Understanding the Connection Between Journey and Experience

What does neuroscience teach us about the customer journey? It's a predictable, human process: ➡️ Value is learned. The brain uses reinforcement learning to make action-outcome associations and inform future decisions. This means the customer’s journey is not only about learning to use new technology, but evaluating the offering and deciding whether you can be trusted. ➡️ Expectations matter. During reinforcement learning, the brain reflexively compares outcomes to expectations and determines if the decision produced a reward or a punishment. This means expectations are as important as outcomes, and ensuring you meet or exceed them is essential. ➡️ Expectations change over time. Once an outcome occurs, the brain adjusts expectations in the direction of the reward or punishment to minimize prediction errors. Past is prologue; a series of good or bad experiences affects what your customer expects will happen next. ➡️ What starts right, stays right. Initial expectations are very fluid, based on perceptions, similar experiences, and what other people say. Once it coalesces, this anchor point has outsized influence on the trajectory. So your crucial first step is ensuring expectations are properly set with all decision-makers. ➡️ Not every touchpoint is important. Memory is extremely limited, so the brain only bothers to store events that are novel, relevant, salient, surprising, or filled with emotional content. This means you must manage a critical few moments well, rather than a trivial many. ➡️ Emotions rule. Besides the preferential recall, emotions dominate decision-making. Logic mostly sits on the sidelines unless greater discrimination is needed for a decision. This means you must pay closer attention to how your customers feel than what they think. ➡️ Bad events are more impactful than good ones. Due to natural selection, the brain weighs negative episodes about twice as much as positive ones, especially when it comes to subconscious threats. So minimizing negative experiences trumps maximizing positive ones. ➡️ Once established, beliefs linger. During reinforcement learning, the brain gains confidence when expectations, good or bad, become accurate predictors. This creates a belief, which is then used to filter new information. So time is limited to shape your customer’s perceptions for the long term. The takeaways? Science underscores the critical need to do things right the first time, from clearly setting value expectations before the sale to ensuring value is realized afterwards. And the process can’t be left to chance. Executing a few things well makes all the difference between a customer that leaves and one that stays and buys more.

Great journey maps start from the intersection of user touchpoints. A customer journey map shows a customer's experiences with your organization, from when they identify a need to whether that need is met. Journey maps are often shown as straight lines with touchpoints explaining a user's challenges. start •—------------>• finish At the heart of this approach is the user, assuming that your product or service is the one they choose to use in their journey. While journey maps help explain the conceptual journey, they often give the wrong impression of how users are trying to solve their problems. In reality, users start from different places, have unique ways of understanding their problems, and often have expectations that your service can't fully meet. Our testing and user research over the years has shown how varied these problem-solving approaches can be. Building a great journey map involves identifying a constellation of touchpoints rather than a single, linear path. Users start from different points and follow various paths, making their journeys complex and varied. These paths intersect to form signals, indicating valuable touchpoints. Users interact with your product or service in many different ways. User journeys are not straightforward and involve multiple touchpoints and interactions…many of which have nothing to do with your company. Here’s how you can create valuable journeys: → Using open-ended questions and a product like Helio, identify key touchpoints, pain points, and decision-making moments within each journey. → Determine the most valuable touchpoints based on the intersection frequency and user feedback. → Create structured lists with closed answer sets and retest with multiple-choice questions to get stronger signals. → Represent these intersections as key touchpoints that indicate where users commonly interact with your product or service. → Focus on these touchpoints for further testing and optimization. Generalizing the linear flow can be practical once you have gone through this process. It helps tell the story of where users need the most support or attention, making it a helpful tool for stakeholders. Using these techniques, we’ve seen engagement nearly double on websites we support. #productdesign #productdiscovery #userresearch #uxresearch

Friday honesty: Customer-centricity is a lot harder to maintain than it seems. Even for those of us in Customer Success. The tendency is always to drift toward making our processes and focus company-centric rather than customer-centric. Don't believe me? Just look at one example of this: Customer Journeys. Many teams say that they have a defined Customer Journey. But rather than actually being oriented around the customer, for many the journey map is a list of activities from the company's perspective that are built around milestones the company cares about (contract signature, go-live, renewal, etc). I know about this, because I've been guilty of it in the past myself. I confuse my activity list with a customer journey and wonder why customers aren't as successful as they'd like. While important, that isn't a customer journey. It's an activity list. It's a rut none of us mean to fall into, but it's the natural drift because we live and breathe our own organization. So what do you do about it? How can you adopt a more customer-centric mindset in this area? TRY THIS APPROACH INSTEAD: 1. List out the stages your customers' business goes through at each phase of their experience with your product. Use these to categorize journey stage, rather than your contract lifecycle. 2. For each stage, list out what their experiences, expectations, and activities should be to get the results they want. Don't focus on listing what YOU do, but rather focus on listing what a customer does at each phase of their business with your product. List out the challenges they'd face, the business benefits they'd experience, the change management they'd have to go through, the usage they'd expect. Think bigger than your product here. 3. Then map what support a customer would need to actually accomplish these desired outcomes at each stage of the journey. Think education, change management enablement, training, etc. 4. Based on all of the above, you're finally ready to start identifying what your teams do to support the customer. ____________________________________________ Following a process like this helps build customer-centricity in 3 ways: 1. It causes customers to be the center of how you decide which activities are most important to focus on. 2. It empowers your team to become prescriptive about what customers should be doing for THEIR success. 3. It exposes what you don't know about your customers' business. And if you don't know something, just ask them. Don't make assumptions when you can instead talk to your customers directly. Avoid the company-centric drift, fight to maintain true customer-centricity however you can. This isn't just a nice to have in 2024. It's a business imperative that's important for any business to survive in this climate. But I want to hear from you! How do you guard your org from drifting to company-centricity? #SaaS #CustomerSuccess #Leadership #CustomerCentric