Customer Journey Mapping and technical communication

A technical communicator’s lot is usually to create content for helping users, and, if they are lucky, do some user testing of it in order to make future improvements. It is not that common for them to be able to look at the bigger picture and think about how the user gets to that information in the first place.

Customer Journey Mapping is an extremely useful way to understand and improve the customer experience. It involves creating a document (often a spreadsheet) that describes the user experience from their perspective. It can record each point at which interact with your service or product, the quality of that experience, and what happens next.

Customer Journey Mapping is something we carried out recently for a client, and it was a topic that came up at the TCUK 2016 conference, in the presentations by both Sarah Richards and Simon Anstey.

Our client is a start up Software as a Service company that is growing rapidly. They are creating new products, gaining new customers, and they are having to face all the challenges that brings. We mapped the journey of a user who wanted to install the product. We used a spreadsheet to record each stage and any issues or problems that users came across. The user began at the company’s website, where there were various links for installing the application, including instructions on how to do that. It revealed there was confusion between the product available on Amazon Web Services and the product clients install in-house. This was because the same, or similar, terms were used to describe the products themselves and the features contained within the products. On some pages, users were directed to the Support desk system and the articles contained there. On other pages, they were directed to PDFs, which described how to install the previous version of the product. There were also a few pages that took them to the online Help system. The Customer Journey map made it easy to change the website so it directs users to the single place for information, and to remove duplicate, and out of date, information.

In Sarah Richards’s presentation at TCUK 2016, she described the approach the Government Digital Service took when they developed the Gov.uk. website. GDS removed content that didn’t address those needs, and consolidated hundreds of government websites into the single gov.uk site. They kept 45,000 pages, and culled 92,000. This process started with user needs, and were designed around those customer journeys.

Sarah’s TCUK 2016 slides aren’t available yet, but here is a similar presentation she gave at another conference:

In Simon Anstey’s (of SAP) presentation, on eliminating Support tickets, he described how he looked at the customer journey for raising a Support ticket, and collaborated with SAP’s customer support team to improve the documentation, and links to useful information, for some critical products. This stemmed the flow of support tickets. They estimated the resultant cost savings and started gaining management’s interest. This activity meant they could show what value documentation was adding.

Customer Journey Mapping can be revelatory in revealing issues that may not be obvious at first glance.