People arrive at a given point in their service experience from a multiple of ways and am I wrong in my thinking or do I need a makeup a path for each of them or do we just try to push all of them down a certain path? – Joe Dager
Ben Reason: I think that’s a great question. I’m not sure if I have all the answers. I agree that it’s dangerous to start mapping a customer journey as if there’s only one, and it’s also probably too much to ask that we map every journey. It just sprung to mind, we’ve been doing some work with an electricity and gas company where we were talking about one particular journey, when people move home and how they transition their account, which should be really simple but they have 300 different permutations of how that might actually occur depending on what tariff when you’ve told them what kind of credit rating you’ve got.
It gets very complicated. You were interested in talking about the life cycles as well; I think what we’re trying to get across in the book is that there are these phases that people need to go through with the service. You need to move from awareness to consideration, to uptake, to being a new user. There are these predictable phases that people move through, but how they get from point to point can be very different. I think designing the specific touch points in the service to be flexible enough to cope with different groups.
The other thing is I think it varies. I think you can apply a customer journey mapping to something like air travel and be fairly confident because it’s a journey and it’s quite set in its structure. But if you’re talking about something less linear, then you’re in danger.
Joe: Well, jumping to that life cycle thing and I’m jumping to another point we talked about in the book, I look at the customer journey map that we have these blobs, these oblong, these ugly looking circles that have kind of a scenario in each. Those things are along the journey, and it’s easier to explain maybe something in a scenario than it is this linear process of what someone’s doing. Do you agree with that and do you talk about that in the book at all?
Ben: Starting with the life cycles, I think one thing, because this book is very deliberately Service Design for business, and one thing that’s very important for large businesses or any business that wants to grow is to be efficient with its customers, plural, and have an impact on the top and the bottom line in the way that they interact with customers having a role to play in how successful they are, and that’s to do with your loyal customers, your instilled base of customers, and it’s thousands or millions of people. We’ve worked a lot with public transport, and they’re geared up to deal with mass customers moving through stations and all the stresses that that poses, and that’s where the life cycle really comes in because it talks to that level.
Whereas I think the journey can be too much to do with a story about a particular individual and how they get on. Does that make sense? I think there’s a tension between design’s focus on the individual experience and a kind of big operation or business focused on how do we serve this large number of people. So we’re trying to reconcile those two things and make the design more relevant to the business audience.
Ben Reason is the co-author of Service Design for Business: A Practical Guide to Optimizing the Customer Experience.
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