There are hardly any companies that want to make customers uncomfortable. However, this happens regularly. More often than not, it’s because organizations have no idea what consumers are going through as they interact with them.
Customer experience maps help to see the whole picture and make the customer journey in the company enjoyable and efficient. There are hundreds of ways to create these maps. Jim Kalbach, a consultant for eBay, Audi, SONY, Citrix and other companies, has compiled them in one practical book, The Customer Path.
The customer journey
Creating visualization as a common reference point
An organization is a complex system. Each department can function perfectly on its own. But the customer experience is an intertwining of different examples of interaction with the company.
This example of a service scenario map with an emotional curve depicts what happens during an eye care visit.
A diagram of the human user experience is a tangible model around which the various teams coalesce. Which means we can simultaneously see all the interconnections, complexities, challenges, and points of growth.
Visualization doesn’t provide direct answers – it stimulates communication, points to opportunities, and serves as a springboard for innovation.
Customer journey maps
Customer journey maps start with the first point of contact, continue with the purchase, and then describe the long-term relationship with the brand. However, by focusing on the customer experience alone, we’re missing half the story.
Traditional customer journey maps don’t show the seemingly invisible but huge amount of employee activity that shapes the user experience. 
Evaluations from both sides, user and employee, provide a complete picture. Creating robust and effective customer journey maps requires the participation of cross-functional teams and even users.
Ideal Work State
The IBM Enterprise Design Thinking suite has a tool for creating ideal work state maps. It gives you the ability to create drafts of future user experiences and show how new ideas can meet current needs.
To start, draw four lines on the board and title them “Stages,” “Actions,” “Thoughts,” and “Feelings.” Then imagine what an ideal user experience might look like by filling in the lines with post-it notes. Compare your ideal future state with your current state and find the areas where the ups and downs occur.
What are your possibilities? What does a moment of insight look like that can influence decisions?
The need method
It’s not enough to create products and services that meet needs and create a positive user experience. You have to learn to imagine how users might behave. And this is where Need comes into the picture.
Successful innovations don’t just push users to do things differently – they ask them to become someone else.
For example, George Eastman didn’t just invent the affordable, easy-to-use automatic camera in the late 19th century; he created photographers. Google is not just a powerful search algorithm, but a solution that allows everyone to become an expert in the field of research. And eBay gave birth to a new generation of entrepreneurs.
However, innovations that ask people to be something they don’t want to be fail. For example, the McDonald’s “double portion” advertising campaign was very effective from a business point of view. However, it essentially called for an unhealthy lifestyle and ended up hurting the company’s reputation.
An example of a service map with possible Needs-based responses for each stage
As you create your model, ask the question, “What do we want to turn our consumers into?” Gather the possible answers and decide which one is best.
What else
In 1997, Steve Jobs returned as Apple’s CEO. In a meeting, an employee asked about technology. Jobs replied, “You have to start with the customer experience and build on that when creating technology.”
With these words, he made it clear exactly how he wanted to reshape Apple’s work – by abandoning the standard way of selling software products. Rather than inventing technology and then promoting it to consumers, he wanted to first imagine what the ideal user experience looked like, and then tailor the technology to that. It worked.
The main way to understand the essence of the “experience” is to create a model that can demonstrate it visually. There are dozens of ways to create such a model in this book. 
Here’s what else is in the book:
- Identifying Contact Points and Moments of Truth: Critical Elements of the User Experience
- What’s the difference. Customer journey maps, service maps, and user experience maps
- Designing new experiences with maps
- Dozens of cases, examples, illustrations, methods, and maps
Visualization feeds strategy. It provides a way to look at the marketplace from the consumer’s perspective. Creating user journey maps is not just a fun tool, but a prerequisite for company growth and development.
Based on the book “The Customer’s Way
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Thank you for your help in publishing the book Vanderful Lab
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