Hearts then Charts

HEARTS THEN CHARTS
It’s not just you: institutional knowledge stored in mailing tubes and archival boxes
Of the thirty organizations we audited, only nine had mapped even part of their customer’s
journey. Of those nine, only one reported that customer journeys or maps were regularly
used to drive decisions.
Six of the thirty reported broader organizational attempts to map or segment the
experiences of their customers. Only three of those companies continue to use those maps
today. All three indicated that the documents are used only by the teams who created them.​
Artifacts are only as valuable as the collective will to use them. With regular use, the
organization develops a muscle memory that amplifies their utility. When used in isolation
their utility is limited by the influence of those who commission them.
Customer experience suffers when customer insights are hoarded — and at great cost to the
enterprise. We heard this from a VP of Product Marketing at a large Consumer Packaged
Goods brand:
“We turn over the majority of our workforce every six or seven years.
After the rollout of our customer journey work five years ago, the
consulting firm we collaborated with left and we didn’t have a lot of
subsequent opportunities to re-introduce the work to our teams.”
Notably, only one of the six reported that the map used by the organization included
interactions and experiences not directly delivered by the organization.
Start here: build an (imperfect) map of the experience of being your customer.
We tend to be extraordinarily poor at outlining the experiences of our customers. The
availability heuristic 14 biases us toward describing experiences that tie closely to our
organizational structures.
To demonstrate this, ask a customer to list out the steps involved in purchasing one of
your products or services. Ask a key member of your operations team to do the same.
The differences between the two will almost always reveal areas in which your customer
experience has significant room for improvement.
We take a significant step forward when we can divide the customer experience into
stages that see the process not through our organization’s structure, but through the eyes
of the user. We make even more progress when we can use that process to make
decisions at every level of the organization.
Before you begin:
• Assemble another cross-functional team of between 8 and 20 individuals. It’s not
necessary that this team be entirely distinct from the group that helped define your
customer types. It is, however, a good opportunity to involve more members of your
organization in the process.
• You’ll want a comfortable working space in which the team can work without distraction
for a full eight-hour day
• Again, you’ll want to schedule recurring monthly check-ins with the same group for at
least a six month period
• Ideally, the team will have access to the customer types you defined in the first exercise
14
a common bias that leads us to over-rely on easily-recalled models and examples in the evaluation of a system or process
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