Why you should undertake client journey mapping
Journey mapping can be used to design or refine your programs and services in order to provide your clients with a better experience, or to help you understand what your client is doing, thinking, and feeling during their ‘journey,’ when using your service.
You will see the term client, customer, user, consumer (and so on), used interchangeably when talking about journey mapping, but they all mean the same thing, i.e. understanding your primary stakeholder’s journey when using your product, program or service.
What is client journey mapping?
Client journey mapping is a concept that has been borrowed from the ‘User Experience’ (UX) field often heard in a marketing or digital context. It has been adapted to fit a variety of applications in the health and not-for-profit sectors to yield deep and meaningful insights which often act as an agent for change within an organisation.
We’ll start with a brief explanation of what client journey mapping is and what it should achieve.
Client journey mapping aims to create alignment across an organisation around a customer-centric vision
Client journey mapping is a visual representation from the client’s point of view regarding how they interact with your brand, people and processes
The purpose of client journey mapping is to understand what clients feel and improve the quality of your client experience, ensuring consistency and a seamless experience at all touchpoints.
Client journey mapping isn’t a comprehensive organizational process map from an insider's point of view but informs future activities to improve organisational processes
How client journey mapping is useful in health sectors
Patient experience is increasingly recognised as one of the three ‘pillars of quality in healthcare’, alongside clinical effectiveness and patient safety. While the health sector is heavily regulated, delivering a compliant service doesn’t necessarily translate to a good service experience for a health consumer. Client/patient journey mapping is a common strategy we use to better understand and evaluate patient experiences. It can be used to guide service planning and design activities that lead to more positive experiences for your clients.
Patient journey mapping provides insights that are often missed in typical stand-alone patient experience surveys, such as what happens in between each ‘step’ of the consumer’s journey (i.e. each service), and how different services interface with each other (or don’t). This helps to capture insight into referral processes, patient follow-up, cross-organisational communication, sector collaboration, and most importantly the impact this has on the consumer, their family and carers.
Why should I use client journey mapping?
There are a plethora of reasons you might need to use journey mapping in your organisation. It could be that...
You intuitively ‘know’ that your programs and services could be better
You’ve heard from a customer/client/stakeholder that their needs aren’t being met by your programs and services
You’ve been delivering the same program/service for a long time based on the assumption that it is being delivered as intended
Your customer/client/stakeholder base has diversified over time and you want to gauge whether your programs/services still meet their needs
Your funder has become increasingly interested in driving service improvement activities across your programs/services and you want to bring things back to what is best for your clients
You plan on delivering a new service and need more information about how people use or may use it
You want to highlight the current strengths of the system in place.
No matter what your reasoning is, undertaking journey mapping is a fantastic way to understand how your organisation’s programs and services are currently delivered and how they could be improved, through the eyes of your most important stakeholder — your client.
How we undertake a client journey mapping process
Below we’ve outlined a common customer journey mapping process that we have used successfully across a number of previous projects.
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Client journey mapping processes are most effective if the outputs that are generated throughout the process are used to successfully drive change within the organisation or team. We’ll set up a project steering committee and bring in all of the key stakeholders within your organisation or team who you want to ‘take on the journey’ with you. We also prepare a Terms of Reference to let them know what they are signing up for.
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We document the ‘current state’ of the customer journey. This is critical to understand the distinct life cycle stages and touch points with your organisation’s programs, systems, processes and people. Developing and documenting a ‘current state’ map creates a shared understanding of the customer journey between your org and ourselves.
To develop a current state map that outlines life cycle stages and key touch points, we leverage existing organisational documentation and engage with internal staff to map it out. We try to keep this at a reasonably high level. Life cycle stages should flow sequentially so the client journey may resemble something like:
Finding > Referral > Intake and triage > Accessing services > Onward referral
Under each of the life cycle stages we’ll identify ‘what should happen’ in a little more detail by researching and listing out:
member activities: what actions, activities or behaviours bring customers in contact with your organisation
touchpoints: tangible points of contact where customers interact with your people, programs, processes and brand.
We may also develop/determine ‘typical’ client personas if the client journey is significantly different.
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After documenting the ‘current state’ lifecycle stages and touchpoints, we engage with your customers to deepen our understanding of the client journey. This process will engage a selection of clients to understand their needs, issues, challenges, success factors, behaviours, thoughts and feelings aligned to the journey. We likely use the products developed during the ‘current state’ phase to consult with a selection of your clients with the view of capturing their experience alongside the key life cycle stages and touchpoints.
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We take what we know and collaboratively prioritise what (if anything) needs to change. At this point in the project, the client journey findings and journey map/s will be presented to the project steering group to get an appreciation of how customers/clients/stakeholders access and experience your programs and services. We mustn’t leap to ‘solution development’ but sit in the awkward and curious space of understanding what works for people and what doesn’t.
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After understanding the experience of your customer, we should now be in a position to facilitate a conversation with the steering group to generate a ‘long list’ of potential programs of work that have either been suggested by your clients/customers/stakeholders or that the steering committee have noted following the sensemaking process. This may take a few passes — we recommend that the steering group go slow and genuinely prioritise what needs to change and whether the organisation has the capacity or appetite to do so. Your ‘long list’ will be consolidated into a ‘short list’ for deeper exploration.
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Once the project steering committee has prioritised which programs or work will be explored, it is time to ‘go deep’ and plan out all the steps required to deliver on the identified program of work. We generally use a process of supporting our clients to go exhaustive on all the things that need to be done, with the view to capture outputs in a project brief. Depending on your organisation, it is likely (or maybe not…) that you have a suite of project management documents that you’ll want to adhere to.
Some real examples of client journey mapping
You can take a look at some past examples of journey mapping we have done for our clients below:
If you are interested in undertaking a client journey mapping process, head to our contact page to have a quick chat (or email) about your requirements!
