Jennifer L. Clinehens - CX That Sings

Youve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.

Steve Jobs

Its one of the hottest topics in business. Customer Experiencemuch like Big Data, Marketing Automation, AI, and the Blockchainis an area thats widely discussed but not well understood.

Thought leaders without much skin in the game tout CX as a cure-all for brands. Agencies go on hiring sprees. Org charts shuffle. It all seems so sexyso strategic.

But when you get down to brass tacks, theres not a lot of clarity around the Customer Experience process, outputs and KPIs.

According to a recent study by Havas said that companies fail to deliver on basic CX promises.

And thats a big, high-stakes problem.

So if youre trying to fix your customer experience, where do you start? Thats where the Customer Journey Map comes in.

Although there are several excellent books on Experience Mapping, I wasn't satisfied with the available resources. Many of these books talk about Journey Mapping at a more strategic level, but not a practical one.

Given how important customer experience and Journey Mapping are to the future of business, I felt such a guide needed to be written.

Designed to be a jumping-off point, this book introduces the language, creation process, and uses for Customer Journey Maps. Its designed to be a quick read without a lot of fluff, just the nuts and bolts of making a Journey Map happen.

In an ideal world, you will finish this book and start creating CJMs right away, while continuing to learn from other resources and your own practice. But please don't stop here. There's a whole world of content out there, and many ways to approach Journey Mapping.

There are three big sections in this guide - designed to help you understand the piece parts of CJMs, how to build your own, and some tips to put your map into action

1. Understanding the Map: Best practice, examples of customer journey maps, templates, and checklists to help you get from zero to completed map with as little pain as possible.
2. Building the Map: From the initial discovery workshop to final visualization and validation, you'll be guided through best practice examples, checklists, case studies, and common mistakes in experience mapping. Includes a section on common mental biases, working cross-functionally, and using the Journey Map to sell-in the right next steps (if you're an agency), or get support for these projects from others in your organization (if you're a product manager, brand manager, or marketing director).
3. Using your Map: Learn how to use this as a jumping off point to develop additional opportunities, solutions, product and experience innovations, and build relationships that get CX initiatives funded, tested, completed, and measured.

In each chapter, Ive included easy-to-scan sections like Key Termsand Definitions, What You Need to Remember, Further Reading, Links, and Additional Resources.

Despite what some people might say, there's no one way to create a Customer Journey Map. This book aims to distill fundamental guiding principals. You may find that your approach will vary slightly from mine.

That's great - you do you! But like learning to be a musician, you have to absorb the fundamentals before you can improvise. Consider this guide your introduction to the notes, rhythms, and scales of Journey Mapping. Where you take the melody is up to you.

In writing this guide, I've assumed zero prior knowledge of a wide range of subjects: advertising, communications design, behavioral psychology, qualitative research, data analysis, and design. This isn't intended to insult anyone. Instead, it's a reflection of the audience I had in mind while writing.

Although anyone should be able to read CX That Sings and hit the ground running, there are a few audiences that will benefit the most:

Meet Jane : She's a client-side marketing manager who specializes in direct communications for a large fast casual dining chain. She's in charge of creating an onboarding email campaign for the company's new mobile app.

Janes agency suggests they put together a customer journey map to better understand the pain points these emails might address.

But Janes a little unsure.

She has a top-tier MBA, but her marketing program didn't mention customer-focused empathy tools. Instead, her professors spent a lot of time on classic strategic frameworks like Blue Ocean, SWOT, and Porter's Five Forces.

Jane has heard of Customer Journey Mapping. She's even Googled it and seen an example or two. But she doesn't have experience in the creation process, so shes not sure what value it might provide.

The question she's asking herself is, "Why should I pay for a big, expensive piece of strategy work when we can just use common sense? Don't we already have a pretty good understanding of our customers and what they need?"

Jane will use consumer journey maps for communications planning and internal strategy development and alignment.

Her biggest challenge is, "I've heard customer journey mapping is important but is it valuable to me?

Meet Ben : Hes an agency-side strategist who wants to better understand the process of putting together a Customer Journey Map.

As his agency evolves from being digital specialists to a more experience-focused shop, Ben sees the writing on the wall. If he wants to keep up with where the agency, clients, and the industry are heading, he needs to learn more about the process of Customer Journey Mapping.