PART
TWO

MAPPING YOUR
CUSTOMER’S JOURNEY

I almost hate to use the term “journey mapping” because the concept’s been hijacked by so many people that it’s become a generic term that doesn’t mean much. The concept of looking at the way in which people experience the throughput of your product and brand—journey mapping—is something of a no-brainer. However, this simple concept has turned into a thousand-pound gorilla.

I’m a big fan of granularity when it comes to looking at what your customers love and hate across-the-big-picture touchpoints, but we need to be extremely careful that we don’t evaluate touchpoints so minutely that the insights we gain are nonactionable.

In the early days of personal computing, you had to understand the cryptic code of the disk operating system (DOS), where you had to enter nonintuitive codes to get your computer to perform basic functions. In effect, the formula was: complex and hard work in = simple computer functions out. It wasn’t until graphical user interface (GUI) arrived that personal computers exploded in popularity. GUI systems such as the Apple OS and Windows OS followed a new formula: simple icon clicks = complex computer functions.

In Part Two, I present five simple steps—the five touchpoints—that you can easily apply when mapping your customers’ experience: the pre-touch, the first-touch, the core-touch, the last-touch, and the in-touch. Like GUI, it’s that simple.