Map your Customer Experience…and Surprise Yourself!

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!”
Robert Burns

Seeing ourselves as others see us is a gift.  And Customer Experience Mapping gives us all the power to do it!  All it takes it stepping away from your desks for a while—and some empathetic imagination.

Our workdays are consumed with the things we do: closing cases, escalating, shipping replacement parts, improving knowledge and self-service, dispatching field staff, preparing for new product introductions…the list goes on and on.  But it turns out, this isn’t what your customers are experiencing, at all.

You think of escalations; they think of getting handed off to another person whom they hope can help.  You think about no-fault-found warranty return rates; your customers think you shipped them a broken and confusing product.  You think about VSOE and entitlement management; your customer wonders why you can’t just “do the right thing” by them.

You’re not wrong, by the way, to think of any of this.  But you need to be aware that the customer’s experience is really, really different from yours.  Perhaps the biggest difference is that you’re looking at the aggregate—at rates, and averages—while they’re experiencing their own singular situation.

So what? Well, your short-term financials, and your performance objectives, probably hinge on your experience.  But your long-term success, and your brand, depend on the aggregate (not average) of each customer experience.  Clearly, ignoring this isn’t an option.  But, short of renting an RV to visit all your customers, it’s hard to find out how they experience you.  That’s where customer experience mapping can help.

That’s the why: next week, we’ll explain how to do it, and then what to do once you’ve done it.