Does anyone else use customer journey mapping to inform IT system requirements?
Join our in-house CX Service Design expert Eric Lutley as he delves into this very question.
I find this really useful, and I’m wondering how common the practice is. And in case you’re interested, here’s a quick case study:
A client hired us to write CRM requirements for an upcoming tender, AND create customer journey maps for their three divisions. They treated the two as a single project, which I found odd at first. Then I started to build the maps… and had a eureka moment.
The client’s customer journeys were complex, so the maps had dozens of steps and divergent pathways in them. For each step, I identified customer/business painpoints, and opportunities pertaining to people, process and technology.
This exercise puts you in the shoes of customers at specific moments in time, allowing you to understand their needs at a granular level. And without even trying, I found that about half of the opportunities I uncovered required new CRM capabilities to deliver.
Some of the opportunities related to requirements we’d already captured using traditional methods. For these, the maps served as a supporting argument and a direct example of how a feature would benefit customers and staff.
And other opportunities were brand new, which was pretty exciting. We also assigned impact/effort scores to each opportunity so the associated requirements could be MoSCoW rated and prioritised.
The end result was a set of maps with a concrete use case (something a lot of journey mapping projects lack) and a list of CRM requirements with customer and staff needs at its heart (something a lot of requirement projects lack).
And now for the inevitable plug: if you have system requirements to write, we’d love to help as described above. Connect with Eric via the contact box below!