 How much research do you need to create a useful customer journey map? When a client approaches you and asks to create a customer journey map for them, how much time do you allocate for research to create a useful map? That's what we're going to talk about in this video. 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. In this episode, we're going to talk about user research for customer journey mapping. I see two common scenarios and problems regarding this topic. The first one is that people tend to do no research at all. This is especially true in environments where people tend to think that they know what their customers already want. It actually never crosses their mind to go outside and do research and they create maps solely based on assumptions and best experience. But the flip side is also true. I have seen a lot of instances where people spend so much time doing research, going outside, investigating things, and eventually they end up with just understanding a really small portion of the customer journey because they didn't have time to do the rest. They go in on so many details instead of spreading it out. What happens when you keep researching because you feel you never have enough research data, you're unnecessarily slowing everything down, and the stakeholders around you will feel that you're just slowing down the process. But on the other hand, if you don't do any research at all or very little, you might end up making misinformed and bad decisions, which is probably even worse. Let me know in the comments how much time do you spend, do you get, and would you like to get for research regarding customer journey maps? I'd really like to know how you deal with this situation, and so leave a comment down below, and let's continue the conversation down there. How much research do you actually need to create a useful customer journey map? Like Adam Lawrence said, if you do two things in service design, do prototyping and research, and if you can only do one thing, do research. So is it bad to create a customer journey map based on assumptions? Let's start with that question. So I think you can absolutely make useful customer journey maps based on assumptions, even though Adam is saying that you'll always need to do research. Let me explain. When you make a map based on assumptions, it's really, really important that you have a long-term plan in mind, and you can use maps based on assumptions similar to the way a lot of people use the business model canvas. If you don't know it, Google it, but it's a tool to map a business model. What I see happening with the business model canvas is that when people go into a workshop to plot out the business model, they haven't done a lot of research upfront. They just go in and start writing and filling out all the elements of the canvas. And during these sessions, people tend to come up with questions or get insights about the topics that they don't fully understand. And then that opens away or the path for doing research. And I've seen similar scenarios with customer journey mapping. So you go in without any research, you start mapping the journey based on past experience, based on, let's say, assumptions. And throughout that session, people will start to realize, hmm, is this really true? What happens here? Why haven't we investigated that? So if you're creating maps based on assumption, make sure that you understand that this is just the first step towards research, right? When I look at how much research we do at 31 faults when we create customer journey maps, the truth is that we always do research. It can be one day, it can be one week, but we always do research. It's a key part in our design process and it's actually why clients hire us. So they know upfront when they go into a project with us, they will be getting the research part and that's what they actually want from us. But how do we know how much research we actually need for a customer journey map? How do we do that? And the secret that we use, the strategy that we use is just to time box it. When you look at how we've structured our design process, research is 25% of our process and we time box our projects in that way. So if we get a one week project, we will spend 25% of our time doing research. That doesn't mean we always go out to do interviews. There are a lot of ways to do research, but we sort of always allocate 25% of our time to do research and then try to get the most value out of that time. Will we be done in a day or in a week? No, we're never done. There's always more to research, but if you approach it in that way, you'll end up in an endless loop of always new questions, always new research. So we time box it, the research phase and then move on to the next phase and then maybe when the project has gone through the first iteration, we redo the research phase once again. So our secret is, like I said, again time box it within the whole project. So why do we always do research in our projects, even though I just said that you can make maps on our assumptions? Well, I want to make as informed decisions as I can. So more research or doing research informs us what we do, informs the design process. And it also helps us to understand what the questions are that we should be asking. So it doesn't only give answers, it also helps us to understand what the key questions are. And I know a lot of you out there have trouble selling research, have trouble getting clients to actually invest in research. And in that scenario, I always try to have the conversation with my client is think about how much time we would lose if we make decisions based on assumptions that turn out to be wrong. If we have to start all over at the end because we made a wrong assumption in the beginning, wouldn't that be worth to test a few of these assumptions early on in this research phase? And if you pose it that way, a lot of clients start to understand what the value is of research and at least give you some room to do that. We have a great video on how to do user research for customer journey mapping. I'll link to it down below in the description of this episode. So check it out if you're interested in that. And there's one final secret that I'd like to share with you. And that is that it doesn't really matter how much time you spend on research the first time for your customer journey map. When you adopt the mindset that customer journey mapping is an iterative process. So you shouldn't treat your customer journey map as a deliverable, as a static end result where you can only do research once. You should treat it like something that is alive, something that is being updated on a regular basis. And then it doesn't really matter how much time you spend on research. The first time, because you'll know you'll get the opportunity to do more research the next time and the next time. And you'll be able to grow and expand and update and evolve the map as it is. That's I think the big mind shift that a lot of clients or maybe even us as practitioners have to make make sure you treat customer journey maps as something that is alive. So to wrap this up how much research do you need before you can start creating valuable customer journey maps? I'd say aim for 25% of the total project time but if you don't have that it's okay when you start making maps based on assumptions and keep in mind that that's just the first step before research. So you can flip the process around as long as you know that research is a key part of the design process and at some point you will need to do it. I'm really curious how do you start making maps? Do you do that based on assumptions or do you go out and do research? And if you go out and do research how much time do you usually spend doing research? Leave a comment down below and let's continue the conversation down there. This video is part of our bigger playlist on customer journey mapping so if you want to learn more about that check out some of the other videos. And if this is your first time here on this channel welcome and I'd love to have you to subscribe so we can keep bringing you more videos like this. Thanks so much for watching and I look forward to see you in the next episode.