Customer Journey Mapping vs. Process Modeling

Speaker 1: Thanks David for joining us. Today we're talking about the difference between customer journey mapping and process mapping. BP3 has traditionally been in the process improvement, process mapping was a foundation for us. What is the difference between actual customer journey mapping and process mapping in your view?

David: I think, from where we come from, process modeling was all about organizing the people in the organization, getting them to do their work, organizing the way they work, what systems they use. But customer journey mapping is more about putting, involving the customer in that flow. So not only is the customer part of the process model and part of the journey map, but also the different types of customers that you have. What are the customer segmentation? What are they feeling, what are the emotions as they go through the process?
It's also trying to interview and have focus groups and layer over that sort of stale data of what the process data is and make it come alive with how the customer's interacting with your organization.
And then off the back of that what you find is I think that a richer understanding of the way the process actually works. Really as we go through this journey with our customers, it's allowing us to give better advice. Instead of just automate the enter and value train and use a BPMS system which was very much the way most of our industry worked two, three, four, five years ago. Now it's like well maybe this step really we should use RPA for. And we should automate the RE train here and the step further towards the end, really we need a chat bot. We need natural language processing. We need machine learning and AI techniques to delight the customer at that point.
It's a much richer understanding of the process model.

Speaker 1: We use the term customer journey quite a bit but a lot of times we're talking about an employee journey too. So is there a difference between a customer journey and an employee journey or there's just the same term?

David: I think in many cases in the same process, we need to understand the customer journey but we also need to understand how's the employee working? So part of it might be that what you find is the customer's very frustrated a step at the process because he's called up for a status update which he thinks should be very simple. What you're gonna find in the back of that is the employee's very frustrated because he can't update that customer easily.
So those two ideas and where in the mapping of what people are feeling on both sides of that equation are incredibly important to understanding the overall.

Speaker 1: Well thanks David for joining us and talking about the difference between the customer journey and process mapping and even adding in the employee journey. We really appreciate it.