This is a compilation of 10 blog posts by Bruce Temkin.

These posts highlight some common mistakes that people make in their CEM Journey. This collection is aimed as a primer for people beginning to build their CEM strategy and not a guide.

Customer Experience Mangement - 10 Mistakes to avoid

Compiled from Bruce Temkins Blog

Balajii Chandarasikharan

CX Mistake #1: Faking Executive Commitment

Its very easy for an executive to say that he or she is committed to customer experience, but it takes much more than words to drive sustainable change across an organization. Without a strong level of executive commitment, companies can exert significant energy towards customer experience only to eventually fail. As a result, organizations revert back to their original behaviors without any sustained customer experience improvements, leaving behind a trail of unfinished efforts and frustrated, disheartened employees. One of our 6 Laws Of Customer Experience is: You cant fake it. Employees figure out whats really important to their leaders and will eventually see through any veneer of commitment. Executives demonstrate their real priorities in their decisions and actions, the priorities they set, the trade-offs they make, and the way that they chose to spend their time. Most organizations have a strong tendency to resist change. Since improving customer experience often requires changes across an organization, executive commitment is required to overcome the innate inertia. Leaders, as it turns out, fall into one of five levels of commitment:

Opposers dont believe in customer experience. These executives generally wont support customer experience efforts no matter what ROI data they see, but can become passives when they see strong support from their peers. Passives dont really care about customer experience. These executives are willing to become toe-dippers if they see strong support from their peers. Toe-dippers are willing to offer some time and resources for customer experience. These executives will increase their participation and can even become supporters if they see strong business opportunities. Supporters are willing to give their resources to customer experience efforts and encourage their peers to do the same because they inherently understand the business value of these efforts. They use ROI results to strengthen their discussions across the company. Advocates fight any battle to make sure that customer experience efforts are funded. They generally understand the impact that customer experience has to the long-term competitiveness of the company without any project-based ROI data.

How can you gauge the actual commitment of your executive team? Weve created a checklist of eight signs of executive commitment that help identify the actual commitment of an executive. Advocates demonstrate most of these items.

Here are some tips for avoiding this mistake:

Communicate the four CX competencies. Its easy for companies to think that they can make superficial changes and wind up with great customer experience. But it takes much more effort than that. Customer experience leaders can make sure that their senior execs understand the breadth of efforts required to build a customercentric culture by explaining the four CX competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Compelling Brand Values, Employee Engagement, and Customer Connectedness. Always refer to the journey. Customer experience change does not come overnight, so companies need to be prepared to hold their focus for several years. To help maintain this focus, try and frame your current customer experience efforts as part of a longer-term journey. Teach execs how to transform their orgs.Many times I find execs looking for advice on how to drive the charge, so heres some to share. The leaders that are most effective at leading transformation demonstrate three key characteristics, they: 1) Communicate why (making sure their people understand the rationale for change),

2) model the desired behaviors (showing commitment in their actions), and 3) reinforce change (continuously looking for ways to overcome inertia). Locate a committed leader. While it will take the CEO and his/her staff to drive organization-wide change, individual operating units inside of organization can become more customer-centric. Look for a business unit leader who is truly committed and start the customer experience efforts in his/her organization. Success in that group can help to get other executives on board. Make the business case. Some execs may be committed based on their belief that customer experience is a critical component of their organizations success.But they need to continuously make trade-offs and convince others to focus on customer experience. To help these execs stay on course, its very helpful to provide them with compelling business cases and anecdotes about how customer experience is generating positive business results. Appeal to the needs of senior execs.To fully engage senior execs, make sure to find ways to tap into their emotional needs. How do you do this? By focussing on two common areas: Their desire to be loved by customers (share direct negative feedback from customers) and their desire for greatness (paint a picture of how your efforts will help them make the company, and their legacy, great). Match ambition with commitment. If senior execs arent true advocates for customer experience, then dont try and make significant changes. While initiatives may start out okay, they will likely stall when changes are required across multiple internal organizations. Its important to realize that not every company can or should focus on customer experience transformation.

The bottom line: You just cant fake real commitment

CX Mistake #2: Over Relying on Customer Surveys

While customer insight can be extremely valuable, annual customer satisfaction and other types of surveys that are a mainstay for many companies often deliver little value. Asking a barrage of multiple-choice questions to customers might have made sense five years ago, but its an ineffective use of a key asset, customer feedback. Companies need to abandon a number of outdated assumptions that drive current market research practices:

Data and insights provide value. They dont. What provides value is having people make more customer-insightful decisions and take more customerinsightful actions. Companies have limited access to information about customers. They dont. Theres a wealth of information available about customers beyond periodic surveys from sources like call center records, interaction data, employee feedback, and social media. Theres no easy way to analyze unstructured data. There is. The primary tools of market research organizations have been multiple choice survey questions. Why? Because that was all they could easily analyze. Text analytics tools are making it easier to mine sentiment, topics, and other key data from the rich vein of unstructured data.

Meaningful insights require deep analysis. They dont. If you dont understand the business, then you need a lot of data and statistically significant results to draw conclusion. People across the company have context for interpreting and using much less data.

Here are some tips for avoiding this mistake:

Scrap your existing surveys. If your customer feedback systems arent driving customer-centric decisions and actions across your company, then just stop doing what youre doing. Divert the time and money to develop a more effective voice of the customer (VoC) program. People will defend the status-quo, arguing the need for comparisons with previous periods, but comparing metrics with historical data is not nearly as valuable as generating actionable insights for future improvements. Build a complete VoC program. Satisfaction and relationship studies tend to be presentation-oriented, periodic events, but strong VoC programs need to be continuous and feed operational processes. Companies need to build VoC programs that encompass what we call the six Ds of closed-loop VoC programs: Detect, Disseminate, Diagnose, Discuss, Design, and Deploy. These efforts often require a customer insight and action (CIA) platform to disseminate the insights. Identify three areas of insights. Asking customers for feedback in a survey can help organizations spot problems, make adjustments on existing processes, and find opportunities to improve their current offerings. But simple surveys are not a good mechanism for uncovering unmet needs to drive new innovations. Also, surveys often ignore non-customers who can fall into several categories such as ex-customers, prospects who are not customers, or segments youd like to target in the future. Thats why you need to have separate insight strategies for operational feedback, innovation opportunities, and non-customer intelligence. Act like you know something. Stop treating every customer like a stranger when youre asking for feedback. You should know what they own and what interactions theyve had, so only ask them relevant questions. Also, you should adjust what you ask based on what they tell you and stop making every customer go through your barrage of the same 50 questions. Ask why and how. Its interesting to know if a customer is satisfied or likely to recommend you, but that information alone doesnt help you make improvements. Make sure to ask why they feel that way or how they think you can improve. These types of open-ended questions can provide immense diagnostic information. If you have a large number of clients, then you will likely need to invest in text analytics capabilities. Focus on actions, not questions. When youre trying to figure out what feedback to collect, dont start by worrying about the questions you ask. Instead, you need to focus on the actions you plan to take. As companies spend more time helping employees take actions, the insights they need will become clearer. Tap into rich veins of unstructured data. Asking customers for feedback is a valuable mechanism, but there are many additional opportunities for insight. Every call into the call center, online chat with a tech agent, note from a salesman, or observations from front-line employees contains rich insights. And in some cases, social media can be insightful as well.

The bottom line: Market research processes need an overhaul

CX Mistake #3: Neglecting Experience Design

Companies focus on the basic requirements of an interaction but ignore the elements of design that can make the difference between customer anger and customer delight. The lack of good design can be see in this quote by Adam Greenfield, a former head of design direction at Nokia: The engineers at Nokia brag about the number of megapixels a new phone has. But they dont understand that if you cant find the button to use the camera on the phone, it doesnt matter how many megapixels it is. In a recent study, we found that 74% of customer experience professionals think that customer experience design is important or critical for their company, but only 34% think that their firm is good at it.

Why is design deficiency so widespread? Because companies convince themselves that theyre taking care of customers when they painstakingly define and measure themselves against meeting functional requirements. What this left brain centric approach misses is that functional needs represent only one of three components of an experience. Experiences are also made up of three components, so accessible and emotional components are often ignored.

Here are some tips for avoiding this mistake:

Identify key moments. Even though most companies cant replicate the design skills of Apple across everything they do, they still need to apply good design for important interactions. Companies should identify the key moments that influence customers and commit themselves to applying good design principles to those moments. Get design help. Good design is not accidental, it requires the right skills. Recognize your limitations and bring in a design team to help in critical areas if you dont have those skills on your team. Plan to test and iterate. Its often impossible to predict exactly how people will respond to a new experiencewhether its a call center script, website design, or retail displayso you need to allot time and money for making incremental changes on key moments. Make sure to factor this into your budget and schedule. Set accessible and emotional goals. Every key moment should have defined requirements for how easy it is for customers and how those customers feel about it afterwards. Dont consider the design of the experience complete until youve reached those goals, even if youve delivered on all of the functional requirements. Find the little things. When Marquis Marriott in NYC spent more than $10 million to change how its elevators operated, consumers were regularly confused. It didnt need another massive overhaul, just a small investment in signage. Thats why companies should constantly look to apply what I call the Design Of Little Things the small changes that can dramatically improve the customer experience of much larger investments.

The bottom line: Companies may not appreciate good design, but customers do

CX Mistake #4: Treating All Customers The Same

Customers have different needs, interests, and familiarity with offerings, but companies often turn their back on these differences.While it may sound appealing to deliver a great experience to everyone, its an impractical goal for most companies. When a traveller wrote a complaint to Southwest Airlines about how flight attendants were fooling around during the safety briefing and said that she would never fly Southwest Airlines again, Herb Kelleher (founder and then CEO) wrote back a simple note: Well miss you. What Kelleher understood is that the airlines value proposition wasnt for everyone and that it would fail if it tried to cater to everyone. Here are some tips for avoiding this mistake:

Identify key customer segments. The first step is to identify the different customer segments that your company serves. While you may start with demographic breakdowns like age or income, some of the most telling segments come from psychographics. Nike, for instance, may have a strong customer segment called running enthusiasts. Once you have a list of segments, it is critical that you prioritize them. Every CX project should identify a primary segment as the audience. Track needs across the customer lifecycle. Customer segments represent one slice of how to look at customers; the other is lifecycle. Customers have different needs as they flow through different stages of their relationship. You need to understand how each target segment wants to do things like: Research using your products/services, make a purchase, start using your products and services, have ongoing communications with you after becoming a customer, get help when theres a problem, etc. Walk away from some customers.In order to prioritize some customer segments, you will need to de-prioritize others. Its critical that you are clear about which segments you are not going to try and serve. If you dont create that clarity, then people across the organization will continue to push for investments and changes to improve things for those (purposely) underserved customers, taking focus away from your more important customers. Get to know customers, qualitatively. Its easy to fall into the trap of thinking customers are the same if you just look at data about them. To truly understand the nuances across your customer segments, its critical that you use qualitative techniques like focus groups, contextual inquiries and shadowing. Its also valuable to have executives regularly interact with customers from key segments. Listen to customers strategically. Voice of the customer experts often talk about getting a 360-degree view of all your customers. While that might make sense in an ideal world, the reality is that companies are forced to make trade-offs. Its expensive to get feedback, both in terms of out-of-pocket expenses and the opportunity cost of having customers answer questions (theres a limit to how often you can ask customers questions). So you need to be more strategic about where you focus your listening, a process that we call Detect (see the 6 Ds For Voice Of The Customer Programs). Design segment-specific experiences.Sometimes your target customer segments will have different enough needs and desires that youll want to design

different experience paths for them. We often find three areas of difference across segments that can require multiple experience paths: knowledge of the domain, level of willingness to engage in a process, and channel preferences.

The bottom line: Experiences built to meet everyones needs often meet meets no ones

CX Mistake #5: Un-engaging New Customers

Companies work very hard to get new customers, but they often ignore them after they write their first check. There are a lot of issues that keep customers from getting the value they expected from a purchase they made. When these issues occur, customers will often have buyers remorse and think poorly of the company that just took their money. In these cases, sales can lead to negative loyalty. This situation occurs because:

Silos leave gaps between sales and service. Companies have sales organizations and customer service organizations, but often dont have any group responsible for making new customers happy before they run into an issue. Metrics overly focus on closing sales. Companies tend to have very mature systems for tracking and measuring sales performance, but few firms have strong customer experience metrics or can effectively make trade-offs between the two. New customers are very impressionable. The people who often know the least about a company are its new customers. They dont understand the companys terminology, its operational processes, or recognize its full value proposition. They may have made a purchase, but new customers arent necessarily bought into the company. Think of it this way: New customers want to love you, but theyre willing to hate you.

Instead of just trying to get money from customers, companies need to focus on making customers happy with their purchases. This requires focusing on a critical, yet neglected part of the customer life-cycle called the Engagement Phase, that we define as: The period where customers initially realize their expected value from a purchase

Here are some tips for engaging new customers:

Focus on PoV, not PoS. The Engagement Phase starts with the point of sale (PoS) and ends with the point of value (PoV), which we define as The point at which customers get the value they were expecting from their purchase and are satisfied with their decision. Companies need to orient their finish line as the PoV and view a sale as one step towards customer value. Establish and track PoV metrics. Companies need to develop metrics that track how often customers are happy with their purchases and how quickly they reach the PoV. This data should be used to drive priorities within the company. Bonuses, for instance, should be based on PoV performance, not just PoS performance. Design the engagement phase. Companies must understand the journey of new customers; identifying their needs and perceptions after they make a purchase. Using this insight, companies should design experiences that ensure new customers get value from and are happy with their new purchase. Define engagement ownership. The engagement phase cant be an orphan within companies. A group or an executive must have clear responsibility for this critical period.

The bottom line: Customers that dont get value, arent going to be valuable customers

CX Mistake #6: Ignoring Employees

Not surprisingly, customer experience programs focus on customers. But they often dont spend enough time cultivating one of their most important CX assets: Employees. One of our 6 Laws Of Customer Experience is: Unengaged employees cant create engaged customers. You cant sustain great customer experience unless your employees are on board. For many companies, the path to great customer experience not only needs to include employees, it needs to start with them. Why? Because theres a virtuous cycle that comes from engaging employees:

Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest, does a great job of clarifying why he built employee engagement into the fabric of the airline: If you create an environment where the people truly participate, you dont need control. They know what needs to be done and they do it. And the more that people will devote themselves to your cause on a voluntary basis, a willing basis, the fewer hierarchies and control mechanisms you need. Unfortunately, employee engagement is lower than it should be at many companies because:

Employee engagement isnt in the plans. Customer experience efforts focus on fixing customer interactions and processes, but they often dont address the ongoing engagement of employees that isnt tied to a specific process or interaction. Cultural change isnt easy. Without a specific plan to improve employee engagement, its not likely to get better. Changing a companys culture requires clear and persistent effort.

Here are some tips for avoiding this mistake:

Tap into employees customer insights. Front line employees know a lot about customers; they interact with customers all the time. All too often, companies dont use this key insight. Develop a program where you regularly collect feedback from customer-facing employees about what theyre seeing: problems, opportunities, and general observations. If employees see that their insights are being used and valued, then they will feel more engaged with the company. Spread customer feedback. The more that employees understand customers, the more they will feel connected to delivering great customer experience. Thats

why companies should find ways to deliver relevant customer feedback widely across their organization. Measure employee engagement. If you want employee engagement, set goals for it and measure it. Many companies have annual or semi-annual employee surveys, but they dont systematically act upon it. Companies should establish some clear metrics around customer engagement, maybe using a simple Net Promoter-like question: How likely are you to recommend <COMPANY> to a friend or colleague as a good place to work? Design for employee engagement. Companies need an explicit track of effort around employee engagement and communications within their customer experience efforts. Another of our 6 Laws Of Customer Experience is: employees do what is measured, incented, and celebrated. So companies need to purposefully design the measurements, incentives, and celebrations that reinforce employee engagement. Stop relying on heroes. When individual employees decide to ignore policies and procedure to deliver a great customer experience, it often makes a great story. But these heroic efforts dont scale; they cant be depended upon and they tend to burn out your people. Companies need to invest in their people, developing the processes, rules, tools, and training that make it easy for employees to consistently deliver a great experience.

The bottom line: Employees can make or break any CX effort

CX Mistake #7: Obsessing About Detractors

Customer experience programs often spend most of their time fixing problems so customers dont dislike them, but they dont spend enough time figuring out how to make customers love them. Its always important to create operating processes that deliver consistently good experiences. But consistency is a minimum requirement for strong brands. To make a deep connection with customers, experiences need to reinforce other key attributes of a brand. In a recent Temkin Group study, we found that only 14% of companies target campaigns at their brand promoters. Customer experience efforts arent purposely ignoring advocates, but the environment in which they operate pushes them in that direction. Here are some of the contributing factors:

Customer feedback overemphasizes problems. Customers are most articulate about their dislikes. In recent Temkin Group research, we found that 34% of US consumers give feedback to a company after a very bad experience, but only 21% did the same after a very good experience. So normal customer listening mechanisms push companies to focus on problems. Understanding dissatisfaction does not help you understand loyalty. It might seem reasonable that focusing on dissatisfaction would help you learn about loyalty. But it turns out that the attributes that makes people unhappy are often not the same things that make them very happy. If the brakes in my car dont work, then Im very unhappy with the car. If my brakes work, then I dont think about it. So companies often lack insight into what causes customers to become advocates. Executives overreact to problems. When executives hear about a single customer issue, they often push hard on the organization to fix the problem. When they get

feedback from a happy customer, they just say great job but dont push their organization to make any changes. Over time, this creates a lot more energy towards fixing problems than towards creating customer advocates. and they dont like talking about emotions. Customer experience is a combination of what consumers do, think, and feel. But executives are often more comfortable focusing on the most tangible items, what customers do and think. Given this bias, corporate plans inadvertently focus on creating satisfied customers, not engaged brand advocates.

Here are some tips for avoiding this mistake:

Create a stream of activity around advocacy building. You shouldnt stop finding and fixing problems, but you need to make sure that you are also identifying and implementing things that create brand advocates. So establish a separate track of activity around raving fans so that it gets unique attention. Translate the brand into desired attitudes. Customer experience management efforts should create customer attitudes and behaviors that support business objectives. So make sure you explicitly describe the desired attitudes of customers that will reinforce your brand and use that information when you design and examine experiences. Map your customers journey. One of the most effective tools for understanding how customers feel about your company is a customer journey map. If you dont understand how customers view their interactions with you, then you wont be able to turn them into advocates. Use alternative research. Traditional market research approaches of surveys and focus groups can uncover what people like and dislike, but they may not uncover what people really desire. Why? Because customers cant often articulate what they really desire. Thats why you should incorporate qualitative research techniques like contextual inquiry, shadowing, and journaling. Infuse emotion in the design. Since experiences are made up of functional, accessible, and emotional attributes, its critical that customer experience designs incorporate all three attributes. Make sure you put desired feelings into the design requirements. Dont track average or net scores. While coming up with a single metric may be interesting, it blurs the distinction between really happy and really unhappy customers. Make sure you have a measurement and goal around really happy customers. If youre using Net Promoter Score, for instance, start tracking promoters and detractors separately.

The bottom line: Design for love, not just for eliminating hate

CX Mistake #8: Forgetting To Celebrate Success

Customer experience leaders spend so much energy focusing on what needs to be improved that they often forget to appreciate the progress that has already been made. Customer experience transformation isnt easy. Leaders of these efforts must push through ongoing resistance over several years to guide their organizations towards being customer-

centric. So its only natural for them to keep looking ahead, trying to anticipate and avoid the next barrier. This non-stop forward charge can cause some problems because it:

Accelerates burn out. Pushing up against barriers and resistance can be very tiring, which is why many customer experience leaders dont last beyond a few years. Even if they go longer, they are often tired and frustrated. Distresses stakeholders. Executives get tired of hearing that their organizations have problems or that they arent changing fast enough. Sooner or later they tune out to the message. Limits organizational change. Identifying problems can drive initial change, but organizations get tired of facing an uphill battle of improvements. People dont get emotionally engaged until they feel good about their efforts.

Here are some tips for avoiding this mistake:

Institutionalize success-seeking. One of the items that should be regularly on your agenda is signs of success where you discuss whats working well. By putting this on the agenda, people will get in the habit of looking for, and thinking about, the progress that theyve made. Acknowledge your organizations great work. One of the 6 laws of customer experience is people do what is measured, incented, and celebrated. So make sure to celebrate! The wins in the organization dont happen on accident. Make sure to recognize members of the customer experience team that are making a positive difference. Regularly communicate success. The organization wants to know that its succeeding. So make sure to communicate the signs of success. But dont oversell. People will start ignoring messages that dont match what theyre seeing. Thank the organization. Dont just communicate the success, but widely thank people across the organization for their help. This will make employees more anxious to be a part of the effort, in the hopes that they will also get the recognition. Create customer experience awards. If your organization has quarterly or annual awards, then some of those accolades should be channeled towards customer experience champions. The people inside of your company that are making a difference deserve an award!

The bottom line: Focus on the future, but dont forget to celebrate the past

CX Mistake #9: Falling In Love With A Metric

Companies often get enamored with a metric like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and lose sight of whats really important, making improvements. Customer experience efforts absolutely need metrics and measurements. While theres value in collecting that data to measure or track customer experience, the true power comes when it provides insight into where and how to make improvements. But some organizations overemphasize the metric. Companies going down this path can run into problems when they:

Rush into compensation. Tying business results to metrics can be a good thing. But tying too much compensation too early to any metric can also cause a lot of problems.

If people have a significant part of their pay tied to a metric they dont understand or dont know how to affect, then they will either ignore it, get bitter about it, or find ways to game the system. Customer experience doesnt improve if salespeople are calling out to customers and begging them to give higher ratings on a survey. Cant answer why. Reporting on a metric can highlight strengths and weaknesses of a companys overall customer experience. So its understandable that some executive teams push for widespread use of those metrics without caring about the overall set of information collected from customers. But if the company does not understand why customers are either happy or unhappy, then they cant systematically improve customer experience and positively affect the metric. Overuse a metric. Understanding if a customer is happy overall with an organization is quite different than understanding if her needs were met during a specific service call. But some companies blindly use the same metrics for each of those areas. A metric like NPS, for example, may be appropriate for examining relationship strength, but its necessarily good for evaluating interactions. Forget their uniqueness. Every business has a unique set of strengths, weaknesses, goals and ambitions. But when it comes to customer experience metrics, companies often want to use the same measures as everyone else. While this may enable benchmarking comparison to other firms, it does not necessarily measure how the company is progressing towards its unique goals.

Here are some tips for avoiding this mistake:

Treat relationships and interactions differently. The questions you ask a customer about how they view your company can (and often should) be quite different than those that you ask about an interaction. Think about different questions and methods for five different types of insights: Relationship tracking, interaction monitoring, continuous listening, project infusion, and periodic immersion. Deploy shadow metrics before making large incentive changes. To help leaders in your company understand the impact of customer experience incentives, put in place the metrics you are thinking about for a couple of periods before actually making them live. That way people can see how it will affect them before actually does affect them. Establish performance bands, not absolute targets. Customer feedback metrics can be a bit jittery. Sometimes it can be very hard to explain small movements since theres always some variance due to sampling limitations. Rather than establishing a number as the goal, set targets for high and low scores. Success comes from consistently execceding the low band. Measure relevant attitudes and behaviors. Businesses arent in the business of getting random people to recommend them. They hope to get that type of loyalty from successfully executing their mission. Develop measurements that test the attitudes and behaviors of target customer segments, making sure they line up with your specific business and brand strategy. Build a robust voice of the customer (VoC) program. Creating isolated metrics will not drive change in an organization; especially when people dont understand what drives the metric. Companies need to develop a voice of the customer (VoC) program that continuously shares actionable customer insights across the organization.

The bottom line: Use metrics to improve the experience, not just measure it

CX Mistake #10: Mapping Your Internal Touchpoints

Companies often confuse internally-focussed touchpoint mapping with externally-focussed customer journey mapping. One of the core customer experience tools is customer journey mapping, a process of examining how customers view their relationship with an organization. These efforts are extremely valuable for identifying key moments of truth and providing an accurate assessment of customer experience. They also serve to identify priorities for voice of the customer (VoC) programs. While these projects can be an asset to customer experience management programs, they can also go awry. How? By using traditional quality and process methodologies for examining touchpoints. Consulting groups (vendors and internal groups) are often familiar with process/touchpoint mapping projects. These efforts examine the specific touchpoints that the company has with customers, in order to drive more efficiencies. These approaches can lead to sub-optimal results because they:

Rely on internal analysis. These efforts often spend a lot of time examining internal processes. While this type of activity can be valuable, they are much more helpful when done in the context of how customers view their interactions with the organization. Ignore some customer touchpoints. When companies look internally, they often mss key touchpoints that arent in the scope of effort for the project. For instance, a project looking at the cable TV installation process may miss an issue with how expectations are set during the purchase process. Lack emotional design components.Touchpoint mapping efforts often lead to redesigning of internal processes. But these changes are based on efficiency goals, not customers emotional needs. Have a short shelf-life. Since these are viewed as consulting projects, the results are often only applied to an initial set of recommendations.

Here are some tips for avoiding this mistake:

Assume that customers view their journey differently than you do. This will force you to do the research to understand how customers perceive their entire relationship. You will often find elements you werent expecting, including interactions with other people/organizations you never recognized or touhpoints with your company that your never recognized as being important. One of the ways to do this is to reframe the objective in customer terms. For instance, find out how customers want to buy not how we can sell. Uncover differences across customer segments. Its unusual for all customers to share the identical journeys. So you need to identify the key differences and build out journey map for the key segments. Sometimes the steps may look similar, but the way that they perceive your company can be quite different.

Answer three questions. Push hard to answer these three questions: 1) What are the most important touchpoints; 2) How are we doing in those key touchpoints; 3) What can we do to improve the customers perception of those touchpoints. Invest in a lasting framework, not a one-time project. A good customer journey map should establish a common understanding of customer needs that drives a number of things across the company: educating employees about customer needs and desires, prioritization of listening posts for voice of the customer programs, identification of acute and chronic issues to improve, and opportunities for driving strong brand preference from customers.

The bottom line: Map your customers journey, not your internal touchpoints