You are reading a guide that explains how to build up your organization's Operational Knowledge. This article covers how to accomplish stage 2 in operational knowledge maturity scale.
Why capture customer journey maps?
Capturing customer journey maps helps businesses understand how customers interact with their products or services at every stage. By visualizing these interactions, companies can identify pain points, improve the overall experience, and make more informed decisions that better meet customer needs. This leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, better business outcomes.
In addition to understanding customer experience pain points, customer journey maps also help define milestones, establish goals, and highlight satisfaction points, allowing businesses to see where they are excelling.
The real value lies in aligning these customer experiences with business processes, helping to identify which operations are responsible for specific outcomes. This alignment enables companies to refine their processes, ensuring that every touchpoint contributes positively to the customer experience, leading to more efficient operations and a stronger, more customer-focused business strategy.
Can UPN be used for customer journey mapping?
Universal Process Notation (UPN) is a powerful diagramming framework designed to capture the essence of complex workflows. While it excels in business process mapping, its utility extends far beyond this application.
UPN's focus on answering critical questions—who, when, what, with what, and most importantly why—makes it an ideal tool for various mapping techniques.
This guide explores how UPN can be effectively applied in Customer Journey Mapping, offering a novel and powerful approach to better and deeper understanding of customer experiences.
What is Universal Process Notation (UPN)?
Universal Process Notation (UPN) is a straightforward yet robust diagramming technique used to capture a wide range of workflows. The foundation of UPN lies in its simplicity: a single type of building block that represents an activity, augmented by flowlines indicating sequence and connections between steps. Each block in a UPN diagram answers the key questions that define an activity within a flow:
What? (the activity itself)
When? (the timing or sequence)
Who? (the responsible party)
With what? (the resources or tools used)
Why? (the outcome or purpose)
This focus on capturing verifiable outcomes sets UPN apart, ensuring that each step within a process is purposeful and measurable.
To learn the full notation and best practices with Universal Process Notation, read this guide.
Problem with traditional customer journey mapping
Traditionally, customer journeys are captured as horizontal sets of steps, with pictures or emojis used to represent customer sentiment across each step.
The problem with this type of visualization is that it:
Enforces a linear perspective of the customer journey, even when it is often non-linear.
Often results in a simplified, high-level view of the customer journey.
Produces large diagrams that are difficult to read and follow, especially for long customer journeys.
Sentiments and experiences are not reportable or easily linkable to work to be done
Elements addresses all of the shortcomings of the traditional customer journey mapping.
Why customer journeys are better with UPN?
Elements offers an innovative approach to customer journey mapping through its UPN format:
UPN enables the capture of more accurate journeys, accommodating complex paths and scenarios.
The hierarchical diagram structure allows for in-depth focus on individual stages of the journey without generating large, difficult-to-read diagrams.
Data tables enable the organized capture of pain points, experiences, and ideas at each step, making it easier to report on them.
How to capture customer journeys with UPN?
Customer journey structure
The proven best practice is the following:
The top level diagram should articulate high-level 'phases' of the customer journey
Rather than simple nouns like 'Awareness', the diagram should articulate distinct, unique, verifiable customer and business outcomes
The child diagram for each 'phase' should articulate the detailed, accurate, and nuanced customer experience steps. The reality is that customer experiences are rarely linear, and there are often many different 'paths' to follow.
How to capture customer sentiment, KPIs and other information?
Custom data tables can be attached to each step in the journey, enabling the structured capture of detailed information, such as customer experiences, pain points, and expected business KPIs. These tables also function as smart, contextual surveys, allowing workshop participants to provide input in a structured manner.
Proposed data tables:
Business KPIs data table for top level journey
Business KPIs data table for top level journey
Business goal (text)
Purpose: Used to capture the headline of the business outcome we hope to achieve (e.g. 2x acquisition rate)
Customer journey stage (picklist)
Values: The values should be dependent on the industry, but e.g. Awareness, Acquisition, Adoption, Renewal, Expansion, Advocacy
Purpose: Allows you to report on and choose related Key Performance Indicators for a given phase in the customer journey.
Related KPIs (picklist)
Values: These values should be dependent on typical KPIs for each of the customer journey stages.
Purpose: Allows you to pick from pre-defined set of industry KPIs specific to phase of the customer journey.
Current performance (number)
Purpose: Allows you to capture current numeric value for a given KPI.
Target performance (number)
Purpose: Allows you to capture target numeric value for a given KPI.
Comment (long text)
Purpose: Place for any comments and ideas around the business objective.
Sentiment data table for detailed customer journey
Sentiment data table for detailed customer journey
Experience type (picklist)
Values: Positive, Negative
Purpose: Used to drive
Customer feeling (picklist)
Values:
For positive:
Appreciated
Confident
Delighted
Excited
Satisfied
For negative:
Confused
Dissapointed
Frustrated
Ignored
Overwhelmed
Purpose: Allows to streamline capture of customer sentiment by choosing pre-defined positive or negative values
Emotional intensity (number field)
Values: 1-10
Purpose: Measures the intensity of the emotion, whether positive or negative
Emotional trigger (long text)
Purpose: Describes what caused the emotional response
Outcome (long text)
Purpose: Documents the result of the experience (e.g., increased loyalty, frustration leading to churn)
Root cause (long text)
Purpose: Identifies the underlying cause of the pain point or best practice behind positive experience
How to capture journeys for different personas?
In some cases your company has multiple different personas that are part of the customer experience. Here is how to reflect that in the customer journey diagrams:
If your company targets different personas with different value propositions (e.g. a 'budget' product for mainstream audience, and 'luxury' product for different customer segment), then it is better for you to copy your customer journey and amend the copy and the original to reflect the experiences of the respective audiences.
If multiple personas play a role in the entire customer journey for one value proposition (very common in B2B industries, like Software as a Service, where decision makers, influencers, economic buyers and users are fundamentally different personas), then it is better for your one customer journey to reflect all of the personas together.
You simply should add human resources to your activity boxes that represent those different personas.
Customer journey templates
Elements has a rich and growing library of templatized customer journeys, unique to each industry. Rather than starting from the blank canvas, consider re-using or adapting one of our available customer journeys:
B2C E-commerce
B2B SaaS
Aligning customer journey steps with business processes
Showing linkage between a customer experience and business process is paramount. It provides granular justification of the required work, the pin-pointing of root causes of known issues, and a strong foundation for the plan of the road forward. Here are a few different approaches the Elements solution can support:
Familiar vertical approach
It is common when using flowcharting / BPMN approach, to capture customer journey and business process flows into separate, horizontal swimlanes. This allows for clear vertical alignment and visibility of which process or system steps support which part of the customer journey.
However, it is worth noting that this approach is not consistent with UPN methodology best practice.
Swimlanes, in traditional BPMN or flowcharting, often represent different roles and systems and their actions.
In UPN, role and system responsibilities are meant to be represented on the activity box itself as resources. That frees us up the canvas to capture non-linear paths and relationships
If this is your preferred approach, Elements can support it with the use of swimlanes and text boxes.
Customer experience to business process view
In order to build a linkage between a given step in customer journey or specific customer experience and the underlying business process that is responsible for it, Elements users can leverage the ability to search for and connect an existing diagram to a single activity step.
Once you map out your current customer journey and your business processes (more on that in this collection of solution guides), you can connect them. From your customer journey, simply select the customer step, and search for the business process you wish to connect.
In the example below, the customer step 'Raise a case' is linked to 'Process inboud customer inquiry' business process that covers handling of cases and live chats.
From the presentation and analysis perspective, this allows you to:
Present a detailed but focused picture of the specific phase of the customer journey
Select a single step in customer journey/ experience and navigate to a specific business process that supports it
Present the business process to the customer in context of the customer journey
experience without any adjacent ‘noise'