Customer experience professionals clearly have customer journey mapping on their minds. Our recent Method Garage posts on journey mapping have seen tremendous organic engagement, and our firm is also getting more and more work in that area lately. It’s understandable; journey mapping can be a powerful way to drive focused business outcomes from accelerating revenue to identifying high-value strategic priorities.
Given this interest, the savvy business move would be to hold our cards close to the vest and keep our in-demand trade secrets to ourselves—but as a teacher by nature (as well as by part-time gig at the Stanford d.school), my instinct goes the other direction. I might come to regret this, but with this post, we are beginning a series on Method Garage’s best practices for journey mapping. We’ll go deep on the lessons we’ve learned and skills we’ve refined in engagements with scores of companies across industries of all kinds. Our hope is not to give away our business, but rather to help you understand what makes for a successful journey mapping initiative so you can get the best results for your own efforts, whether with us, with another firm, or on your own.
To begin with, let’s look at the four phases of a B2B customer journey mapping project as delivered by Method Garage:
Phase 1 – Empathizing with customers. We begin by working with the clients and their customers to develop a deep understanding of what it’s like to adopt and expand with their business from the customer’s perspective.
Phase 2 – Mapping their experience. We then develop a current state journey map that highlights top customer needs, the moments that matter most, and the largest opportunities to improve experience and cost. Working collaboratively with stakeholders, we create buy-in and a shared passion to solve customer opportunities.
Phase 3 – Envisioning their future. Initiatives that stop at the current state end up on a shelf. To enable real business impact, we create a future state journey map composed of new ideas and concepts to deliver better experiences at specific moments that matter. This provides a shared, quantitatively validated vision to move forward together.
Phase 4 – Driving alignment and action. A great vision is only the beginning—the next step is to communicate it in a way that drives excitement and alignment across the entire company. High-fidelity assets that convey the rich customer empathy work gathered in phase 1 help spark action and culture change.
In our next few blogs, we’ll reveal the most valuable things we do in each phase. The discussion will be based on our work with B2B tech companies, since that’s our sweet spot, but the premises and principles will be broadly applicable across markets.
Let me know what you think!
Ready for part 2 in the series? Journey mapping secrets part 2 - Establishing customer empathy