 So, how do you prevent that your customer journey map becomes irrelevant within two months? It all comes down to the difference between how the amateurs use customer journey maps and how the pros do it. That's coming up in this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you to design and deliver services that have a positive impact on people and are good for business. And as we all know, customer journey maps play a vital role in designing these services. But a lot of customer journey maps look great on the wall, but really quickly lose their value and eventually most of them become irrelevant within two months and disappear somewhere in a presentation or in a drawer. So how do we prevent this from happening? So the way a lot of customer journey maps are created is actually the root cause of this problem. Most customer journey maps that I've seen are created in projects where people say, okay, let's do some research and map the journey. They are creating an overview of their current or existing situations and sometimes think about the future, but mostly they document the existing situation. Now, the problem is that if you add things like ideas, opportunities, existing KPIs, metrics, stuff like that into your map, although the actual journey might not change, the actual customer journey and the needs might not change, everything around it probably changes really quickly. So you'll end up with an overview that gets outdated really quickly and when something gets outdated, it becomes irrelevant. Now, the problem is that if you spend a lot of time and energy and resources on creating this map and it becomes irrelevant within a short period of time, people around you will start to question if this was actually worth the investment because they are not getting the full value out of your work. And that's a big problem because the next time you'll start to argue for why we need to do research on why we should map the journey, you might run into some really big difficulties convincing people that this is a good idea. So we need to fix this. Now before we continue and talk about how the pros have fixed this issue, I want to ask you what is your biggest challenge in regards to customer journey mapping? Leave a comment down below and let's continue the conversation there. And if you want to learn how to create better customer journey maps in less time that have more impact, I've got a course on that called the Perfect Map and the link to that course is in the description of this video. So check it out down below if you're interested in that. I want to explain the problem with customer journey mapping by using an analogy. So let's imagine you're the CFO of a company and your main goal is to run a healthy business. Make sure you have a positive cash flow. In order to do that, you probably have a lot of tools that help to make you day to day decisions. The most simple tool could be like an Excel sheet where you see the daily sales numbers versus the expenses on the day. Which will give you an indicator if you're doing the right things. So based on that Excel sheet, you're able to make day to day decisions and also make a plan for the future because you will start to think about activities that should influence either the expenses or the number of sales. Now imagine if we have this Excel sheet as our tool, it would be insane. It would be completely insane to spend three months building this Excel sheet, filling it with numbers and then printing the Excel sheet, hanging it up on the wall and then not looking at it or not updating the Excel sheet for a year. That would be insane. In order to actually have a useful tool, you would want to update your Excel sheet at least every month, every week. I would say even every day in order to see if the things that you're doing, the actions that you're taking have an impact on the things you want to influence. So the Excel sheet is just a convenient way to represent data in order to make better decisions. Now, let's go back to customer journey mapping and imagine that you're for instance the chief experience officer and your goal is to run a customer centric business. Well, the first thing you would need to do is make sure that your customer journey map is fitted with relevant and existing day to day data. So how do you make sure that your customer journey map is sort of the latest snapshot that it's not outdated? And a way to do that is for instance to do user research as a continuous activity rather than a one-off project or single projects. And another way is for instance to invite other departments to provide you with data that is relevant for the customer journey map that can be NPS scores can even be sales numbers. It doesn't matter, but you need to have a process in place which makes sure that your customer journey map is sort of constantly fitted with up-to-date data. And the second thing you need to do is to make sure to embed the customer journey map in a process where you extract insights from the map and make decisions based on that and maybe come up with new plans. And also review if the actions that you've taken in the last period actually have had a positive impact on the things you want to improve in the customer journey. Now if you want to do this quarterly, monthly or maybe even in a daily stand-up meeting that's totally up to you, but you need to find a good place where you always where the customer journey map is sort of an in and part of that decision-making process. Your customer journey map has to be part of a decision-making process. If it's not, then we'll become just a way to document the customer journey and it will lose its value really quickly. And I'll admit embedding customer journey maps in a decision-making process is a big challenge, but I believe that is the only way to actually have long-term benefits and make sure that you're on the right path to becoming a customer-centric organization. I'm really curious, what other challenges do you see in regards to customer journey mapping? Leave a comment down below and I'll try to answer every comment that is added. And if you want to learn how to create better customer journey maps in less time that have more impact, check out the perfect map course that's over here. And if you know someone who might benefit from what we've just discussed, don't forget to share this video with them. Thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.