Since I have been dealing with the customer journey and how a CRM should map it for a long time, I decided to participate in this workshop.
It was about how you can identify the typical customer journeys of your customers. In an earlier presentation, there was a comparison with different swimming lanes in a swimming pool. They all get to the destination, but in different ways.
Companies need to recognise which paths their customers and prospects typically take and align their strategies accordingly.
There is a separate article on the topic of personas and the customer journey here: Do you actually know who your customers are? Customer Journey Mapping, Personas and Customer Experience
The workshop was about using simple methods to identify a typical persona for a business process and to build a typical customer journey for this persona.
As an example, the participants were asked to think of a company that offers student exchange programmes.
Dr Felten asked the participants to imagine a typical customer of this company and to characterise him. The characteristics suggested from the participants were compiled into a small profile.
Our typical persona was male, 15 years old, high school student, both parents academics, living in the suburbs of a big city, one sister 10 years old, hobbies own Youtube channel and sports.
Now that we all had a good idea of this persona, we had to think about the steps a prospective student might take before deciding to book a student exchange programme.
To do this, we first collected their motives. Again by shouting from the audience, a colourful picture emerged of reasons why such a young person would be interested in an exchange programme.
Now it was time to identify the appropriate Journey.
The participants made a number of suggestions and the stations were pinned on the flipchart and moved and added to as needed.
It quickly became clear that a persona can also have different possible journeys. Even with such a simplified example.
If you apply the experience to the business processes that we map ourselves, it becomes clear that you have to deal intensively with the identification of the personas and the construction of the customer journeys and that you also have to put the results to the test again and again.
And these actions are only the cornerstone of a sales strategy based on the customer journey and persona.
Certainly a lot of work that companies have to do here.
But on the way to an optimal customer experience, the effort is probably justified.
Presenting the methods of customer journey mapping and developing a first prototype in the limited time of only 45 minutes was a challenge, but Dr. Felten mastered it with energy, humour and success.
