Capturing & communicating the customer experience effectively

Why do you need to understand the customer experience?

When you’re busy working to get through a mountain of tasks or constantly being pulled into various meetings, it’s easy to lose sight of why you’re doing the work – for your customers. The customer experience should drive most of your activities and processes. If the work doesn’t add value, isn’t business critical, and your customer is disappointed with the service delivery, what’s the point in creating extra work that serves no one?

By understanding customer value and the customer experience, you can design better services and optimise customer satisfaction. We help clients facilitate customer engagement work, either as a stand-alone project or as part of a wider service or process improvement project.

Visualising the customer experience with customer journey mapping

The main thing our clients struggle with is deciding the format for the outputs to make them useful for both business analysis purposes and to use as an aid to communicate problems with the wider workforce. Customer Journey Maps are a useful visual tool for road mapping the customer experience which outlines key stages, thoughts & expectations, feelings, pain points, and opportunities & ideas. Whilst they’re effective for gaining insight into your customer experience, they tend to rely on some knowledge and time to fully absorb and comprehend the context.

How to communicate the customer experience effectively

A recent project with Homes for Haringey gave us an opportunity to produce a Storytelling Video that shared the customer experience as well as the traditional Customer Journey Map. The map was a visual one-page summary, used by the insights team to complement their service improvement project. Meanwhile, the Storytelling Video was used to communicate the issues being faced more widely within the organisation.

“Ad Esse were a pleasure to work with. After the initial briefing discussions, they got on with the task at hand and engaged really well with staff and residents [at Homes for Haringey]. We were really pleased with the work they produced for us, all conducted professionally and delivered on time and within budget. I’ll definitely consider them for any similar work in the future.”

Elaine Prado, Head of Customer Experience and Operations at Haringey Council

An example of a Customer Journey Map and Storytelling Video

Here’s an example of what your Customer Journey Map and Storytelling Video could look like. We created a fictitious customer experience with an imaginary customer and organisation to give you an idea of what to expect. This could be applied to any industry, service, or process.