8.1.1. Step 1: analyzing past customer experiences

Continuous and discontinuous monitoring systems must be established to monitor the customer experience created. The measurement of experience requires multiple associated measures because the five elements of the lived experience and the perception of past experience(s) must be evaluated [LEM 17].

8.1.2. Step 2: taking strategic prerequisites into account

A customer experience can only be conceived if it is backed by prior strategic choices that must be taken into account [LEM 17]. Brand strategy with, for example, a brand platform [KAP 08] allows the desired experience to be aligned with brand positioning.

It is also necessary to have defined the business model associated before with a Canvas Business Model [OST 10], for example. Thus, the desired experience, and therefore the interactions, will embody the value promised to the customer and the ability to capture the determined revenues.

8.1.3. Step 3: prioritizing and determining the place for the desired experience

Defining a desired experience implies that the company determines:

• – the strategic objective of the experience;
• – the behavioral, relational, sensorial, emotional and cognitive elements that the customer should experience.

The choice to create/modify/improve certain customer journeys expresses one of five strategic options:

8.1.4. Step 4: operationalizing the journeys that constitute the experience

This desired experience defined in the previous step must then be formalized into one or more customer journeys composed of a series of touchpoints perceived as a way of optimizing customer satisfaction. To do this, it is necessary to define different experience scenarios adapted to the various customer profiles. The company has an interest in drawing the operational outlines of the transformation of experience with:

• – the temporal scope of the experience to know if it works with regard to a service, on a purchasing act, on the entire relationship or on the period of use of a product in order to precisely describe different contexts and situations of services/ purchasing/relation/use;
• – the spatial perimeter of the integration of touchpoints by determining whether it works on a particular touchpoint, on several or on all of the proposed touchpoints;
• – by identifying the company’s internal stakeholders (services concerned) but also the partners and subcontractors involved in the experience.

This phase of route operationalization is the most difficult phase because it requires reflection on:

• – the changes to be made within organizations and the impacts on the various business lines of the company (IT, Marketing, Sales, HR, etc.);
• – the project management method including varied and transversal skills within the company;
• – the development of a new corporate culture including the new dimensions of experience;
• – transcription of the journeys into business processes but also into information monitoring within information systems;
• – the practices of testing new courses and accepting the failure of certain measures.

More generally, the question arises as to whether one wishes to make iterative changes by changing the experience as it happens or whether one wishes to make a radical change of experience by removing many elements of the experience in favor of new ones.

8.1.5. Step 5: checking the created journeys

The Service Quality Model [PAR 85] is a model for identifying and correcting service quality problems by detecting gaps between what the customer experiences and their expectations. This model identifies seven sources of discrepancies between customer perception of experience and the company’s desired experience:

• – the knowledge gap between the experiences of customers’ and managers’ perceptions of them;
• – the difference in standards between the desired experience and the specifications decided by the manager;
• – the delivery gap between the customer’s expectations and the experience delivered by the company;
• – the communication gap between the experience delivered by the company according to the front-office and the promise of communication;
• – the perceived gap between the experience delivered by the company and the experience perceived by customers;
• – the difference in the interpretation of communication with the difference between the message given by the communication and what the customer understood of the promise;
• – the service gap between the customer’s experience and expectations.

This model can be used as a basis for creating experience control reporting and gap measurement to define points for continuous improvement.

8.2.1. The classic graphic tools: blueprint and contact matrix

8.2.2. Practicing design thinking by creating personas

T. Brown, a designer, gave this definition of design thinking:

“a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technically feasible and what business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunities” [BRO 08].

Design thinking is the designer’s ability to reconcile the imperatives of technical feasibility with those of economic profitability and desirability for the individual. Design thinking is perceived as a source of structuring marketing thinking and uses personas in particular.

Personas have often been cited by practitioners and have defined by Brangier et al. [BRA 12]. “The personas method consists of describing probable users in a nominative, archetypal and personalized form”. The persona is the flagship tool in customer journey design, as shown by this testimony from the customer experience director of the musketeers group:

“We prefer to use the persona technique. I am really a fan of the persona concept but not of marketing segmentation. The objective of the persona is really to embody the customer. Often we use four to five people and we truly embody them by creating their photos or their constraints and resources: what their computer equipment could be, their consumption, their needs, their way of thinking about shopping. People, it’s really a great method even if it’s caricatured and fantasized but it’s deeply human”.

Most of the people observed in companies [JAC 16] follow the structure of the model presented in a book [OST 10], proposing to present them with photos and text.

The persona makes it possible to mirror the company’s vision and the customer’s needs. Thus, personas allow us to have a critical vision of managerial work. This is because the persona provides the opportunity to compare the mental representations shared by the company with the persona’s representations in order to challenge the teams’ work. The persona is often linked to marketing segmentation:

“Defining personas also means insisting on the fact that they cannot be assimilated to marketing segmentations, in particular because they do not come from market research and do not represent identified percentages of users” [BRA 12].

The interest in using personas is that the customer appears as a hoped-for and embodied target. Persona practices differ from segmentation because the persona practice is punctual and has no quantitative purpose; however, it should allow the manager to better extract themselves from their vision of the company in order to make them endorse the customer’s clothes. The persona is, therefore, not intended to define quantitative commercial objectives or to serve as a basis for mix marketing.

8.2.3. Interests and limitations of graphic tools

No literature had ever really linked design to customer experience management. Design practices are quite naturally associated with the creation of products, packaging or logos or with the brand image called “design orientation”, aimed at integrating the work of designers within the company. However, design could also define a working position for managers in management [BOL 04] by using tools and designer approaches to create new sources of value for the customer. Design thinking is complementary to managerial decision-making because it can be developed when the problem to be solved is complex and the solutions all contain advantages but also disadvantages. Design thinking should have points in common with the managerial approach such as the desire to create value for the customer, the desire to reduce costs and to rely on the company’s key activities but also strong differentiating points and sources of creativity [RYL 09]. These points of differentiation would be the way (1) to approach problems that are considered difficult and seemingly without a single and final solution [BUC 92]; (2) to work in a pragmatic, iterative and experimental way; and (3) to represent the solutions visually. Finally, design thinking should go beyond product design to be applied to the organization of the company or the design of organized systems. Research shows that the contribution of design thinking to traditional marketing practices makes it possible to improve the visibility of brand positioning [BEV 15] or product innovation design thinking within organizations would make it possible (1) to better understand customer needs by focusing on usage values through qualitative research; (2) to break away from a unique and fixed strategic thinking by creating breakthrough innovations; and (3) to restore the brand’s image to its central role as a guide to marketing design thinking.

The first result is to allow the project team to focus their attention on the customer by reflecting on their needs through a persona, to better understand the proposed routes and to avoid journey dependence by remaining limited to the company’s vision. The persona becomes a common totem for design teams by breaking down customer stereotypes in the company and contextualizing all customer behaviors.

The second result is to facilitate and develop transmission capacities by creating esthetic and simple diagrams to address a complex problem. It is the power of the “simplexity” of design thinking advocated by the designer Ora-Ito and therefore the ability of design thinking tools to disseminate, within companies, this vision of the desired journeys.

Finally, these tools integrate the customer’s desired emotions and thus work on the value created in a global way. This takes up Benoît Heilbrunn’s work on product marketing design showing that:

“What design marketing expects is precisely to project a universe of signs on products to induce purchasing criteria that are no longer the only springboard for the function […]. In this sense, design seems to relay the marketing project, which is to make sense of consumer objects by projecting emotional and imaginary meanings to increase their desirability and perceived value” [HEI 06].

In design thinking, the designer’s unique thinking system is an integral part of the method:

“In its core functioning (i.e. doing it as distinct from studying about it), design thinking is embodied in the design thinker, in terms of behaviours, values, attitudes, intuition, creativity. This is a relativist and constructivist perspective where knowledge is primarily resident in the thinker and context” [DEV 13].

These techniques are, therefore, not free from criticism. In design literature, the personas technique can also present many flaws. For example, many personas created by designers had not been shaped from data collection and were used to support their design choices [AMP 06]. Finally, some designers consider that the persona is counterproductive because it is impersonal. Indeed, some designers consider that the persona goes against the principle of focusing on the individual’s needs, which requires a thorough understanding of the users by meeting them.

The limitations of design thinking also arise from the fact that graphic representations are often not based on any quantitatively measured elements. This limitation explains why they are complementary to the work on the algorithmic representation of the customer’s journey.