What could be more frustrating than you and the team believing you solved the customer problem but are struggling with commercializing the product?
The team is feeling challenged and unable to pinpoint exactly where the current customer experience is sub-optimal and causing enough friction that you are losing customers.
To enable these teams to locate problem areas, we developed a free concept tool called ELM - for Experience Lifecycle Map. The basic idea is for teams to visualize the intersection of the Customer Lifecycle with the Customer Journey.
The Customer Lifecycle:
- Stages customers go through from becoming aware of the product, service, brand to becoming your most loyal advocates.
- Provides an understanding of where customers might be at any point in time in the lifecycle.
- Allows you to identify blockers that prevent the customer from progressing through to the next stage.
- Overlaps with and reference parts of the customer journey.
The Customer Journey
- A lens of walking in your customer’s shoes as they interact with your organization (channels, departments, products, etc.).
- Provides an understanding of customer behavior and actions as they attempt to achieve an outcome within each stage of the lifecycle.
- Helps to identify key moments to ensure exceptional experiences and expose gaps causing potential blockers.
- It’s not linear nor static as you continue to learn, and customer’s needs change the map is updated.
- Is the backbone of your customer experience efforts.
ELM helps:
- Identify the customer needs, actions, behaviors, and desired outcomes on the customer journey for each lifecycle stage.
- Reveal ways to measure behaviors and experiences.
- Establish a confidence metric that defines an extraordinary experience.
- Expose the disparity between confidence and current metrics and identify the possible obstacles that could hinder efforts to pinpoint where to focus discovery.
- Create opportunities to hypothesize and test to eliminate barriers and reduce friction for their customers so they progress to the next part of the journey and lifecycle stage.
- Evolve with the learnings and evidence generated.
The components of the ELM:
Customer Lifecycle Stage: the stages customers go through, from first becoming aware of the product, service, and brand to becoming your most loyal advocates. It provides an understanding of where customers might be at any point in time in the lifecycle.
Customer Outcome: the goal the customer wants to achieve at that lifecycle stage in the customer journey. What is the customer's desired outcome at each stage in their journey?
Customer Journey: the customer behavior, steps, and actions customers take to reach their desired outcome at every stage of the lifecycle. It identifies essential moments to ensure exceptional experiences and expose gaps causing potential blockers.
Measuring Behavior: the various methods/tools to measure customer behavior during pivotal moments in the customer journey to gain insights into each lifecycle stage.
Confidence Metric: the number or percentage that instills team confidence they delivered a customer experience that moves the customer to the next lifecycle stage.
Current Metric: the recent data (number/percentage) that measures the customer behavior in a given lifecycle stage.
Here is a draft example of how that would appear on the ELM.
The place to start is to ensure you are not losing them once they commit. If your customers never receive value from your product, does it matter how many you can move through to committing to using your product but never do?
Remember, if you can't deliver value to the customer and no one becomes a brand advocate, there is no growth engine and a path toward commercialization.
Feel free to recreate it or use any new version on the virtual whiteboards that will work for you and your team.
Tap into the potential of the Experience Lifecycle Map and explore how each of its components - from the Customer Lifecycle Stage, Customer Outcome, Customer Journey to the Confidence and Current Metric - work together to create an unforgettable customer experience!
Written By: Pam Krengel