to-person interactions that get layered on top of other aspects of customer experience, like how an employee greets a customer when they walk into a store, or a team member’s demeanor when they’re advising a customer. That’s the first theme. The second theme is customer support activities, or actions that a company takes to assist a customer during their journey.

This can include things like a contact center agent sorting out a customer account issue or a store employee going above and beyond to help a customer find the right product. But it can also include non-human support interactions like chatbots or the ability to quickly self-resolve issues through automated channels. And that’s why it’s important to distinguish between these two concepts, which both fall under the umbrella of customer service. Using these two main themes, we can define customer service as both support interactions and the broader human element of customer experience.

And again, going back to our big question for today, customer service, within this definition, is still a component of overall customer experience. So, why go through all the trouble of defining customer service? Why not just let people define it however they like? Well, for one, it’s very difficult to help teams work towards a goal if everyone has a slightly different understanding of the objective.

Customer experience teams may intrinsically understand the difference between customer experience and customer service, but if cross-functional department leaders or executive decision-makers don’t understand how customer experience function differs from a customer service function, then customer experience leaders will struggle to foster buy-in and drive change. Unlike other customer experience terminology, such as customer journey, Net Promoter Score, or even the term customer experience itself, which are all still relatively new to the business lexicon, the term customer service is not only ingrained, but it’s also a source of confusion because of the various personal interpretations. My suggestion to you as a champion for customer-centric change is to use the definition we’ve covered today and think about one or two actions that you can take straight away to help create clarity around these concepts within your organization. And please let me know what you did.

I’d love to feature this on future episodes of Decoding the Customer so that we can share ideas and learn from each other. I hope that you enjoyed this CX mini masterclass.

I’ll be back next Thursday with another mini masterclass episode on the concept of customer touchpoints, one of the most widely misunderstood and misused topics in the field of customer experience. I often say that the quickest way to spot someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about with CX is to listen to how they use the word touchpoint. It’s a dead giveaway.

I’m pretty sure that you don’t want to be one of those people, so join me next week. If you’d like to get in touch in the meantime, you can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My contact details are also listed on my website. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you next week.

[Outro music]

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email.