How do you run a customer journey workshop?

The key aim in running a customer journey workshop is to create a detailed “map” of the individual touchpoints and interactions that customers have with a specific business. This should encapsulate both the operational and emotional journey a customer takes with a company. The map also needs to identify points on the journey which have the power to change experiences and create value, alongside those which have the power to destroy value.

A deep understanding of customers and their experience with a brand is critical. Armed with this understanding, businesses can seek to implement ways of fully managing the whole customer experience.

It is advised that a company should try to seek participation from a range of departments and personnel who can contribute to mapping the different touchpoints that customers have with a business. Whilst there are those in customer-facing roles such as sales and customer service, this does not complete the picture. It is therefore important to include a mixture of those from marketing, sales, customer service, operations, finance and so on. As an example, the marketing team can advise on important touchpoints linked to the company website or marketing efforts which enable new customers to build awareness of a brand.

Moreover, when a business is running a customer journey mapping workshop, then including a range of personnel serves to send an important message; that everyone in a business has an important role to play in contributing to the end customer experience – whether this is directly or indirectly. This understanding and acceptance is the critical first step in a business building a truly customer-centric culture, where customer experience is ingrained in the fabric of the company. As highlighted in the diagram below, there are five core stages to embedding customer-centricity and only 4% of companies have reached the final stage, of which this cultural shift in recognizing that everyone has a role to play when it comes to delivering the customer experience is central.

Typically, this would run as an interactive working day long session (depending on the availability of all attendees). Whilst every workshop (and customer journey) is unique to each business, we would normally expect between 10-20 attendees to each workshop.

Facilitated by B2B International’s customer experience experts, the start of the session would set the scene to help align all attendees to what customer experience is and why it is an important focus. The rest of the day would then include multiple exercises which enable attendees to put themselves in the shoes of customers to understand their experiences and interactions, alongside key strengths, pain points or the most integral parts of the journey which have the most power to build or destroy customer loyalty – the “moments of truth”.

As is often the case for many b2b businesses, there may be several different but important customer types – for example, distributors of product and services versus end-users. With this in mind, we can format the day so that attendees are split into different groups; with each focusing on a specific customer type so that we can map out the different journeys that these customers take with a brand.