The tagline from the Forrester event listing page says it all, “Design and deliver breakaway customer experiences”. This is exactly what I was educated about at the Forrester event in New York City the past few days. Starting on Monday with a pre-conference workshop, and then the main conference Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m happy to report that non-stop learning occurred during all three days! Here is my first day recap, with the next two days to be posted soon.
Monday – The Pre-Conference Workshop Experience
I attended the Customer Journey Mapping workshop, which was hosted by Rick Parrish, Principal Analyst, and TJ Keitt, Senior Analyst from Forrester. About 30 people attended the workshop, and it was a mixture of PPT lecture and hands-on experience in building out journey mapping.
Customer Journey Mapping is a critical process in several areas of an organization in today’s world. This is especially true for the customer experience journeys. A combined journey map of both process, customer, and employee provides a new level of interaction or touchpoint understanding and ability to not only plan for the future, but assess current experiences as well.
I was very excited to learn several new methods to implement in our own customer experience journey mapping process, and I’m looking forward to using them in our next strategic engagement with a client. The workshop was 4 hours in length, and the information and experience was definitely worth the time.
One outstanding item that was discussed during this workshop and followed up with a session during the conference was about the emotional arc or journey. It was a creative and simple way of mapping out the customer experience from both a pre-data analysis perspective of what we (the business) thought the emotional journey to be, and then post-data analysis, which leads to a much better and changed emotional journey when analyzed. The method of the post-analysis journey was something that I personally haven’t experienced as the pre-analysis is what we typically would discuss.
This is where I foresee even more mapping in the future, and continuous improvement of the journey maps, so that an organization will always understand what is happening with their customers at an individual level, as well as at a process level.
I would highly recommend the pre-conference workshops to anyone attending a Forrester conference, as they definitely provide information and ideas that you can utilize.
