Intro
Mapping the customer journey hypothetically, is a method for gathering all the information from inside the organisation about what you know about the customer’s journey from need to satisfaction.
What is it?
Mapping the customer journey hypothetically, is a method for gathering all the information from inside the organisation about what you know about the customer’s journey from need to satisfaction.
In a workshop format you gather all relevant stakeholders, to guess your way to how you think the customer’s journey actually looks and feels like. The goal of the excercise is to create a foundation of information to later validate or reject through stakeholder interviews.
Include all relevant qualitative data and conclusions from quantitative data, that you have access to. For example from observations of customers at different touchpoints or web analytics.
Stakeholders: to map out the hypothetical journey you need to gather a relevant team from inside your organisation, that have all different interactions with the customer, at different points of time during the customer journey. The goal is to have as many relevant and different viewpoints, as possible.
How to do it?
Based on the timeframe you have defined, use a whiteboard to divide the customer journey into five steps (attract, choose, use, support and retain).
Using post-its and issue mapping technique, start defining different actions that happen during the journey. Consider the journey’s aspects from the customer’s point of view only, in the sense of what they see and experience. Ignore internal issues.
Once you have the customer’s point-of-view mapped, using the same method, start defining what is going on from the organisation’s persective:
- what are customer facing staff doing;
- where is the interaction taking place (physical and virtual);
- what systems are being use;
- what is the back-office doing.
