Customer and employee experience are key aspects in the fast-changing environment of business today. To remain competitive, organizations must develop a new approach that replaces the more traditional, one-size-fits-all mindset with an individualized, human-centered strategy that meets the needs, feelings, thoughts and goals of all a given organization's stakeholders. A human-centric journey map is one of the most powerful solutions to build such bespoke experience in the life cycle.
A human-centric journey map captures the experience, needs, emotions and touchpoints of an individual engaged with an organization, product, or service in either a visual or conceptual manner. Traditional journey mapping is usually quite transactional analog, which limits its ability for stakeholders to grasp the confidently human side of the experience: where it can be made even better for customers or employees.
In this essay, we unpack the thought of human-centric journey mapping, why it matters, and how you would apply us in customer and employee experience contexts. Built on scientific literature, this article analyzes how we create human-centered journey maps that help organizations align their strategy with their users, as well as a promotion of the trust gained, loyalty, and less churn.
What Does Human-Centric Journey Mapping Mean?
Simply put, Journey mapping is the act of visualizing the various steps and stages an individual undertakes during his experience with a brand, service or product. This works in any context, from customer journeys to employee journeys to product user experiences. Traditional journey mapping is therefore often executed with a predominant focus on transactional or linear components (e.g. product purchases, service usage, internal processes), often overlooking the emotions, motivations, and pain points that drive these experiences.
A human-centric journey map, alternatively, looks at the human experience in its entirety. It accounts for the emotional, cognitive, and social factors that determine how a person sees and engages with an organization. Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem solving with an underlying emphasis on empathy for the end user (Bliss, 2013). Organizations can follow this practice to have a more holistic view of the journey to create more personalized, engaging experiences by integrating these dimensions into the mapping process.
To put it simply, rather than looking at journey mapping from decidedly a process-oriented lens, human-centric journey mapping lenses it through empathy. It aims to put human beings — customers, employees and other stakeholders — at the heart of the design process.
Why Human-Centric Journey Map Is Important?
2.1. Interpreting Feelings and Events
Such human-centric journey mapping would bring useful insights about the feeling and psychological states of people across their journeys. Most of the time, emotions are the main factor behind the decisions we make and the actions we take, but still, they take back in traditional journey maps. According to Schmitt (2003), emotions are essential for customer behavior and loyalty. Emotions, including frustration, satisfaction or engagement that we experience throughout employee experience greatly influence our motivation, productivity and retention.
For instance, a customer might feel excited by discovering a brand for the first time, only to feel frustrated by things like poor website navigation or slow customer service as they go through the purchase process. Through mapping these emotional touchpoints and how we feel, organizations can understand a more complex dynamic of the human experience across the journey. And with this they can proactively address pain points and improve positive experiences.
2.2. Enhancing Personalization and Customization
This helps organizations better personalize their offerings through human-centric journey mapping. Organizations can create more personalized experiences to greater meet the specific needs, goals, and pain points by understanding which specific group of customers or employees they are targeting. According to Lemon and Verhoef (2016), providing personalized experiences is vital to elements of long-lasting relations between customers and brands, as well as better retention.
An employee who views their career as a 'journey' may feel frustrated when they don't have professional development opportunities in their organization, whereas another employee who values flextime may have their own priorities. HR departments can use this map of preferences to create personalized employee experiences that can ultimately boost engagement and minimize turnover.
2.3. Creating a Unified Vision
Human-centric journey maps not only help organizations to create one vision of the experience from all stakeholders’ perspective. Whether the journeys are for customers or employees, journey maps create opportunities for cross-functional collaboration within organizations. According to Gartner (2020), journey mapping enables different departments (marketing, sales, HR, and IT) to be aligned to a common understanding of user needs and expectations.
As an illustration, HR departments can leverage journey mapping to build a clear picture of an employee’s experience at each stage, which includes recruitment, onboarding, professional development, and exit interviews. Having this vision is key to breaking down the silos so that every department of the organization can pull in the same direction to enhance experience and satisfaction.
Steps and Techniques to Create a Human-Centric Journey Map
Step 1: Define Personas and their Objectives
Personas are fictional characters whose needs, goals and behaviors communicate trends among the users of your product. Real data, demographic information, motivations, goals and pain points form the basis of personas. As Brown (2009) points out, personas are crucial in human-centered design simply because a good design decision must be something not based on (or overly based on) an assumption, but on what is really important for the end user.
In a customer journey map, for example, personas might represent segments of customers like regular customers, new customers, or frequent buyers. For an employee experience map, personas may be junior employees, mid level managers, executives, etc.
Once the personas are laid out, the next step is to identify their goals: both explicit (like buying a product, or getting promoted) and implicit (like being valued or growing personally). Why organizations care about what people are trying to do, is they can create better experiences and make sure they tap into their motivations.
Identify Critical Interaction and Touchpoint
The next step is to identify touchpoints — the moments of interaction that happen between the personas and the organization at various stages of their journey. These touchpoints can be online and/or offline: a website visit, a customer service call or ticket, an onboarding process, employee feedback sessions, etc.
According to Gentile et al. (2007) emphasise the importance of mapping these touchpoints to identify areas of positive or negative experiences. For example, they feel supportive during onboarding, but frustrated with the lack of feedback during annual performance reviews. Mapping these touchpoints helps organizations identify where experience can be enhanced.
Step three: Get a sense of the emotional landscape
Mapping the emotional journey of the individual is a crucial part of human-centric journey mapping. Depending on the touchpoint, each person will feel a mix of excitement and satisfaction, annoyance and disappointment. We map these emotional states so that organizations can know where they are succeeding in providing positive experiences, and where there may be opportunities for improvement.
According to Meyer and Schwager (2007), one of the strongest motivators of customer loyalty is emotional engagement. Recently, in employee experience design, for example, analyzing how employees feel at various stages of their journey (like onboarding, performance reviews and exit interviews) can go a long way in affecting engagement and retention.
After listing all interactions, look for pain points and areas to improve
Obstacles: identifying pain points After mapping the emotional landscape, the next step is to make sure that you know exactly where the obstacles are—points and moments of frustration, confusion or dissatisfaction surrounding the emotion. Pain points are typically caused by the line of fissure between what an organization delivers and what people actually expect. McKinsey & Company (2018) Results are significantly improving customer and employee satisfaction.
Some employee journey pain points can be circling long recruitment cycles, lack of recognition, and poor communication with managers. For example, in customer journeys, typical pain points can be confusing websites, long checkout processes, or bad post-purchase assistance. This approach makes it possible for organizations to address specific pain points in ways that prevent or eliminate the most problematic situations.
Ideal Experience and Future State Design
Lastly, organizations must create the perfect experience—the ideal future state of the journey, without friction and attuned to the personas’ goals and emotional needs. Rosenbaum et al. (2017) emphasize the creation of the excellent experience that evokes positive feelings and builds long associations.
This step includes solutions brainstorming, goal setting, and upending the processes, technology and culture. Enhancing the employee journey through providing customized onboarding experiences, enabling ongoing professional development or using AI-driven feedback mechanisms .
