How do you map your customer journey to reflect your culture?

Mapping your customer journey to reflect your culture involves aligning every touchpoint and interaction that a customer has with your brand to the values, beliefs, and identity of your organization. This ensures a consistent and authentic experience that resonates with your target audience.

First of all, you have to know what your culture is. And culture is not purpose. Brand purpose is what your brand aims and why. Culture is how you deliver that in every aspect of the business, including all the types of customers (internal and externals). Second, you have to understand that different people need different approaches in order to absorb your culture, so segmentation and different strategies for each segment is important. Third, you have to create different goals for each strategy/segment and measure the results accordingly.

This approach humanizes the customer journey and fosters a deeper connection, potentially leading to long-term loyalty. However, the real challenge lies in its execution, where consistency and authenticity across all touchpoints become crucial. Any misstep could break the carefully crafted image, showing that while the integration of culture in CX is a powerful concept, it demands strategic alignment, dedicated resources, and a keen understanding of both the brand and the customer.

Culture is a group's way if thinking and doing. It should define who you target as customers. Most importantly, what's important to your customers tells you what's needed in your culture. Customer-centricity is the degree that thinking and doing are in-tune with customer well-being. What's in their best interest? How much of each work group's thinking considers this foremost? How well do consequences for deviations from this course-correct behaviors? Remedial cost to serve customers and customer churn are measures of customer-centricity. When customer well-being comes first, these metrics improve.

Partially disagree with the whole paragraph… you build the desired culture around the customer journey… so the client gets the same service/product experience every time… this is what will bring them back… if they like it the first time…

Making your customer journey match your culture means making sure that every time a customer connects with your business, it feels like they're experiencing what your brand is all about – the things you believe in and stand for. When you do this, it helps your customers feel really good about their experience. It's like making sure everything flows smoothly and makes them happy, while also letting them connect with the special vibe that makes your brand different. By putting a bit of your business's heart and soul into every step of how your customers experience it, you're not just selling treats – you're sharing a piece of who you are with each person who walks through your door.

Defining your culture is pivotal in mapping a customer journey that reflects your essence. Clarify core values, beliefs, and principles, both internally and externally. Cultivate emotions you want visitors to experience during interactions. Measure and enhance culture through ongoing assessments. Aligning your culture with CX strategy fosters a cohesive and authentic visitor experience, strengthening connections and loyalty to your institution.

The culture we build internally directly reflects how it would shape the customer experience and their journey with us. The values of the organization should be inculcated in not just the customer-facing people of the organization but also the last person to be facing the customers ever. Because directly or indirectly everyone in the organization plays a role in providing a delightful customer experience or a bad one. Culture is not just the game changer, it's the whole game which impacts customer experience.

I would reckon it all starts with you defining clearly and articulating what your organisational cultural attributes would be..And this has to start from the top leadership. Once you do that , you set in motion demonstrable actions that are aligned with the values and attributes ..Once this internal alignment comes about is when you keep reinforcing the same so it it gets percolated across all internal and external touchpoints and there is tangible difference seen for the brand..

I´d like to first comment on the title of this article. I would say that "mapping" the customer journey to reflect the culture is not the right title or "approach" for this piece. A better title would be: How do you "design" your customer journey to reflect your culture? The act of "mapping" the customer journey is just a reflection of what is, in fact, going on from the perspective of the customer at the moment. To reflect your culture in the customer journey(s), you must design (not just mapp) the customer experience and the customer journey(s) to reflect the culture of your organization.

In my experience, understanding that customers differ in their responses to culture is vital. Segmenting based on needs, preferences, behaviors, and feedback allows tailoring journeys for different personas. Personalised and relevant CX enhances engagement. Utilise surveys, interviews, analytics, and CRM data to effectively segment customers, ensuring an authentic and resonating experience that delights diverse audiences visiting your attraction of using your service.

Customer segmentation is crucial because there are as many customer journeys as there are customer types. Here, I recommend doing the mapping exercise using persona profiles that provide a 360° view of these archetypes (needs, expectations, preferences, requirements, etc.).

Segment customers by their overall purpose in what your offering achieves in their life or business. When they succeed in their purpose, everyone wins. This is known as jobs to be done (JTBD). Outcome based selling and innovation and customer success teams may have researched this. Use this as primary segmentation, and traditional segmentation secondarily. JTBD segments make customer expectations crystal clear so you can close and prevent performance gaps. JTBD personas are actionable for non-customer-facing groups. There are usually two to four overall JTBD segments per brand. Meeting and exceeding expectations (JTBD) means good experiences, low cost to serve, and growth in many ways.

It is important to deeply understand the needs of a wide range of customers with minimal assumptions. We should be cognizant of not allowing biases based on our needs or experiences while evaluating what customers want. While data-driven analytical techniques are a must to assess a wider pool of customers, it is also important to physical meet and talk to them to truly understand their unarticulated needs.

As I follow this convo I think there are alot of great insights shared! But as a Business Anthropologist working in UX, I've always experienced customer journey mapping as a way to make the context come alive - and brilliant at that! But not only that, user-journeys show interactions and behaviors you can't easily capture otherwise. I'm on team customer journeys - but the more interesting ambition, I think, is to find NEW contexts - new 3D worlds, senses, markets, 'tribes', habits - sky's not even the limit.

Segmentation is definitely important but even this can sometimes become quite generic- not all middle aged, female doctors from Kansas have the same motivators. Use a hybrid of automations as well as personal touch points to build trust and influence. If you come across something you think might be of interest to one particular client ping it over to them in a direct message on LinkedIn, that way those automated mailers will feel more natural and simply perceived as you just keeping them up to date.

Adding to the qualitative or emotional aspects of a particular segment, marketers should also focus on understanding the population, value, and share of each segment. Also, they should have an understanding of how these segments are interconnected. This will enable them to make strategic decisions on which segments to target with what positioning.

More important than segmenting your customers for CX is building a set of distinctive customer personas that will help inform a set of persona-informed or persona-linked customer journeys. Do your research to inform your customer persona creation first.

I agree, but in the context of museum experiences, touchpoints hold a unique significance. Beyond traditional online and offline interactions, consider the sensorial touchpoints within your exhibits—the tactile textures, auditory experiences, and immersive environments. These physical touchpoints can evoke powerful emotions and memories, deepening visitor engagement. Mapping them along the customer journey stages adds depth to your understanding of how visitors connect with the exhibits, fostering lasting connections and a sense of wonderment that lingers far beyond their visit. Embrace this distinctive perspective to elevate your museum's impact and create truly unforgettable experiences.

Touchpoints for a product sometimes go beyond the eco-system that a platform can control. In the context of E-commerce, the platform a high degree of control over the user buying experience on the app/website. A fair degree of control on product delivery. But customers today expect support on issues for touchpoints beyond that, such as repair, re-sale etc. It is important to create an information ecosystem that serves as source of truth for the customers to guide them in fulfilling their needs.

In my experience and viewpoint, pinpointing touchpoints is only the initial step. If you go through the earlier step 0, as I explained, you won't need to spend valuable time identifying touchpoints here because they would have already been identified. The main challenge in identifying touchpoints is ensuring overall coherence in mapping the journey. This involves the concept of omnichannel.

You need to work from the perspective of the customers job to be done. The customers will have many different minor journeys that will be very different (search for a supplier, starting to use the service, ask about an invoice etc) and these different customer journeys all needs to be designed an mapped individually with the relevant touchpoints for the map to be detailed enough to be useful in improving the customer experience. I don´t think that customer journey maps should use the stages awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy as said in the article. The customers certainly don’t think that way so you should not design a customer journey based on this customer-life-cycle (that is inside-out-thinking).

Understand Your Culture: Clearly define your organizational culture. Identify core values, mission, vision, and unique characteristics that make up your culture. This understanding will be the foundation for mapping the customer journey. Define Customer Touchpoints: Identify all the touchpoints where customers interact with your brand. This includes initial awareness, website visits, social media engagement, purchase process, post-purchase support, and more. Align Culture with Touchpoints: For each touchpoint, analyze how your culture can be expressed. Determine how your values, messaging, and behavior can be integrated at each stage to create a consistent experience.

Culture fit is a two-sided coin: how well is your culture preventing gaps and what gaps tell you is needed in your culture. It's useful to add a row below the journey map for each of your core values. Note in each row what's strong and what's missing. This is a powerful way to engage work groups in closing gaps. It connects employee experience and outcomes to customer experience and outcomes. Quantify the strengths and gaps as a baseline and cost-benefit analysis. Accordingly, what needs to change in standards, reviews, coordination, approvals, metrics, etc.? This is a key step in reducing silos.

In my experience, infusing your attraction, such as a museums unique culture into touchpoints fosters authenticity. Evaluate cultural expressions at each point, ensuring coherence and consistency. Leverage culture audits and satisfaction scores to refine touchpoints and bridge any gaps. This holistic approach creates an immersive experience, where visitors connect with your heritage on a deeper level, forging lasting connections with your museum.

The employees are the main carriers of culture. To make the culture more tangible and noticeable to the customers, you must educate the employees in how they should act when interacting with the customers so that the employees act in a way that is in accordance with your values. For example, if "helpfulness" is one of your key values, you must ensure that the employees act in a way that makes the customer feel that your employees are truly extra helpful. Start by defining what helpfulness means, and then create a set of actions that the employees should take to reflect helpfulness. It can be things like starting a conversation with "How can I assist you today?" and asking "Is there anything else I can help you with?"

Unleash the untamed potential of your attractions touchpoints. Seamlessly weave your culture into every interaction, leaving an indelible mark on visitors' hearts. Dare to challenge conventions and reimagine content, design, and communication. Embrace radical experimentation, for it is through the uncharted waters of innovation that transformative experiences emerge. Let curiosity guide you, and curiosity shall be the beacon illuminating the path to extraordinary encounters. Monitor, refine, and evolve with an unwavering commitment to enchant, enthrall, and inspire visitors in ways they never thought possible.

With touchpoints, in the absence of other research, we can hypothesize where are the bottlenecks to moving a target customer from one phase of the purchase funnel to the next one.

In this section on "Optimizing touchpoints," the key idea to emphasize is the concept of continuous improvement. Customer journeys should evolve because they are not set in stone over time.

Create long & lasting relationships This is one of the main objectives of the Customer Success Manager, because when strong relationships are created with a customer, it means that they’ll continue to make purchases and renewals. Customer loyalty is essential for sales creation & business sustainability. A company can constantly gain new customers, but if it doesn’t make efforts to keep the ones it already has, it’s destined to lose profits. It’s the bridge to the technical team Maintaining constant contact with customers also gives the CSM greater insight into what companies are doing with the product, whether they are using it or not, if they have certain problems in common or if they need to make changes to any of the processes.

At PetsApp we refrain from direct in your face sales and instead create free educational resources for our community which they can either take as is or use our product to implement and grow their own business. By doing this we not only gain trust, and set the standard on the quality of our product via the content we create but we also position ourselves as key opinion leaders within our field.

Creating a customer journey map that reflects your company culture requires both visualization and contextualization of the inputs. What are the key steps in the journey bring your culture in, what is the language that you should be injecting into the text captured on the journey map, and beyond the basic phases and steps of the journey you capture horizontally, what are the key information you should be capturing vertically on the map to reflect your culture?

You can map your customer journey to reflect your culture by: - Listening to customers at critical points along the journey - Monitoring metrics to see how successful the journey is from the company's perspective - Engaging cross-functional teams to prioritize improvement opportunities identified through mapping process - Using journey map and CX metrics as communications tools to align cross-functional teams around customer understanding - Setting up a governance model to assign ownership of action plans to different areas of business - Evaluating and prioritizing improvements & investments using journey map as framework - Continuing to iterate and update customer journey map as CX evolves Make sure to set goals when implementing changes!