Wow! Mapping the journey is complex indeed ! We are having to acknowledge that we can’t actually design the experience because every customer’s perception, needs, and wants are different. So – we must do what we can to influence the experience – identifying the pain and replacing it with pleasure.

In order to do this, we are breaking the process down into layers. First we have laid down the available journeys as they are currently, with all their potential turnings, crossroads, and stops along the way. Next we will layer this according to the typical user profiles of our core services, and look to the convergence points where it would be beneficial to simplify the route choices. Once we have input the fixes this process identifies, we will then re-walk the journey from the point of view of a variety of customer profiles to test the improvements from another perspective.

Scrutinising our own performance is enlightening and refreshing and staff are enthusiastic about the task in hand – we might be shedding layers of old habits to build the framework we need to differentiate our company and achieve the overall emotional engagement and loyalty of more customers. Back to the map – we need more post-its!