 If you know why you want to create a customer journey map, what are the goals of your customer journey map? Then you'll be able to create much better maps, much more effective maps in way less time. In this video, I'm going to show you a few common scenarios, why people create customer journey maps in the first place. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to design services that have a positive impact on people and are good for business. Okay, so understanding the customer journey is, of course, a key part in Service Design. Well, I've been in a lot of workshops and sessions where people want to create a customer journey, and what they do is they start sticking post-its on brown paper in the hope to get a good customer journey map. What usually happens in these sessions is that they go in all directions without a clear focus. Either two things happen. Either they just plot their customer activities, really high-level customer journey map, or they go into so much detail in a map that they get lost in the details and never finish actually creating that map. So the problem here is that people forget to ask the most important question at the beginning of these workshops. Now, before we continue, let me know down below in the comments, have you ever created a map that didn't make the impact you desired and what was the problem with it? I'd love to hear your stories and learn from them. All right. So how do we prevent that we lose time or get lost in details? Well, the answer is pretty simple. Before you start mapping anything, you need to ask yourself the question, why am I making this map? A map is always a tool. It's always a means to an end. You need to define that end really clearly at the beginning of your workshops. So let's go over a few common scenarios for creating customer journey maps. What are potential goals and uses for customer journey maps? A really common scenario, of course, for using customer journey maps is to create an overview, to create a shared understanding among stakeholders of what the journey actually looks like. This can be the user journey, the customer journey, the patient journey, but it's really about visualizing the journey and creating a shared understanding in that way. So another common scenario for using customer journey maps is to store research data. So you go out, you do interviews, you do observations, you collect a lot of user insights, and then you need a place where you can link them to each other, you can link them to the backend systems, and your customer journey map is a really good place to actually store research data and maybe user insights, customer insights in a really structured and coherent way. So another scenario for using customer journey maps is to use the map as a research tool itself. Let me explain. You might want to use a customer journey map as a template to involve other stakeholders, other departments in, for instance, a service design project. You can do that by creating the journey and leaving out some of the parts in the journey, like making a template and then going to different stakeholders in different departments and inviting them to fill in those blanks. So you engage and co-create with other stakeholders to complete the map. So this is also a common scenario how we've been using customer journey maps, not as an end deliverable or as an end result, but really as a tool to do research. And the last scenario I want to talk about here is that a customer journey map is a great tool for prioritizing activities, prioritizing investments. It helps you to understand where can you get the most benefit for the user and also of course for the company because when you map the journey, when you map the emotional curve and when you also map like the business value, the business KPIs, you can really quickly see where you can get the most value out of improvements, out of investments. So customer journey map really helps you to make conscious choices about where you're going to start new improvement projects or maybe even do more research. Yeah, so prioritizing activities, investments, user research there. That's a great way to use customer journey maps. So there's one thing I really want to stress here and it is I think all these scenarios, goals, why you can create customer journey maps are equally important. And it's really up to you to decide which one is relevant for you. Now you might be thinking, how do I know which one is relevant for me? Well, it's pretty simple. Just think about what the next action is that you wanna take. What do you want to achieve next? And then reverse engineer from that and think about how the customer journey map is going to help you in that way. Do you want to create a shared understanding? Do you want to store data? It's really up to you. If you know what the next step is then this becomes really clear. And one more thing, and that is you have to really, really remember like Mark Stegno said in the service design show episode number one, a customer journey map is never a final deliverable. It's always a means to an end. So what does this mean? This means that you always have to keep in mind that the map should be evolving. Once you created an initial version of your map, you'll always have to think, okay, how will the map look next week? How are we going to update it? How are we going to iterate on this? How are we going to evolve this? Because otherwise you'll just end up with a pretty big poster that looks pretty and impresses people in the first week. But after the first week, it won't have any impact anymore. So promise me the next time you start making a map you will think about why we're making the map but you will also think about how it is going to evolve. How are you going to update it before you start writing and sticking sticky notes on the wall? So I've outlined just four common scenarios why people create customer journey maps but I'm sure this list is not complete. So I'm really interested to learn from you guys. Why do you create customer journey maps? What is your common goal? Leave a comment down below and I'm really interested to learn what you have to say. If you want to learn more about customer journey mapping this video is part of a bigger playlist. So check out the other videos that are in that playlist. And if this is your first time here I'd love to have you to subscribe to the channel so we can keep bringing you more videos like this. Thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.