CREATING A GREAT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

The Objective:

Module 1: The depth of experience mapping

• Building a team
• Internal Investigation
• Assumption Formulation
• External Research

Module 2: Building Empathy Maps

• Spend some time discussing what each of the different quadrants corresponds to: seeing, hearing, saying, and thinking.
•  In order to reinforce the idea of using real data to build out the maps, have one person in the pair be an interviewer and the other person be the interviewee.
• Provide interviewers with a relevant experience to interview their partner about. A good generic topic for different groups is asking about the last major purchase the interviewee made.
• Interviewers should use the empathy map as a note-taking tool.

Module 3: Building Customer Journey Maps

• Spend time discussing the sentiment and sequential characteristics of the customer journey map.
•  In order to reinforce further the idea of using real data and practice interviewing, have the interviewer and interviewee switch roles.
• Provide interviewers with a relevant and recent experience to interview their partner about. Try to gauge your audience to make sure the topic is recent for the majority of the people in the room. Interviewees do less recollecting and generalizing about an experience if it is fresh in their mind.
•  Interviewers should use the customer journey map template as a note-taking tool.

Module 4: Brainstorming Opportunity Areas 

• Spend time discussing how to derive insights from the peaks and valleys of a customer journey map. What parts of the high points along the experience can be applied to improve the low parts?
• Teams should use the opportunity area worksheet to translate problem areas into design opportunities.
• Always timebox the activity between 5–10 minutes.
• Wrap up the activity by asking pairs what they found helpful about the tool and what they found the least helpful. Sometimes the insights gained from this discussion can be beneficial to your mapping practice.

Module 5: Bringing it all together

• A great way to incorporate research findings and opportunity areas into a product’s overall strategy and design is through collaborating with a product owner or manager to build a product roadmap with the customer in mind.
• Themes should be based on an organization’s overall business strategies. I like to find a list of a company’s strategic goals to help colleagues in the workshop begin to see how they can incorporate this type of roadmap into their processes. These answer the ‘why are we doing this,’ question across the company.
• Strategic features should be actionable items that are less detailed than a task, but more detailed than an overall initiative. They should be built from opportunity areas identified in the generative research phase of a project.
• Trello is a great, free, online tool to build out this type of roadmap. I also recommend adding user stories to the different feature cards to provide specifics. Cards in the pipeline don’t need specifics, but cards in the now column should always have a user story attached to narrow the scope of the feature.