What is Customer Journey Mapping and how can it be used by not-for-profit organisations?
Undertaking customer journey mapping is one way of designing or refining your programs and services. Customer journey mapping is a concept that has been borrowed from the ‘user experience’ (UX) or ‘customer experience’ (CX) disciplines that can be adapted to fit the not-for-profit context. We’ve used this methodology a number of times in recent projects and it has yielded deep and meaningful insight that has become the burning platform for change that some not-for-profit organisations need to crack on with things.
Why customer journey mapping?
So why do people usually turn to customer journey mapping? It could be that...
You intuitively ‘know’ that your programs and services could be better
You’ve heard from a customer/client/stakeholder or two that their needs aren’t being met by your programs and services
You’ve been delivering the same program/service for a long time based on the assumption that it is being delivered as intended
Your customer/client/stakeholder base has diversified over time and you want to gauge whether your programs/services meet their needs
Your funder has become increasingly interested in driving service improvement activities across your programs/services and you want to bring things back to what is best for your clients
<Insert other deep existential answers here> I’m sure there are many more.
Whatever the reason, what better way to understand how your organisational programs and services are currently delivered and could be improved than through the eyes of your most important stakeholder, your customers (or whatever nomenclature your organisation is using).
What is customer journey mapping?
It is probably best to start with a brief explanation (and save you some googling) of what customer journey mapping is and what it could and should achieve.
Customer journey mapping aims to create alignment across an organisation around a customer-centric vision
Customer journey mapping is a visual representation from the customer’s point of view regarding how they interact with your brand, people and processes
The purpose of customer journey mapping is to understand what customers feel and improve the quality of your customer experience, ensuring consistency and a seamless experience at all touchpoints.
Customer journey mapping isn’t a comprehensive organizational process map from an insider's point of view but informs future activities to improve organisational processes
How to get started on your next customer journey mapping process?
The good news is that with a bit of space, time and well thought through process design, undertaking a customer journey mapping process isn’t unattainable for a not-for-profit organisation to deliver effectively. It can be scaled up or down (i.e. engaged with one or many of your customers) and doesn’t have to be bigger than Ben-Hur.
To help get you started, we’ve outlined a common customer journey mapping process that we have used successfully across a number of previous projects (and we thought what the hell, why not share it?).
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Customer journey mapping processes are most effective if the outputs that are generated throughout the process are used to successfully drive change within your organisation or team. Set up a project steering committee and bring in all of the key stakeholders within your organisation or team that you’d like to ‘take on the journey’ with you. To support recruitment, prepare a lean terms of reference to let them know what they are signing up for. If you are undertaking the process with your team alone, you may not need this, but if you are recruiting members cross-functionally (particularly senior managers or executives) this is strongly recommended.
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Documenting the ‘current state’ customer journey is critical to understanding the distinct life cycle stages and touch points with your organisation’s programs, systems, processes and people. Developing and documenting a ‘current state’ map will create a shared understanding of the customer journey between.
To develop a current state map that outlines life cycle stages and key touch points you can leverage existing organisational documentation and engage with internal staff to map it out. Our advice here is to try and keep this at a reasonably high level and that life cycle stages should flow sequentially and resemble the customer journey something like:
Finding > Referral > Intake and triage > Accessing services > Onward referral
Under each of the life cycle stages it is important to also identify ‘what should happen’ in a little more detail by researching and listing out:
member activities: what actions, activities or behaviours bring customers in contact with your organisation?
touchpoints: tangible points of contact where customers interact with your people, programs, processes and brand.
On a side note, it may also be helpful to develop/determine ‘typical’ customer personas if the customer journey is significantly different. But that's a story for another day.
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After documenting the ‘current state’ lifecycle stages and touchpoints it's time to engage with your customers to deepen your understanding of the customer journey. This process should engage a selection of customers to understand their needs, issues, challenges, success factors, behaviours, thoughts and feelings aligned to the journey. We recommend using the products developed during ‘current state’ to consult with a selection of your customers with the view to capturing their experience alongside the key life cycle stages and touchpoints.
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So this is where it can get a little tricky. How do you take what you now know and collaboratively prioritise what (if anything) needs to change. At this point in the project, the customer journey findings and journey map/s should be presented back to the project steering group for them to get an appreciation of how your customers/clients/stakeholders access and experience your programs and services. It is important initially to not leap to ‘solution development’ straight away but sit in the awkward and curious space of understanding what works for people and what doesn’t.
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After understanding the experience of your customer, you should now be in the position to facilitate a conversation with the steering group to generate a ‘long list’ of potential programs of work that have either been suggested by your clients/customers/stakeholders or that you of the steering committee have noted following the sensemaking process. This may take a few passes but we recommend that the steering group go slow and genuinely prioritise what needs to change and whether the organisation has bandwidth or appetite to do so. Your ‘long list’ should be consolidated into a ‘short list’ for deeper exploration around
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Once the project steering committee has prioritized which programs or work will be explored further it is time to go deep and plan out all of the steps required to deliver on the identified program of work. We generally use a process of supporting our clients to go exhaustive on all of the things that need to be done with the view to capturing the outputs in a project brief. Depending on your organisation, it is likely (or maybe not…) that you have a suite of project management documents that you’ll need to adhere to.
Where to from here?
So you want to jump in and have a go? If this is your first customer journey mapping project we’d recommend starting small (in both scope and scale). It is possible to do some really meaningful work with one specific part of a program/service or one specific customer persona. By keeping the scope tight, you’ll also likely be able to make small changes that fall within your remit that may not require approvals from the powers that be. Once you’ve delivered a process or two you’ll have the confidence in tackling program areas that are larger in nature.
Beacon Strategies is a health and social services organisation that frequently works with not-for-profit organisations. To see some of our other not-for-profit blogs click here. If you would like to have a read about some of the not-for-profit projects we’ve recently worked on, check them out below.
