Selective Insurance [NASDAQ: SIGI]

Why do we rely on Google Maps even when we know how to get to our destination? We want to make sure we take the best route with the fewest obstacles. And we know the most direct path by “design” might not be the best path at any given time, at least not after accounting for the reality of construction delays, traffic volume and other potential road hazards.

To draw a comparison, journey mapping is like the “Google Maps” of experience management. It shifts an organization’s focus from internal process flows and “happy paths” to the actual experiences of customers or other external stakeholders. It examines interactions from an outside-in perspective based on what these individuals aim to achieve. It encourages business leaders to reconsider their preconceptions. If you are serious about delivering an exceptional experience, journey mapping can be a game changer.

Journey Mapping 101

While journey mapping offers many benefits, it's not a quick fix. Building an effective journey map requires considerable effort, engagement and input from internal and external stakeholders. Once a journey map is created, it only has value if it is regularly used and updated. Friendly warning: if you don’t have the time or solid organizational buy-in, don’t bother.

To prepare for journey mapping, you begin by selecting a single journey or specific aspect of the stakeholder’s overall experience with you. Based on the selected journey, you create an associated persona. A persona is a fictional profile that represents the subject of your journey. Personas help you stay focused on your subject’s personality, motivations and needs as you build out the maps.

Although there are different types of journey maps that serve various purposes, most include the following elements:

• Journey Stages: The map is divided into the main phases of the journey you've selected. Typical customer stages include awareness, consideration, purchase, onboarding and ongoing support.

• Touchpoints: Touchpoints are all the ways you and the persona connect with each other, both directly and indirectly. These may include your website, app, emails, social media, customer service, and even word-of-mouth.

• Pain Points: These are the moments when your persona encounters challenges or frustrations. Recognizing these helps you pinpoint areas that require fixing or improvement.

“Journey mapping is like the “google maps” of experience management. It shifts an organization’s focus from internal process flows to actual experiences of customers and other stakeholders.”

• Actions, Thoughts and Emotions: These sections capture what your persona is doing, thinking and feeling at each phase of their journey.

• Insights and Opportunities: After mapping the journey, you’ll uncover opportunities to enhance the experience and better meet the persona’s needs.

Journey Mapping Benefits

The benefits of journey mapping extend well beyond an organization’s CX or Experience Management function. Journey maps produce insights that inform marketing, sales, human resources and technology departments. The following are some potential takeaways:

• Understanding where gaps exist between expectations and actual experiences

• Identifying and remediating pain points that impact satisfaction and loyalty

• Revealing employee skill gaps or training needs that diminish the experience

• Isolating and eliminating operational inefficiencies that reduce profitability

• Uncovering new opportunities to create a competitive advantage

• Prioritizing potential enhancements based on business value

• Aligning internal teams on common goals or challenges With all these benefits, journey mapping may sound like an easy sell. However, there are some common points of resistance within organizations. Those include:

• A belief that there is an existing understanding of all key pain points

• A lack of confidence in qualitative (versus quantitative) insights

• Reluctance to acknowledge weaknesses or consider viewpoints that challenge established and closely held organizational beliefs

• The significant time investment

If you can overcome these hurdles, your organization has a lot to gain. Compared with voice-of-the-customer programs, CRM systems and advisory councils, which provide valuable snippets of interaction intelligence, journey maps distill the totality of experience data from customers, partners and internal subject matter experts to create a full visualization of the end-to-end journey with all its ups and downs.

As part of our experience management mandate at Selective, we have spent the past two years creating end to-end journey maps for our key product areas. Through this process, we have gained numerous insights and are actively working to prioritize and resolve friction points that negatively impact our customer and agent relationships. If you are involved in customer experience or experience management, journey mapping is something you should consider.