If there's one tool we turn to time and again to help teams innovate, its the customer journey map. 

Why is this technique so helpful?

This tool helps point innovators in new and unexpected directions. It surfaces surprising ideas but crucially focuses your mind on the critical moments where people seek better solutions to their needs.

When improving a product or service, you can't do it in isolation from the context in which it fits into people's lives. The customer journey map helps bring this context into focus.

Let's look at some practical examples.

Service innovation

Service innovation in healthcare is challenging. Patients progress through lots of steps from the initial diagnosis to receiving treatment and support on their journey. And each journey is personal.

When we work on projects with patients, doctors and nurses to improve healthcare services, we find a simple map of this journey is a great conversation starter for everyone involved.

The map allows those involved to comment, reconfigure and adjust this journey to reflect their own experiences, frustrations and setbacks.

More often, what people think the patient journey should be is not what it is. You can quickly zoom in and examine these discrepancies – they become crucial insight moments for innovators. These insights point to new ideas.

To help with this discussion, we create hypotheses and examples on where improvements could be made, for instance: a way to speed up diagnosis, improve the information that passes between clinicians or patients, ways to connect support services faster. We use these to prompt 'what if?' and 'how might we?' conversations with people. What if it worked like this..? If we had to improve this interaction, could it work like this? Would that be helpful..?  

By getting those who participate in front line service provision to reconfigure a journey and identify fixes, you spot the previously overlooked and not so obvious opportunities — the springboards for novel solutions and improvements.

Designing new consumer products

In consumer product sectors, many innovation teams suffer from myopia. They develop a set of unwritten rules on how a category, brand or range of products should behave. From the type of advertising, packaging design, product formats, claims and so on, these norms become hard-wired. Consequently, it's easy for a team to jump on the latest trend yet fail to deliver unique concepts fine-tuned to the needs of their target audience—the result: lacklustre innovations which don’t achieve their potential in the market.

An interrogation of the customer journey helps nudge people out of these norms to create more distinctive and competitive solutions. 

Let’s consider examples of when we’ve worked on health and wellness brands in the food and personal healthcare sectors.

When we involve consumers in face to face and online co-creation sessions, we take a step back to look at the broader context and influences that shape people's attitudes to a category.

We zoom in and out of the stages of the customer journey.

We start with their attitudes, behaviours and habits to health and how these have changed over time. We explore what influences this (peers, advertising, social influencers, types of brand communication, their personal needs) and how this has evolved and shaped their perceptions, and the repertoire of brands they use.

Next, we examine how they use products on a day to day basis to spot unresolved frustrations, and what influences choice when they go shopping.

Overall this creates a more elegant picture and contextually richer view of the customer journey and innovation opportunities.

We convert these opportunities into initial concepts or adcepts. When we present these ideas to consumers, we can decode their response based on the clues we've picked up. For instance, for a new proposition to cut through what you say and do may be very different in social media compared to the messages and claims you need to make in-store or in the e-commerce environment, when the consumer switches into a different purchasing mindset faced with choices.

And with the help of consumers, we can fine-tune ideas to meet their needs better and create ideas that stand out from the crowd. Crucially, it forces the team to take a customer-centric view of innovation.

This approach helps innovation teams identify how an idea has to work at critical moments of the customer journey — in social media, in-home, in-store. The result? More robust, more relevant and more unique concepts with greater market potential.

TESTIMONIAL CLIENT FEEDBACK - the benefits of this approach

‘The insights have not only formed the foundations of the updated brand proposition and innovation philosophy but have helped to make the wider business more consumer orientated.‘

To sum up:

A customer journey map is an excellent tool for spotting new insights. It pushes innovation teams to think outside of their narrow field of view and look at a challenge through the eyes of your end-user/customer.

Ultimately it helps you create solutions to people's needs that are more relevant, unique and distinctive.