First, let’s start with, “What is a customer experience?” A customer experience is the culmination of all the emotional and physical interactions a customer has with a company or their product or service. Customer experience mapping aims to help companies understand the customer experience they are currently delivering across various channels and touch points and identify opportunities to improve those touch points for greater brand loyalty and sales success.

There are several different methods of customer experience mapping that exist in the market today. Some methods try to capture the experience across the entire customer life cycle—or the journey a customer takes as they engage in a service with a company over time. This is sometimes called “customer journey mapping“. Others look at the tangible and quantitative measures of a customer’s experience across the touch points, such as number of contacts made and the time taken to access a service. These methods tend to only look at the experience from a service or goal achievement perspective. They often overlook how the brand impacts a customer’s decisions, mindsets and behaviors.

Customer Experience Mapping: The Parker LePla Approach

Parker LePla’s method for customer experience mapping is more targeted to business goals and looks at customer experience through the lens of the customer and their relationship with the brand—seeking to understand how the customer influences the brand and the brand influences the customer along the way. This approach highlights the many elements of a customer experience that are more important from a customer’s perspective than a company may think. It also uncovers opportunities for the company to create moments that turn a simple event such as a post-purchase confirmation, or how a package is wrapped and shipped, into brand-defining experiences.

Customer Experience Mapping in Practice

Here’s how customer experience mapping might work in practice. Let’s say we are working with a company that provides high end shipping and project management services for trade shows and other events. And, let’s say their business goal is to acquire 10 new customers over the next two months. Rather than trying to break down and analyze their entire customer experience from end to end, we help them understand how their existing customers learned about them and what process they went through to make a decision to work with them—how did they frame their need or business problem, what did they need to know, who was involved in the each stage of the process, what barriers existed and how were they overcome?

We start by doing some customer experience research to understand customers’ baseline impressions of the brand, how it impacts their decisions and what they associate with the brand. Then, we talk to the company’s internal teams (business development, marketing, communications, PR and sales) to understand how they deliver their services and what channels they deliver them through. Then, we get to mapping—facilitating a team discussion that walks them through the experience from their customer’s point of view—mapping each and every aspect of the experience on a white board so that the team can see, in real time, what the process looks like from their customer’s point of view.

Let’s also say that during the process they realize that the way most of their customers are finding them is not through Google, but through the event management grapevine. This realization makes them think about whether they should reduce their Google AdWords budget and put more money towards a customer referral program and directory listings on key event management sites. It also makes them think they should boost their brand promotions in these event spaces. During the process, they discover the opportunity to turn their sales force into “event logistics consultants” that provide an hour of free consulting to help potential clients see the benefits of their approach—all because they were able to see that their clients needed more education on why their customers should choose their approach over others. The end result: a clear understanding of their customer’s experience and a strategic plan to help them meet their business goal of acquiring 10 new customers over the next two months.

Customer experience mapping is a very enlightening process that helps companies take a new look at what they do through the eyes of their customers. It helps managers and executives emerge from ruts and inspires creativity and innovation in everyone in the organization. It’s powerful work that transforms brands and turns customers into champions.

Learn more about how customer experience mapping can help you increase brand loyalty and sales and learn about a complimentary customer experience mapping offer from Parker LePla here.

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