Customer Journey

The Customer Journey is applicable in varied fields and serves the purpose to create an overview of the interaction of users with a product, service or system mapping their emotional state, touchpoints and needs across the journey. It helps to better understand critical points or opportunities, get in the users’ shoes and understand the effective use of touchpoints throughout the journey to deliver functioning and effective systems and services.

1.Specify what is the “intervention” (i.e., a policy supporting social innovation) and what is the effect that is aimed for.

2. Define indicators of the desired effect. For example, if the aim is to test a policy for increasing sharing practices, the effect of the policy could be measured by counting the number of initiatives related to sharing practices, counting the number of people and

Individualize the user you will be designing for and map out the main phases of their journey throughout the service in terms of main steps and activities of the user

Then draw sketches of the phases in the boxes or take pictures and use photo to sketch technology to convert them into sketches. In alternative, the steps can be described with text.

Identify the need that the user has at each moment of the journey and the channels or touchpoints through which the user is in contact with the service or system.

At the end of the activity, detect what the possible pain points are, or rather where the beneficiary, customer or donor may have problems or difficulties using the service. Remember that pain points can also occur before or after the service in terms of their decision to use or re-use the service.

The tools itself can serve for evaluation purposes and is often not evaluated itself. It can be cross-checked with other actors and users to validate the developed map. Furthermore, the activity itself and the canvas used can be analyzed for their efficacy and efficiency by conducting interviews, focus groups and observation during and after the activity to identify problems of use of the tool and gather feedback.

The Customer Journey template can be adapted to the specific context by translating it into the local language, using text instead of sketches or adding additional categories.

The existing categories of activity, needs, touchpoints and emotional state for each step of the journey are important since they ensure the representation of both activities and emotional state/empathy with the user balancing the inclusion of user needs and (potential) responses of the service provider.