Creating Customer Journey Maps from Scratch | Pontus Wärnestål | Skillshare
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Creating Customer Journey Maps from Scratch

teacher avatar Pontus Wärnestål, Service Designer

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:13

    • 2.

      What Is Customer Journey Mapping?

      6:55

    • 3.

      What Are We Mapping?

      5:03

    • 4.

      Uncovering Value Through Research

      4:03

    • 5.

      Doing, Thinking, and Feeling

      2:32

    • 6.

      The Anatomy of a Customer Journey Map

      3:41

    • 7.

      Class Project

      1:27

    • 8.

      Looking Ahead: The Future State Journey Map

      2:24

    • 9.

      Closing Thoughts

      1:23

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About This Class

Join service designer Pontus Warnestal (PhD) who will introduce customer journey mapping as a flexible and value-creating tool for improving services, products, and brands. The course covers concrete methods and techniques for creating research-based visual narratives of how experiences and interactions are working today for your service, and how you can design improved future-state journeys.

This class is for you who is interested in moving into the Service Design and Customer Experience field, and want to learn the basics for taking a holistic perspective of your brand, service, or product in order to systematically improve your customers’ or users’ experience.

Meet Your Teacher

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Pontus Wärnestål

Service Designer

Teacher

Pontus is an award-winning Service Designer and academic researcher in Human-Computer Interaction and Informatics. For the past 15 years, Pontus has worked with user experience design and service design within automotive, med tech, telecom, communication, branding, and the public sector. Currently, he is Director of Service Design at design agency inUse, as well as teaching and researching at Halmstad University in Sweden.

With his Cognitive Science background, a PhD dissertation on natural language interaction with personalized recommender systems, and several high-profile service design projects in the bag, Pontus keeps a holistic human experience perspective in designing both digital, analogue, social, and physical platforms.

He writes now and then at Medium.

See full profile

Related Skills

Design UI/UX Design
Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: we live in an experience and service economy, 80% of our economy is based on services, and companies are investing a lot in creating services for the customers. Still, less than 10% of customers across the board are actually satisfied with the customer experience off the services that they use as service designers. It is our job to change that for the better. I'm Pontus in this class will be learning how to create customer journey maps, one of the core tools for anyone interested in learning more about how people experience services, products and brands. For the past 15 years, I've been working with indirection design, user experience and service design in telecom, out of motive, met tech and communication and branding. I've also don academic research on how technology effects individuals, organizations and society as a whole. Me and my clients have found customer journey maps to be very valuable to for understanding and communicating insights around customers. Experience of the service that they're using one of the powers of customer journey maps is that their visual. That means that they can be easily understood and used to communicate insights at different stages in the customer's journey. A customer journey map gives a visual representation of what different kinds of values are being created for the customer. This bird's eye view of the entire customer experience is hard to convey in other forms, such as in spreadsheets or in war text. Our goal in this class is to learn how to communicate customer insights and envision new design. That is what your product is currently like, but also how it can be bent made better in the future, the focus of the classes practical. And during the class you will work on your own customer journey mapping project. You don't need any prior experience of service assigned to take this class. Um, but even if you are a more seasoned designer is thinking about moving into service to sign , you will find this class useful. Okay, let's get started. 2. What Is Customer Journey Mapping?: So what exactly is a customer journey map? Well, obviously, it's a map off a customer's journey, and the journey in this case is a metaphor for the Siris of interactions with your service . Over time, all interactions occur a so called touch points, and they can be digital, analog, physical, social and so on. In each interaction or touch point, there is an exchange of value or creation of value. A customer journey map is a visualization off the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal tied to a specific business or product. We will talk more about touchpoints and types of value later. But first, let's take a closer look at an example. This is a journey map showing parts of a train travel experience. This particular map is in its early stages, and I've chosen to work with post its and drawing a writing directly on a template. As soon as things get clear, I'll fire up sketch or illustrator to make it presentable and terrible. As you can see, there are some key features that most journey maps should include. First, we have a timeline describing the order of events in actions is, usually it helps to divide them into, ah, stages and steps, and how you slice the stages is up to you. But to come in starting points are either before, during and after the key experience or the traditional customer life cycle of awareness consideration, converse in usage and advocacy or retention. Next, we have the doing, thinking, feeling this is with the particular customer or persona or target group experiences, and we will talk more about why capturing, doing, thinking and feeling is important. And then we have channels and touchpoints, and this is the core of the journey map. We want to be able to trace what devices and channels are being used when the customer interacts with our service. But don't forget that the customers using other brands and services as well to get his or her tasks done. So make sure you map other relevant brands and services to really get a holistic view off what your customers actually experiencing and who knows that complimenting third party service might be a strategic acquisition target for your organization in the future. Then we have opportunities, and this is so important. I usually say that every deliverable should be actionable. A current state journey map should clearly list actionable initiatives or even projects that could be started in order to improve the current experience. There are other cool features that you can include two, and we'll introduce them as we go. I just want to highlight two points regarding terminology. First off, strictly speaking, journey maps are actually not proper maps, but diagrams. A map depicts spatial or geographical location, but I don't think changing the name now would be possible. But for those hard core semantic people out there, just know that you are actually right in questioning why these diagrams are called maps and not diagrams. Second, even though there is a formal difference between experience maps and customer journey maps , the terms are used interchangeably today, in most cases, also most of the times in commercial settings we use the word customer, but sometimes other words are more appropriate. I've worked with men tacking hospital settings, and it's a little controversial to refer to patients as customers. So sometimes I use terms like user, citizen, patient or student instead, the important thing is that we're looking at experiences from human and users point of view and not from the organization's point of view. A simple search for customer journey maps will give you a wide variety of different types of maps. What we need to focus on is what they're going to be used for. Sometimes it's primarily about communicating use of research findings. Sometimes it's for your own understanding of what's going on from the customer's point of view. And sometimes they're used as a platform for creating new experiences, future state journey maps. And just as there are different kinds of maps, there are different kinds of journeys. Sometimes we focus on the detailed in directions oven existence service, such as booking a train ticket and board the train. But sometimes we might consider an activity that is not centered around a particular service. We could, for example, map out the process of a hiking trip. This would include planning where to go research equipment, food and packing tips, maybe even engage in a fitness training program to prepare and then travel to the site. The actual hike and the journey back home. Such a journey could highlight opportunities to create new services instead of just improving and already existing one So why do we spend time and energy on creating these maps? And why have they risen in popularity in the last couple of years? There are a couple of reasons in a more and more complex service environment. It's becoming more and more important to visualize the complete experience your customers are currently having. Sometimes the only one who really knows what your service experiences like is the customer . And since we're living in it and experience economy, it seems very risky to not have the complete picture of pain. Points in game points clearly mapped out. A good customer journey map has the power to help break down silos and mobilize all your employees to consistently deliver value according to the service or brand promise. It's also an efficient way to engage urine, please around how our future service experience could be designed. Therefore, it's a great tool to use as a framework for ideation workshops. Customer journey mapping is both of two on the practice of imagining new services and better experiences for people. It's a critical part of the toolbox that service designers use, along with service blueprints, personas, impact maps and business model canvas, too many to name a few. Since service experiences are intangible, they're hard to grasp. And that's why a good customer journey map is valuable for us. In the next lesson will talk about what we are actually mapping and how you can capture premium values and experiences. 3. What Are We Mapping?: So what are we actually mapping? Well, my short answer is value. More specifically, the customer's experience of value value is what drives the interaction with your service and value takes a lot of different forms, so to speak. I find it useful to think in terms of base values and premium values. Based values are aspect that are easy to rationally and objectively jot down in a spread sheet or a list. Financial value and functional value are very much focused on product, what it costs and what functional feature it has, what it can do for you. And, of course, these are important values. That's why they are in the base of the pyramid. But what people really value are often connected to social, emotional and identity building values at the top of the pyramid. We even have the notion of meaningfulness as a service and experience designer. My focus is to tragedy. Nail the premium values. Why? Well, because people don't buy products, they buy satisfaction or experience. A lot of companies focus on the tangible off in physical product because it's easy to see, touch and measure. But the deep values that really matter for humans such as accomplishment, creativity, sense of duty, harmony and so on are harder to attach a financial or functional value to Nevertheless they are would drive people's behavior. So in order to serve them better, we should try to make these as explicit and concrete as we can. One quick method I used to start digging as to ask a serious What does it do for you questions. For example, If I ask you to show me my air your favorite 10 I will then ask you So what does that do for you? And your answer would most likely be Well, it allows me to write, so that's a functional value, right? But then I ask. And what does that do for you? You might be a little puzzled, but you go ahead and answer something like I can write down stuff so I won't and forget important things. I plate politely nod and ask. Okay, so what does that do for you? And now you might start to get a little annoyed. So, as a good interviewer, I rephrase that question a little bit. Please tell me about the last time you used your pen to write something down. This probably gets you back on tracks. His concrete anecdotes are easier to remember and talk about then generalizations. So you might say, Well, I wrote down the date in time for my daughter's dentist appointment. I continue to ask for more examples, and you might say, Well, I wrote down a note to my partner that he or she shouldn't forget to pack of fruit for our son's school picnic. And so one. Do you see where I'm going with this? As we dig deeper into what the pen will do for you, we move up the pyramid of values. I might conclude that your pen is actually a tool for you to be a better parent. We're spouse, and that holds some deep meaning. That gives me insight into how I could perhaps build a better service sent around that I might supplement my pen with something or my might pivot and desire to create a completely new service and product that it has a very little to do with pence. Maybe remember, we're not buying products were paying for experience and satisfaction. Now the pen versus being a good parent might sound like a pretty stretched example, But think about it. Let's say you own a new electrical company and you deliver electricity to your customers. But I dare say that most people actually aren't that interested in being your customers. In that case, they just want to be able to switch on the lights to read a book and by asking what your product is actually doing for people. You get a better insight in what people really want to achieve, and that could inspire you to pivot and create completely new service offerings. I'm sure you've heard about a certain search company that are now doing robotics research and geographical maps, or a particular computer company that suddenly started to create smartphones and tablets, or a certain bookseller that are now hosting cloud services and develops autonomous drone deliveries. Those are examples of the ability to look beyond the tangible products and focus on the service experience. There's a famous quote by Harvard professor livid. People don't want to buy 1/4 inch drills. They want quarter inch holes. In fact, people don't want the holes either. They what they really want. It might be a cozy living room with a photo of their Children on the wall. So how do we find these values? Yes, you probably guessed it user research, and that is the topic of the next lesson. 4. Uncovering Value Through Research: okay. Research is the foundation for Design Insight. If you can back your claims with research, you're wasting your time. Armchair customer journey mapping will most likely not give you any new insights. And in the worst case, Onley strengthen erroneous stereotypes you might have about your users or customers. So we need to base our journey maps on research And, as you might remember from school, there are two main types of research. Quantitative research data such as statistics, Web, traffic analysis, service and other metrics can improve the reliability of the journey map. Quantitative research is based on a large number of data points, such as surveys among hundreds of people. Qualitative research data. On the other hand, such as deep interviews, quotes, video clips and observations and richest, the experience insights and improves the credibility of the journey map. There are tons of resource is available on the difference between qualitative and quantitative, and we won't go into a lot of detail in this class. Just remember that we gain qualitative insight from interviews and observations in complement. This was with quantitative metrics to increase the reliability quantitative methods such as statistical analysis of large data sample can provide truth but often fails to explain why people are doing what they do in qualitative analysis. On the other hand, we seldom use truth. We are more interested in the deeper insights of human behavior. Obviously, the best way is to use both a set of deep interviews to gain insights and then complimenting invalidating the findings with surveys and or Web traffic analysis, for example. So what type of insights can we learn from interview and observation analysis? Well, remember how we talked about premium values and meaningfulness in the previous lesson? It turns out that there are certain universal aspect of meaningfulness for human beings. In all cultures, making meaning has identified 16 different aspects of meaningfulness, and others have suggested alternative frameworks. Successful brands are good at communicating around, let's say two or three of these aspects and build their experience around those. I'm sure you can pinpoint most of your favorite products or services to a handful of these words. For example, a lot of people would probably agree that Nikes message of Just Do it has to do with accomplishment and that their digital services aimed to build a sense of community and freedom being able to run where everyone, For example, When me, my team, analyze interviews, we try to identify these notions of meaningfulness and other premium values. These words are typically describing what our customers would consider rich or premium experience and all touchpoints that reinforce this are typically experienced as positive. But it's very rare that customers perceive all our interactions to be rich. There's always touch points that are perceived as frustrating, inefficient or boring. We met these in directions below the neutral baseline to map out all the customers. Pain points allow us to prioritize, which we should address first and allow us to reason about what effects repairing them could have on the overall customer experience. Okay, so the main take away message from this section is that value is a multifaceted thing, and being able to capture and visualize different kinds of value as they relate to the customer's experience over time is one of the most important reasons for doing customer journey mapping. But value is created in action, and this is why we need to pay close attention to what our customers do, think and feel during their interactions with our service. That's the topic up off the next section 5. Doing, Thinking, and Feeling: Okay, so let's talk about the concepts off. Doing, thinking and feeling. Emotion is motivational. There's tons of research indicating that rationality is constructed after we make choices and that we are very emotionally driven when we make decisions and take action. Thinking is the customers frame of reference, which effects how he or she interprets their emotion and into action. And doing is the observable behavior. This could be affected how we design directions, devices, physical space and information. Consider this example. The bus is late. You feel anxious because you worry that you'll be late and you really don't like wasting time waiting. This is the driver that triggers something in you. Now let's say the bus company's reputation is low and they have a pretty bad track record in terms of keeping the timetable. That is your thinking, your frame of reference. They never keep the timetables. This shapes your behavior because now you might think I'm not gonna let them get away with this. I'm gonna rage, tweet or Raj inning with message on their Facebook page. And that would be your action. What you're doing. No, let's backtrack. What if the bus company had a super high reputation and perhaps informed you about the delay, and you knew that you'd get generously compensated or offered free coffee by representative at the bus station. If that was your frame of reference your thinking, then you might have a much more positive and much more forgive herbal mindset towards the company. And we're probably not rage on social media about your experience. You might even be compelled to take a picture of your coffee and write something positive about the whole thing. See how feeling or emotion trigger something thinking shapes your course of action, which is resulting in the doing your behavior. If your map clearly shows doing thinking, feeling you can unravel the why behind the behaviors you see. And by knowing this, you can start designing for a change for the better. We finally have all the concepts we need to start actually producing a journey map. In the next section, we will go over the different parts you'll find in most customer journey maps 6. The Anatomy of a Customer Journey Map: okay, A short recap on what we've learned so far. A customer journey map makes intangible experiences visible and can facilitate a common understanding between team members. The map visualizes premium values as a serious of interactions along a timeline. Every direction happened at touch points, which can be mediated through a lot of different channels and devices. This journey between touchpoints and channels is what the customer is experiencing, and we visualize that this as what the customer is doing thinking and feeling. Now let's put that into practice first, block the actions and events on the timeline. Remember, this is from the customer's point of view, not according to how your organisation is structured or how you currently view how your services delivered these actions and events air captured in your observations and from what you've heard in your interviews. Now note the key questions that go through your customers head as they take part in all these actions, the key questions should emerge from your interview analysis. I put these key questions in a prominent place usually close to the actions or doing part to clearly show how the customers questions relate to what actions they are taking at the same time, try to map and the different channels and devices that the customers using to interact with you. Are they using their phone looking at signs talking to other people? This channel and devised breakdown is mapped on the timeline. Now let's turn to the premium values and the emotional experience. Come away toe work with experiences. To visualize the journey in an experience curve, write down your premium value words in the rich area on the experience graph. Also write down any frustrations and negative words that occurred in your interviews. Your task now is to plot what interactions are enhancing the rich experience and what interactions are actually dragging the experience down. Depending on your data and your analysis, this step requires some interpretation. Human emotion is hard to quantify exactly. In a graph like this, this graph should serve as an overall hint on what works and what we need to improve. Remember, our goal is to provide a holistic view so that everyone in the team is on the same page regarding the customer's experience. I'm sure you're wondering, but different people experience the same service differently. How do we handle that? Yes, you're absolutely right. Most services have several different target groups in our train. Right example. There is a difference between the commuter and the first time traveller on an unknown destination, for example. In those cases, we can either have the different experiences as swim lanes in the same up, or simply draw unique maps for different target groups. You probably noticed that I'm using pen and paper again. This is what I prefer in the early stages. If I work with a client or bigger design team, I might start by using post its on a white board. But as soon as things are getting more clear and validated, I move into digital rendering so I can share it and continuously work with it more easily, depending on what you go with your customer journey. Mup is. You can also consider making it an interactive presentation. But that's the stuff for another course. Now let's move on to the class project and create your own customer journey map 7. Class Project: thanks for sticking with me through all the lessons up to now. Now it's time for you to put what you've learned into practice. The project I suggest you start with is an everyday, fairly simple experience. A coffee shop visit. Just to keep the project lightweight, I suggest you map your own experience of your favorite coffee shop visit or even better visited coffee shop that you haven't visited before. That will give you a fresh perspective on this new experience and allow you to ask yourself questions like, Was it easy to find and understand the menu items? How was the line experience? How was the treatment from the barista? Do you use any digital tools to order or pay? What sounds, aromas, ambience? Did you experience during your visit? And so one. If you want to do proper user research like we talked about, by all means, go ahead, talk to people and, with their permission, observe and analyse their behavior. But bear in mind that qualitative research can take some time. So in order for you to get your feet wet, considered just mapping your own coffee shop visit to start. So for the first part, of the project used the provided template as a starting point and fill out how your coffee shop visit went. It's not the photo of your mouth. And if you work digitally in illustrator or sketch, for example, just exported as a PdF and upload your map in the project area. I can't wait to see what your created. 8. Looking Ahead: The Future State Journey Map: great to have you back. How was your coffee shop visit? Not too good, I hope. Remember, we're trying to find ways to improve it. The second part of the class project is to, of course, an opportunity for you to get creative and design a new costs. Coffee shop, customer journey map. We call this a future state customer journey map. Now we're trying to work with the experience curve, and we tried to address any pain points and to enhance interactions to amplify any premium values that we've discovered. Let's look at some other techniques you can use for this. In the nineties, Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman did some interesting research on the experience on pain in a hospital setting. There's a great Ted talk by Khanum on which I suggest you watch. There is a link in the class description below. Their findings is summarised as the peak and rule, and in short, it basically means that when a person coats his or her experience, the peak emotional experiences and the end experience dictates the memory off the overall experience. That means that when we work with the experience curve, we try to improve the pain points and try to elevate the interactions towards the end of the experience. Here are some strategies to work with the experience curve you have smoothing. We have strong ends, and you can even add steps to get an earlier starts. And there are other ways you can get created with the experience curve, such as reordering touchpoints and enhancing already strong peaks at several. The objective is, of course, to get rid of frustrating pain points and elevating the experience to build more meaningfulness and premium values into your future service offering. So please have a go at your future coffee shop. Visit experience. And don't limit yourself too much with whether or not your improvements are realistic or whether they would be too hard to implement. Aim for the stars. There will be plenty of time for you to get more realistic about your ideas later on. Better to have a grand vision to start with, then aiming too low. Remember, the Wright brothers did their first flying attempts in the beginning of the 19 hundreds. Only 60 years later, we landed on the moon, and now we're seriously planning to colonize Mars. Anything is possible even for your coffee shop visit experience 9. Closing Thoughts: congratulations. I hope you enjoy this class and that you're interested in working mawr with customer journey, mapping and service experience. Design To recap, we use journey maps for a number of things, including one communicating and summarizing research insights about how your service works and is experienced to mobilizing everyone in your organization to help drive or deliver value consistently through the complete journey of your customers and three using maps as a framework for designing new experiences and services. Customer journey mapping is just one of many tools that it helped create better and more meaningful experiences for customers and users. As service designers, we have a lot more tools at our disposal. Stakeholder maps, impact maps, experience maps, service blueprints, businessman cameras and more. In fact, it has become a service designing, saying that if there's a problem to be solved, don't worry. There's a map for that. If you like this course and would like to see more classes on user experience and service designed, please feel free to reach out either here on skill share or Twitter or lengthen or medium. Thanks for watching and participating