1. Review key concepts.
2. Agree to channels.
3. Define journey stages.
4. Fill in touchpoints.
5. Review and refine.
6. Reflect and determine the next steps.
Review Key Concepts
Start with reviewing the definitions of channel, journey, journey stages, and touchpoints. Show examples from your products and services to make this tangible. Encourage people to embrace these definitions for the workshop, in order to ensure an effective session. There may be initial confusion (or even pushback) as you introduce concepts that challenge the status quo. In the end, you should find that most people will appreciate at least trying a new approach to document the ways your organization currently interacts with customers.
Agree to Channels
Take a first pass at your channels before the session and then validate and refine them with your participants. Go through each channel, one by one, and make sure that everyone understands the purpose of the channel at a high level. Each channel should be written on a sticky note and placed on your canvas as a row of your matrix.
Remember to push participants to break down overarching channels—such as “digital”—to more useful categories. For Amazon, a few useful channels for exploring entertainment journeys could be:
• Amazon app
• Echo and Alexa family
• Amazon Music app
• Amazon Kindle app
• Prime Video app
Define Journey Stages
If your organization has an existing journey model, place each stage on the canvas as a column of your matrix. Review each stage and make sure that everyone is in alignment before moving on to the next step. In the absence of a previously created journey model, you will need to build a quick hypothesis with your participants. Here is a quick way to do so:
• Give each participant a few sticky notes and a Sharpie.
• Ask everyone individually to capture what they think are the stages of the customer journey, writing one stage per sticky.
• Have participants present their stages one by one. As they do so, begin to cluster similar stages.
• Once everyone has presented, facilitate aligning around the names and sequence of your stages. Remember, there is no magic number, and your stages should be from the customer’s perspective.
NOTE BE ITERATIVE
To create change, you must begin somewhere. This workshop essentially creates a hypothesis of your channels, stages, and touchpoints based on what the workshop participants know (or think they know). This starting point helps you introduce new concepts and get some traction in creating a shared understanding. You shouldn’t create grand strategies and plans based on this initial hypothesis, however. More work—especially customer research (see Chapter 5)—and subsequent iterations will be needed to have a complete inventory.
Fill in Touchpoints
You can now begin populating your matrix. First, review the definition of a touchpoint again and ask for a few examples. Then instruct participants to write down individually, one per sticky note, as many existing touchpoints as possible and then place them on the canvas in the channel and stage in which they belong. For the best results, follow these simple guidelines:
• Timebox the activity at 15 to 20 minutes.
• Have people start with what they know. They may own a specific channel or stage of the customer journey. Encourage them to spend the most time on where they have the most knowledge.
• Some touchpoints may appear in more than one stage, so ask participants to add multiple sticky notes for those touchpoints.
• Group people together who have similar knowledge. By working together, they should be able to generate a good inventory while reducing duplicates or differences in language.
• Watch out for groups that get stuck on what to call things or what stages that touchpoints go in. Remind them this is a first pass and that you will refine everything in the next step.
Review and Refine
You will now have a wall covered in sticky notes and a room full of people surprised that there are so many. That’s progress!
Next, facilitate a walkthrough of the matrix, going top to bottom, left to right. Your goal: review each touchpoint, combine duplicates, and fill in any gaps. Along the way, you will generate a valuable cross-functional conversation about why certain touchpoints exist, how they connect with others, and in general what is known about their performance. Take your time.
To get the most out of the discussion, we recommend the following:
• Get people to lean in. People should be actively putting up and moving sticky notes together.
• Assign some participants to document the walkthrough discussion. One person can write down new touchpoints; another can capture details of touchpoints (how they perform, if they are being replaced or improved, and so on).
• If you have time, give participants three green stickers and three red stickers. Ask them to put their stickers on touchpoints that are performing the best (green) and the worst (red). Facilitate a dialogue around how the organization defines and measures the success and failure of touchpoints.
NOTE BUILDING BRIDGES, ONE STICKY NOTE AT A TIME
The sharing of information and dialogue you facilitate in this workshop can generate more value than what ends up on the sticky notes. Bringing together colleagues from different functions with their varying perspectives to cocreate a tool happens too rarely in most organizations. When facilitated well, this workshop is enlightening and enjoyable. You will build a lot of goodwill and lay the foundation for other approaches outlined in this book. Make sure to take good pictures of the session so that you can share the process and results with others.
Reflect and Determine the Next Steps
Wrap up your session with a review of the workshop experience. What worked? What didn’t?
Finally, discuss the next steps to improve your inventory. Engage stakeholders in doing some more discovery in their areas of ownership or expertise. Invite people to participate in field research to learn from customers about when, how, and why they interact (or don’t interact) with your channels and touchpoints.
After the Workshop
Once the dust settles, you will need to assess the completeness of your inventory. You may need to circle back with some of the participants to make sure that you captured things accurately. Or, if you have not done primary discovery yet, you can take a deep dive into each channel and the journey as outlined earlier in the chapter. Remember, this is an iterative process. Keep filling in the blanks and continue to build consensus on a standard way to refer to your channels and touchpoints.
CHAPTER