Illustration by the author
Any problem solving exercise should start with the questions:
- What is it we are trying to understand?
- What is the outcome we are hoping to achieve?
Then we choose the tool with the best fit.
When mapping our customers to our company there are many valid approaches. I’ve chosen three to demonstrate the significance in difference.
The Journey:
The journey is the most common approach to mapping customers. It is most helpful if the team is:
- Trying to plot what the company is doing across the different stages the customer flows through.
- Trying to map the path-to-purchase journey as it is the one most likely to be close-ish to linear.
The journey doesn’t help you understand your customers. It helps organize the companies activities according to different customer-situations and see connections across different parts of the organization.
Iluustration by the author
It is an excellent exercise to help the organization better understand what other people and departments are doing and how to work better together.
The Experience:
The challenge with the journey is that there is literally no linear customer journey.
In a piece of research done all the way back in 2012 Google and Shopper Science identified that of the 3000 customers investigated, there were 3000 individual journeys. (link)
Also empirical evidence debunks linear hierarchical models (link).
But how does the customer travel towards becoming a customer? It’s a mess .. or to say it better .. it’s an experience.
Kunde & Co made a beautiful experience map many years ago for IKEA. I still believe its one of the most clever ways to map the complicated path the customer travels through leading to purchase.
Model by Kunde&Co
It’s based on what you know: the channels of interaction. And what you don’t know: the multitude of ways people travel between them.
But you can find patterns and you can guide. And so this experience map helps the team build better channels and set the right connections between them.
Both the journey and the experience focuses on leading the customer towards a purchase (or some other goal).
What if the project’s goal is to better serve customers, compared to only aquiring them?
I would wager two things:
- Customers don’t care about channels (we do)
- Customers don’t care about purchasing a product (we do), but using it to serve their need
So both the journey and the experience makes it all about us, ignoring the customer.
How do we change that?
The System:
This is where we need a HUGE mindset change. Because we are myopic to our own products and our own channels.
Both the experience and the journey demonstrates that we are not able to pull away from the gravitational force that is ourselves.
But what do our customers care about? What is their underlying need that we are helping them serve? If we truly care about understanding the customer that is what we put at the center of our model: their need.
E.g. If we are a TV-cable provider and our customers need is “entertainment”, then we put “entertainment” in the middle of the model and ask the simple question:
“What leads to more of this and what leads to less of it?”
Then map those inputs as nodes surrounding the need at the center.
Illustration by the author
Now ask again: what leads to more or less of the nodes you just added to the model, and also, are any of them connecting and influencing each other?
Illustration by the author
Continue doing this until you are happy with the output.
You are now building a causal diagram with the customer need at the center.
It’s not about us, its about them.
With the map in place we can better figure out how to amplify or reduce forces of influence we want more or less of. And then we can (finally) figure out how to do that using our channels, products and technologies.
If we truly want to focus on the customer their needs should be at the center of the model, not channels nor purchasing.
And then we identify what leads to more or less of what they need .. all the time (there is very little linearity it’s much more similar to that movie title: everything, everywhere, all at once).
Now the team will have a map to help them understand what can drive more value to the customer and what will lead to less value. And now it is in a position to serve the customer …
