What is Customer Journey Mapping, and how can it improve HR Service Delivery?

Companies like Zappo’s, Amazon and Apple are successful for a lot of reasons; not the least of which is their customers’ experience.  

Customers that consistently have a great experience return more often.  And they tell their friends, neighbors and coworkers about the experience. Simply put, companies that deliver a better customer experience are more successful.

Delivering a better customer experience in HR Service Delivery can bring similar advantages: Employees  will like going to the self-service portal and the knowledge base, they’ll tell their co workers about how easy and engaging it is.   And you’ll begin to see higher rates of Tier Zero Resolution, Employee Satisfaction and  Employee Engagement!  What wonderful world it could be!

Ok, maybe I’ve over-simplified it, but there is a technique that HR Service Centers can borrow from those wildly successful consumer brands, to improve the employee experience.   It’s called Customer Journey Mapping.

A customer journey map is a pretty simple concept  – it’s drawing a visual map of the steps a customer goes through in a particular process.   If this sounds familiar, it should. Many HR process owners are  already  creating visual maps to define and clarify their processes; simple processes like a change of address transaction, to more complex processes like employee  relations issues.  But there’s an important difference between the traditional HR process  map, and the customer  journey map:

The HR View vs. the Customer View

The traditional HR Process map presents the process from the service center’s point of view, while the customer journey map presents it from the customer’s point of view.  There’s a big difference between the two:  When you create a process map from the customer’s point of  view, you’re forcing yourself to see thing “touch-points” as the customer sees them; touch points that appeared neutral  or positive when viewed from inside the service center, may suddenly appear as negative touch-points when you look at them through the eyes of the customer.  And if you can see the negatives, you can fix the negatives.  That’s the advantage.

Here’s a five-step approach to Customer Journey Mapping:

1. Identify a specific customer “journey” to map – start with an example that’s considered problematic.
2. Write down, or sketch, each step taken by the customer to accomplish the particular goal of the journey.
3. For each Step, write down each person, group or system that  the customer  interacts with at that step.  These are the all-important “touch-points.”
4. For each touch point, identify the actions that  the customer must take, and consider the motivations, questions and emotions that the customer typically experiences with each touch point.  If you’re unsure,  don’t guess – ask a customer!
5. Change, automate or eliminate those touch-points that negatively  impact the customer  experience.

Plenty of books have been written about customer journey mapping (my favorite is Outside-In by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine of Forrester Research).

The bottom line is this:  If you consistently view your HR processes from your customers’ point of view, you’ll gain new  insights about what  to change, to create a better experience for your customers.  And in the end, a better customer  experience means better results for  the service center.  Customer Journey Mapping can help you find your way there.