Associations spend a lot of time and money trying to create experiences that provide a differentiated and highly valued product or service. But they often approach the subject with an internal point of view and develop services that they think members will like instead of what customers need. This is known as an “inside-out” viewpoint.

Unfortunately, doing business this way can result in a fragmented series of experiences that leaves members frustrated. In the new omnichannel world of empowered consumers and cross-channel interactions, a negative experience in one channel or across channels can be disastrous to customer loyalty.

Customer journey mapping can achieve more unified experiences across all member channels and touchpoints, and it can be a useful tool for visualizing an actual customer’s journey as they engage with your association.

Journey maps tell a complete story by documenting every member touchpoint and step and every channel in play during each interaction. This could be following a potential member’s path to entry or identifying a current member’s problem or issue. Because journey maps visualize complex interactions using easy-to-understand diagrams, they serve as potent tools for understanding members’ experiences and communicating them across organizational functions. Journey maps can help associations to:

• speak to members effectively in communications or marketing campaigns
• understand where and why products or services fail
• discover new product and service opportunities
• design better products with features that customers want
• fix customer pain points by identifying root causes
• organize internal processes

The importance of intentionally designed customer experiences cannot be overstated. Great customer experiences don’t just happen organically. They require rigor, effort, and organizational change. 

Fundamentals of Customer Journey Mapping

Experience designers and service designers are continually experimenting with new types of journey maps and visual styles and layouts to make them more useful and informative. There are many ways to visualize and format a customer journey. Here are a few best practices for their creation, as well as some key components that all journey maps share:

Outside-in approach. All journey maps tell the story from the customer’s point of view. They should focus on the actual experiences of your members rather than projecting the association’s point of view outwardly.

Great customer experiences don’t just happen organically. They require rigor, effort, and organizational change.

Customer context. Journey maps are also meant to capture and display what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing during each interaction with your association. The maps should concentrate intensely on the rich context of each situation as the building blocks of the overall experience, including time, place, device, channel, touchpoint, relationship, psychological behavior, and emotion.

Common empathy. All customer journey maps are rooted in the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Your goal should be to create a consistent organizational understanding and empathy for what members are experiencing psychologically, emotionally, and physically during their interactions with your association.

Storytelling. Journey maps also tell a complete and personal story, either as a snapshot of reality (current-state maps) or as an intended and possible next state of being (future-state maps) for the customer. This story visualizes and conveys the subtleties and details of what your members are thinking, feeling, and doing.

Truth and transparency. Finally, all customer journey maps are based on qualitative and quantitative research and illustrate true customer stories with complete transparency. Factual transparency into why customer behaviors occur is vital to making customer journey maps useful and valuable.