 One of the most common questions with regards to customer journey mapping is where do I start and stop mapping the journey? Well, in this video, I'm going to show you two very straightforward strategies that will help you to answer this question and get on with the real important stuff. 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. And customer journey mapping and customer journey maps are a very important tool in that process. And one of the most common questions with regards to customer journey maps and customer journey mapping is how far should the journey go? Where does it start and where does it stop? And if you've ever been part of a workshop where this question arose, you've probably noticed that you can end up in endless discussions if something is still part of the journey and if it isn't. Well, that's usually a waste of your time. And a common mistake I see people making when answering this question, where does a journey start and end is to think of the moment the first time a customer interacts with an organization that that's the moment the journey starts. So for instance, the moment you walk into the airport, that that's the moment the journey of your travel experience starts. Well, that's a common mistake because as you'll see later on, a lot of the clues and answers to improving the user experience, the customer experience lie specifically in the parts before entering an airport or after leaving the airport, as it has been scientifically shown that what we remember the memory we have of the quality of a service is determined by the last part. So if you don't look at the last part of a service after you've maybe even left the airport, you'll miss out on some important opportunities to improve the experience. So the question is, how do we determine where does it start and where does it stop? So the way I think about where a journey ends is to think about the specific goal a customer wants to achieve, not thinking about process maps and what the process map says, but really think about what is the goal your customer wants to achieve. So for instance, if somebody wants to buy a house, then that's the specific end goal. But the question is, how far do you go with that? Because buying a house, you could think about the moment, the specific goal could be signing the mortgage papers, it could be the moment you enter the house or it could be the first time you meet your new neighbors. So how far do you actually go with expanding the journey? How far should you go? Paulin said in his episode on the show that service design is really fractal. So every journey contains endless numbers, probably of smaller journeys. So if we think about buying a house, like I said, think about the end goal. But it also, if you think about the start, how far back should you go? Is a conversation at a birthday party also part of the journey of buying a house until you want to play a role in that as a company, you can make it as big and as small as you'd like. And that can be a real challenge. So how do we approach this? Well, I think and I have two very pragmatic strategies to just answer this question and get on with the real important stuff. So my first approach is really simple and straightforward. Start mapping the journey by looking at what's happening in the middle of your journey. So let's say it's the journey phase. What is the moment your customer interacts with your company that you know for sure? Start with that moment and then just work your way out. And it's up to you how many steps you're going to take to start and end. And at first it's smart to do more steps than less. So just start in the middle and then think of five steps to the left and five steps to the right. I hope you can see this drawing. So this is my first approach. Start in the middle and then start mapping it out to the sides. The second approach is similar to the first one, but it's a little bit different in the way that you define three moments. You define the journey moment and you define an end moment and you define the start moment. And it doesn't really matter what those moments are at first in this stage, but you just pick those three and then you start filling in the gaps in between. So when I would do this in a workshop, I would say what are three interactions, activities, touch points that are in between the start and the journey phase and what are the three touch points that are in between the journey and the end phase. And you start filling in the gaps in that way. And does that mean that you will know for sure if this is the end and the start moment? Nope, you won't. But like I said, it doesn't really matter at first. Just start making the map and then you can always sort of expand and ask the question, okay, is this really the end? Isn't what's going to happen after this moment? But if you just approach it by filling in the gaps, you'll have something to talk about. I think that's the key essence of this approach. You get up to speed, you pick up momentum and you have something to think about. So the first approach was really expand out both ways. And the second approach is fill in the gaps. So you might be wondering or you might get the question, why should we map activities that aren't in the sphere of our service delivery? So why should we map activities outside of the airport? Or why should we map activities that are after the moment that we've signed the mortgage papers? For instance, the birthday party, right? If you're talking to your neighbor about buying a new house, why should we map those activities? Well, the truth is that usually you'll find the most interesting clues on how to improve the user experience, how to improve your service in the before and after phase. Usually those are the really interesting areas to map. Because who knows, maybe you'll find an interesting opportunity, an interesting solution on how you could influence the conversation at a birthday party for people to pick you as a mortgage provider. I don't know how, but you'll see that if you start thinking about what happens outside of the realm of your own service, you'll really get a lot of clues on how to do that. So I guess my key message here is that it doesn't really matter that much what the start and end point of your map are. It's really hard to define that anyway. The best way to think about it is from the perspective of your client. So like I said, or your customer, like I said, think about the specific goal he or she wants to achieve and take that as an end moment. And the start moment, it's really up to you to pick how far you want to go. And my advice would be it's better to go too broad than too narrow, because if you go too broad, you can always narrow down. And if you go broad, the chances are that you'll see some interesting opportunities in that space. But the most important thing is like I said, just start mapping. Make sure you have something on paper that you can talk about with other people and get that discussion going, because that's where the real value lies and not in scientifically determining what the start and end point of your journey is. And if you do it right, if you do customer journey mapping right, it is always an iterative process, you'll always be updating your map, you'll always be expanding the map, you'll always be updating the map. So if you're in debt flow, it doesn't matter that much what the start and end point will be the first time you start mapping. So just just go out and do it. So I hope this video helps you a little bit the next time you need to answer the question where to start and then your customer journey map. And I'm really interested, what is your approach to answering this question, because there are more people like you watching this video and I'm sure your perspective on how to answer this question will be helpful for them. If you'd like to dig deeper into customer journey mapping, I have a whole playlist dedicated on that topic. So make sure you check that out. It should be somewhere over here or here. And if this is your first time here on this channel, I'd love to have you subscribe 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.