5 Rules for using Behavioral Science in Journey Mapping

The 5 Rules for Behavioral Journey Mapping

A lot of Behavioral Economics can feel intimidating. However, it doesn't have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.

What Are The Five Rules?

We were training customers with journey mapping recently when it became apparent that people didn't understand what journey mapping could do for them. Moreover, they thought they did. To respond, I came up with five precepts for advanced journey mapping skills, which can serve as a guide to your desired outcome.

Before we get into the rules, I should clarify for those of you that aren't familiar with Journey Maps what they are. They are essentially what a customer does in your experience. This exercise is excellent, and I support their use in designing your Customer Experience.

My criticism for journey mapping is that most people only do a superficial version that does not dip much outside their interaction with customers. Moreover, they usually don't indicate why customers do what they do. In many cases, it feels more like a customer process than a journey map, mostly because it isn't going to take you where you want to go.

Our version of journey mapping is called Behavioral Journey Mapping. It is different because it expands past the actual customer interaction where the experience starts and stops. It also identifies how customers feel entering the experience. Also, Behavioral Journey Mapping digs deeper into how each of the moments of the experience influences customer behavior, which is essential if you want to get customers to behave the way you want.

Now, for the rules:

The 5 Rules for Advanced Journey Mapping

1. Embrace that the journey is rational, emotional, subconscious, and psychological.
2. Look for the hidden aspects of a customer journey.
3. Define strategically what specific emotions drive most value across the market.
4. Build deliberate memory points.
5. Identify how to nudge customer decision-making.

What Should You Do With Them?

1. Embrace that the journey is rational, emotional, subconscious, and psychological. The first step is to understand that it is essential to know what customers do and why they do it. It is also necessary to know how they feel entering the experience. When you have this understanding of all the aspects of a customer journey, from practical to emotional and all the psychological stops in between, the rest of the rules will make more sense and yield more useful actions to get to where you want to go.

2. Look for the hidden aspects of the customer journey. Here is where you begin to plot out what is happening in your Customer Experience. You should include where the experience starts, recognizing it often happens way before the customer ever interacts with your organization. Furthermore, it would be best if you carried the journey map out to the end of the experience, which may conclude long after your organization's last interaction. Furthermore, third-party providers that take over parts of your experience (e.g., shuttle drivers, installers, tow truck operators) are also part of the experience and should make the map.

3. Define strategically what specific emotions drive most value across the market. Now that you have detailed what is happening in the customer journey comprehensively, you can plan how you want to enhance it. A crucial part of this strategy is the emotion your customer feels at the end of the experience. Whatever feeling you choose, from satisfied to safe to appreciated, the sentiment should drive value for your organization, which could mean anything from Net Promoter Score® to customer-driven growth. Then, your job is to design an experience that evokes these emotions. If you don't know what these emotions are, you should do research, like our Emotional Signature® Research, which uncovers the customers' unmet, hidden needs that can drive value for your Customer Experience if you were to meet them.

4. Build deliberate memory points. Memory is vital to your experience. Your customers don't choose you based on the experience you provide; they choose you because of the experience they remember you provide. Therefore, building a positive memory of your experience is essential to your customer-driven growth. Memories form based on the peak experience of the experience and how customers felt at the end, called the Peak-End Rule, first introduced by Nobel-Prize-winning economist Professor Daniel Kahneman. If the peak emotion that occurs in your experience and the one at the end, as identified in your customer journey map from Rule 2 do not drive value for your organization, you need to change them.

5. Identify how to nudge customer decision-making. There will be moments in your experience that present an opportunity to nudge customer behavior to something that you prefer to what is occurring now. Understanding how people make decisions, and the psychological concepts that explain them will help you design your situations to make it easy for customers to make the decision that you want. After all, isn't that what spending all this time and money on customer journey mapping was meant to do?

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.