Some quick notes on a workshop session that we ran this week to help to get people familiar with Customer Journey Mapping in a short and interactive session.
Overall objectives
Get a group from across our organisation’s support functions (HR, L&D, Health & Safety, Comms, Tech) and some key people from across the rest of the organisation to experience a simple Customer/User Journey mapping exercise to increase their familiarity with concepts behind designing around the needs of the people consuming services.
Resources
We ran the session using Zoom and Miro. The Miro board (here). The Miro board was set up with four blank Customer Journey Templates.
Workshop structure (detailed STOP chart here)
After an initial introduction into the aims and objectives of the session, we then ran through an exercise with the whole group (about 25 people in total) to illustrate the basics of a customer journey map. We took the example of the experience of ordering a pizza for delivery.
First question to the group was “Where does the journey start?” – and purposefully explored the answers as being ambiguous (and a point for decision for designing the service) – is it when the customer is hungry? When they’ve decided they want a take away? When they’ve decided they want a pizza? When they know which pizza store they want to order from? etc
Second question to the group was “Where does the journey end?” with similar ambiguity.
We then worked through some of the activities that would happen, and particular drew attention that the times when the provider is doing all the work (making and delivering the pizza) is the time when the customer is doing little other than gaining in anxiety and hunger. Also talked about the mapping of emotions at the bottom of the template.
We then split into 3 breakout groups in Zoom, with one pre-determined facilitator in each group. All groups would look at the New Employee Welcome experience (aka onboarding in some orgs).
This was chosen because it involves multiple parts of the support organisation, and just about all of the business managers and employees involved in the exercise would have some familiarity of it.
Group 1 looked at it from the manager’s perspective, group 2 from the new recruits’ perspective and group 3 from the perspective of the new recruit’s peers. I put quite a lot of the people most involved in the service at the moment in group 3 as I had a hunch it would be a new perspective for them.
The teams spent about 25 minutes and then we returned in plenary. Each group gave feedback and the differences in the 3 perspectives was profound – a useful illustration of how different users have very different needs.
Next steps
Having shown the technique to this group, we now intend to run similar sessions in regular team huddles to go further out into the business. We’ll also look at similar sessions using other key tools as well as journey mapping. Those sessions will then ask groups to flesh out journeys (or other artefacts) for particular services delivered internally or externally, with a view to how they might change them to make them better serve customer needs.
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