How customer journey mapping can create internal and external alignment

We talk a lot about the importance of using customer journey mapping (CJM) to create marketing and business strategies that are customer centric. They are the best tool we’ve come across to focus the team on the perspective and experience of the customer, and identify the gaps and opportunities that allow businesses to shape their strategies to achieve optimal outcomes.

One of the primary benefits of customer journey mapping, though, is their power to create alignment.

Customer journey maps are a single, customer-centric perspective of the moving parts of an organisation, or multiple organisations or service providers, involved in a person’s journey to solve a triggered problem.

In their creation, they are an opportunity to break down siloed thinking and bring cross-functional teams together to share wisdom and insight. Ensuring a customer journey mapping project includes the perspective of different knowledge holders is vital to its success. As a result, the process itself fosters alignment, as people with different experiences and goals in the business come together to populate and plot out an assumptive journey.  Sharing the research learnings and the refined customer-informed maps back across the business embeds a shared knowledge base about customers across the organisation.

Beyond strategy creation, there are use-cases where alignment may well be the key goal. The outputs themselves are artefacts for alignment, and alignment, rather than strategy, is a legitimate reason to run such a project.

They can be useful when businesses are merging, for example. We created extensively detailed and visualised customer journey and touch point maps for an insurance company doing just that. The outputs were powerful tools that everyone from marketing & sales to IT & management could use to make aligned decisions about the new framework, messaging, technology and tools required for operating in a post-merger world.

Alignment benefits don’t just apply to consumers or customer orientated businesses. It’s especially powerful for patient-orientated journeys too. In these journeys, many disconnected players interact to deliver services along the patient’s experience with the disease. The maps themselves provide a drone view, if you like, of the whole journey, which the individual players often don’t have.

We’ve mapped out journeys for people with asthma, for example, looking not just at where the interest point is for our client, but where and how all service providers and education touch points engage with the patient, from the patient’s perspective. From charities to GPs to schools and local hospitals, the maps provide a shared, patient centric view of how the various components interact along the asthma journey. It highlights where people fall off the path to living well, and why, and the role service providers play in improving (or disrupting) optimal outcomes.

As such the maps provide a patient-orientated, shared perspective of the journey that people with asthma go through – that can assist policy makers and health care providers to align policy, process and services to achieve better outcomes for the patient, and better efficiencies for the government and health services.

We have extensive experience mapping and researching health-oriented journeys. From asthma and diabetes, to supplements and medical devices. If you’d like to know more about how customer journey mapping can help unlock alignment in your field, get in touch with us today at [email protected] or find out more at www.zuni.com.au.