The Critical Steps to Ensure Your Program Is Not Seen As Something Soft and Fluffy

One of our listeners in Finland is in a pickle. Anna wants to operationalize journey mapping to make their Customer Experience more customer centric. Perhaps more importantly, she wants these improvements to prove practical and effective rather than viewed as a “soft and fluffy” exercise that is not practical for the organization to continue to support. 

Anna is not alone in this problem. Similar situations are everywhere in business today. After all, owners and stakeholders in an organization do not invest money in anything because they are hoping it doesn’t provide a return on investment. The things you spend resources on in business should provide a return on investment—or they are not practical enough for the organization to continue to support. 

In this episode, we discuss Anna’s business pickle and how she can leverage what she learns in journey mapping to improve her organization’s customer strategy. In addition, we will share practical steps and advice that any organization should take when implementing what they learn from the exercise to become more customer-centric in the experience they provide.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

When it comes to journey mapping, we often encounter a problem. People think that the exercise is the answer to everything that’s wrong (or right) with Customer Experiences. But it isn’t. Journey Mapping is a way to uncover the answers to everything, and should be combined with other customer-centricity experience improvement efforts and measurements to ensure success. We talk about these areas in the podcast. 

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

2:55  Anna shares her pickle in a recording about how to use the findings in their journey mapping exercise to change the organization to be more customer-centric.

6:10  We share our advice on how to operationalize journey mapping starting with the four parts of a customer experience, including the rational, conscious, subconscious, and psychological. 

07:15  Ryan shares his view on what journey mapping can do for an organization, and how it can benefit organizations in their experience improvement efforts.

12:50  Colin addresses the nine areas of customer centricity that affect customer experiences, and the four levels of customer centricity that range from Naïve to Natural. 

16:40  Colin shares a personal example of how an experience can expose how customer-centric an organization is. 

20:46  We talk about the John Cotter’s 8-step Process for Leading Change and how Anna (and other organizations) can use it to manage the process. 

32:08  We both share the practical steps for leveraging what you know from your journey mapping exercise into improving your experience to drive value for the organization, from Emotional Signture research to measurement strategy and more. 

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Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University. 

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers. 

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more. 

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