Barriers: What structural, process, cost, implementation, or other barriers stand in the way of moving on to the next stage?įilling all these out is best done if grounded in customer research, preferably including in-depth ethnographic-style interviews and in-context observations.Questions: What are the uncertainties, jargon, or other issues preventing the customer from moving to the next stage? As you can from the diagram above, home theater has a larger proportion of questions than almost anything else at each stage, which indicates this is an area that manufacturers and retailers should be attacking aggressively.Motivations: Why is the customer motivated to keep going to the next stage? What emotions are they feeling? Why do they care?.That will come later when we look at touchpoints) Actions: What is the customer doing at each stage? What actions are they taking to move themselves on to the next stage? (Don’t list what your company or partners such as retailers are doing here.A framework that I find consistently useful is to look at: The timeline is just the starting point next we need to look at what’s happening at each stage. Scripting it well helps guide the customer through the first steps of using their new purchase and minimizes expensive calls into help lines. A great out-of-box experience is like a little piece of theater. Do a search on YouTube for “ unboxing“, for example, or looking at for many examples of people going through what is now a ritualistic act of opening up the latest gadget.īut beyond the emotional factors, it makes good business sense. This has become an increasing important step. The spine of the timeline in this case is based around the conventional sales funnel (awareness, research, purchase), but then adds another step: OOBE, or out-of-box-experience. If I were a manufacturer, how would I go about understanding the customer journey so I could improve it? Here is a diagram that shows one way of looking at the home theater journey up to the point of getting the gear home: But it’s also an opportunity for smart companies: retailer Best Buy bought service start-up Geek Squad to solve exactly this type of problem. It’s a bad sign when there are numerous forums for customers to help each other out, as is the case in home theater, since it means that the manufacturers have utterly failed in creating a comprehensive customer experience. Yet in home theater, such confusion is rampant. There is no good reason why a layperson just wanting to watch movies at home should be exposed to such complexity and jargon.

Will DD PLIIx or THX 7.1 apply to these? What are the limitations?”ĭon’t worry if you have no idea what this means - you shouldn’t have to. “For HD and Blue Ray DVD HDMI audio I do not understand if any post processing is done on the 5.1 Lossless PCM channels from these players. Here’s a real sample of some questions asked by a prospective purchaser on a home theater forum: It makes buying a car seem trivially easy. By way of example, let’s look at a customer journey that doesn’t work well: home theater.Īnyone who has attempted to research, buy, set up, and use a home theater system knows that this is one of the most frustratingly complicated customer experiences in the consumer electronics realm. Here, for example, is a customer journey timeline that includes first engaging with a customer (perhaps with advertising or in a store), buying the product or service, using it, sharing about the experience with others (in person or online), and then finishing the journey by upgrading, replacing, or choosing a competitor (re-starting the journey with another company):Īt other times, journey maps are used to look at very specific customer-company interactions. Sometimes customer journey maps are “cradle to grave,” looking at the entire arc of engagement.

The more touchpoints you have, the more complicated - but necessary - such a map becomes. Following on the first article on defining customer experience, this second installment looks at the first essential step of improving the experience you deliver, which is mapping out your customer journey.Ī customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination.

Customer journey