Redesign your customer journey to minimize physical human contact

The Corona crisis affects all of us in one way or another, and right now many organizations struggle to find ways to handle this extreme situation. As we all know, we have to do everything we can to minimize physical contact between people.

Yet, on the contrary, limiting human contact can be devastating for all those businesses that depend on customer-facing activities to carry out their service. And in difficult times it’s even more important to treat people well and to deliver in accordance with the customer needs. Here are two tips on how to use your customer journeys to quickly prioritize actions, to innovate and to find new ways to create customer value:

Prioritize touchpoints with physical contact

Take a look at your existing customer journey maps and identify the areas where human interaction is crucial for your business or service. Where is the business most affected by people (both employees and customers) staying at home? This should be your top priority now.

Now, perhaps more than ever, it’s important to gather as many people as possible around the customer journey maps. Your customer-facing co-workers, as well as teams or departments that can support them, should be involved, to make sure that everyone is on the same page and that you have a shared view of your priorities.

Redesign the prioritized touchpoints

Once you have prioritized the touchpoints, pick the quick- and easy ones first. What can be done immediately to avoid physical contact? Can we simply go digital or remote on certain touchpoints? If the answer is yes, then start with that.

In some of the touchpoints that you have prioritized, you probably need to understand the details of the customer interactions more. Here it’s a good idea to break out those particular touchpoints into separate customer journeys. In Custellence this is easy to do by creating a new journey map and connecting it to the prioritized touchpoint in the first map. This will be a “temporary journey map” to use as a base for problem-solving and ideation.

A final tip is to listen carefully to the insights and ideas of your customer-facing colleagues and teams. Being the closest ones to your customers, they might be your best source of insight right now.

Perhaps you will go back to the way you were doing things before the crisis, but don’t be surprised if you come up with some new ideas that you want to keep when we’re back to some kind of normal again.

Last but not least, stay safe and take care!