Journey Mapping & Service Blueprint research tool: Mobile Ethnography
Mobile Ethnography is a powerful, agile research methodology that helps researchers, designers and customer experience teams better understand the in-the-moment needs, behaviors and experiences of their users and customers. As research is increasingly being done remotely and asynchronously and as customer journeys and customer experiences are becoming increasingly digital and omni-channel, Mobile Ethnography is a powerful methodology for remotely undertaking in-context, in-the-moment research into user journeys and customer journeys.
The outputs for this research are Journey Maps (either user journey maps or customer journey maps) and Service Blueprints.
This article will discuss the structural and process differences between Journey Maps and Service Blueprints. It will take a closer look at each deliverable and how it can be applied for the most impact, as well as introducing mobile ethnography as a new approach to supporting research in this area.
Although Journey Maps and Service Blueprints are conceptually similar, there are some key differences: Journey Maps are more commonly used in user experience design (UX), whereas service blueprints are a staple for Service Design and Customer Experience (CX).
While both deliverables are used to tell a step-by-step story of a persona, there are key differences in strategy and usage of each deliverable.
Journey Mapping as a tool for researching customer journeys
A customer journey map focuses on one persona, usually the user of a particular device or software, and tracks their journey. Service blueprints look at personas through a business lens. They capture the journey of both the user / customer and the internal operations /employees supporting the customer’s journey at each touchpoint.
This article will look at the structure of each deliverable and how they can be used for digital transformation.
What is a “Journey Map” and why is it important?
Once a persona is established and you understand who is taking the actions, it is important to understand what those actions will look like. This is where the journey map comes in. A journey map will help you focus on the core workflow phases and the individual touchpoints and steps within each phase. The resulting Journey Map will tell a story. More details on this right after we look at the why.
To create a User Journey Map, it is important to have the right amount of both qualitative and quantitative data on the persona as a foundation. Ideally it’s desirable to go on-site and conduct contextual inquiry in person. However, it’s getting increasingly harder to observe and record the process on-site. Not only is it incredibly time-consuming (and requires a lot of planning and permission to do), it is also not easy to gain access to many customers and when you do, (with a researcher shadowing their every move) it’s hard to be 100% sure that they are going to behave as they normally would.
How Mobile Ethnography research tools can help
This is where Mobile Ethnography, and in particular Indeemo, can help.
Indeemo leverages smartphones to remotely connect UX researchers with their research participants. Indeemo’s Mobile Ethnography app enables users to record every touchpoint of their journey using photo, video, text or screen recordings. Think of it as a longitudinal, asynchronous, contextual inquiry where you get to experience their user journey through the lens of each individual.
Because of its ability to help you conduct multiple asynchronous, contextual inquiries across several locations concurrently, Indeemo can expedite and increase sample scope, upping the validity of the research. It also allows you to reach more users as your reach is not geographically constrained.
Indeemo’s mobile ethnography tool can help you capture journeys and workflows along with strategic details and can help take your ethnographic research and journey mapping to the next level.
Why research is so important for Journey Mapping
In a fast-paced work environment, journeys are often created before even considering any product features. This is because it’s important to understand what process, channels and touchpoints the persona needs to go through to most effectively accomplish a task.
It’s also important to make sure the persona’s mental model of the process is captured and reflected in the digital flow. Once a journey map is created, it is often used as a contextual reference by the UX researchers, designers, product owners and developers as they decide on features and build out the product.
The problem is, however, that due to time constraints, a lot of journey maps are co-created internally and sometimes without authentic, in-the-moment input from real users or customers. This can result in Journey Maps that may reflect internal hypotheses rather than real-life user / customer experiences.
Typical Journey Map Layout:
The following diagram shows the typical structure of a Journey Map.
Source: Diana Glozman
Key Features of a Journey Map
Persona focused, follows a single persona’s journey through a core workflow
Each journey is divided into core workflows (or phases); these can be linear, or separate tasks done during specific time frames (end of the week, once a month, etc).
Next, user journeys can be broken down into step-by-step activities. Each step displays common workflows, individual tasks, touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities.
Finally, you can display additional information visually such as icons capturing the core idea of the step and a line reflecting the emotional phase at each step of the journey.
As you can see in the above image, Journey Maps typically chart the journey and experience of a user or customer through multiple phases / stages / touchpoints of their individual journeys and chart the highs and lows of their journey through each touchpoint.
Journey Maps capture what is referred to as the “front stage” experience i.e. what the user or customer experiences.
To also capture and record the ”back stage” operations i.e. what employees experience and do to deliver on the front stage customer experience, you need to prepare a Service Blueprint.
Using Service Blueprints as a tool for mapping Internal Operations
Service Blueprints are increasingly being used to craft the internal company operations. COVID-19 has expedited a global digital transformation. More companies and clients are going fully-digital. Revamping business structure to support omni-channel journeys and digital experiences both internally and externally is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge. Strategizing for the best way to scale both digital presence and internal resources can be difficult without having an entire, user-centric picture of the current end to end work processes. The combined customer and company digital experience can provide this foundation for efficient scaling.
Service blueprints can be used to provide a snapshot of the current work environment as well as a blueprint for scaling internal resources digitally in the most efficient manner. It can help answer questions on what resources and/or tools to invest to get the most ROI. More importantly, by having a solid understanding of the customer interaction with each core business functionality, these maps can assist in empowering empathy, streamlining the customer experience and eliminating growing pains that often occur with organizational scaling.
Service blueprints are powerful at documenting the current state of the business operations (through the lens of the customer). By documenting the current state (based on in-the-moment research with real customers), the business can then leverage the current state service blueprint to design a future state service blueprint to address pain points and take advantage of high impact, low effort opportunities.
Service Blueprint Layout
The following diagram illustrates a typical service blueprint layout.
Source: Diana Glozman
Key features of Service Blueprints
Service blueprints can range in usage but will usually consist of the following areas and content:
Persona-focused follows a single persona’s journey through a core workflow. It’s important to consider the status of the persona as it progresses through the journey. For example, the persona starts as a prospect and becomes a client.
Include swim lanes for the front stage (customer focused), backstage (employee focused), and opportunities.
The front stage is what is experienced by the client.
Backstage is what is experienced within the company’s internal operations.
Opportunities swim lane provides a summary of opportunities per step.
Define the core processes that the client encounters end-to-end.
Split those core processes into core journeys. These journeys can be linear or subsets of journeys that have a more detailed workflow that needs to be captured.
Each journey is divided into core workflows, these can be linear, or separate tasks done during specific time frames (end of the week, once a month, etc).
Next, journeys are broken further down into step-by-step activities. Each step displays common workflows, individual tasks, pain-points, and opportunities.
Finally, you can display additional information visually such as icons capturing the core idea of the step and a line reflecting the emotional phase at this step of the journey.
The advantages of Service Blueprints:
As mentioned earlier, businesses looking to transform their operations with a digital experience strategy can greatly benefit from preparing a service blueprint. The process of creating the service blueprint can break down silos, align teams and key stakeholders on workflows. It can shine a light on some high-impact, low-effort pain points that can be easily resolved even before the completion of the Service Blueprints.
The final deliverable can build customer empathy and align both working teams and executive teams on the current state of the business. It can highlight customer pain-points and commercial opportunities and help with prioritization and strategy. These journeys can be used as a baseline to help track ROI as the company grows and scales.
An accurate, context-rich, service blueprint can also provide a great foundation for the future state of the digital experience and operations, aligning on cross-departmental initiatives. Finally, if these service blueprints are properly maintained and governed, they are a great onboarding tool for new employees.
The importance of using Mobile Ethnography as a research tool to Create Customer Experience Advantages
Numerous customers may have been engaging fully digitally before Covid-19, but many have been hurriedly pushed into the new digital normal. For some this has been easy. Some customers however experience the pain points of digital operational redundancies and workflow gaps. They are the ones that often blame themselves for an inefficient process or outcome. It’s important to be able to provide a streamlined and consistent customer experience from the beginning of their interaction with the company through the purchase phase and beyond to the maintenance phase.
Understanding the reality of the customer’s experience through this accelerated digital transformation is a critical foundation for success. To fuel your design process with real-life, in-the-moment, context-rich behavioural data, digital ethnography (as mobile ethnography is also called) is increasingly being employed by forward-looking organisations. Indeemo’s mobile ethnography app helps researchers and designers better understand their customer experience at each key touchpoint.
Each research participant can be assigned tasks to complete where they document their in-the-moment experience for each touchpoint using video, images, screen recordings or text. All this information is captured asynchronously and in-the-moment, helping you get a large amount of context-rich data in a fraction of the time it would take to conduct each interview on its own.
You can also have each participant provide self-reported CSAT and NPS scores for each touchpoint and Indeemo automatically graphs the highs and lows of their journey into a visual customer experience graph. This feature prevents post rationalisation and captures exactly how the customer feels during each touchpoint of their customer journey. This makes it easier to spot moments of delight but also any serious pain points and opportunities. Indeemo’s functionality captures in-context insights and provides powerful filtering, video transcription and analysis tools needed to quickly synthesize and map the real customer experience.
In Summary
Both customer journey maps and service blueprints serve a distinct purpose not only for products but also for the business organization.
These deliverables can provide great benefits for empowering empathy across the entire organisation, helping an organisation transition to a human-centric ethos, mapping internal operations, enabling organisations to scale and, of course, for accelerating digital transformation.
However, as both Journey Maps and Service Blueprints are just a means to plot and communicate journeys and experiences, they are only as reliable as the inputs that are used to inform and create them. To ensure your Journey Maps and Service Blueprints are based on real, in-the-moment, human experiences from customers and employees, you need to augment your research with a Mobile Ethnography component. To maximise the efficiency and competitive advantage of these powerful deliverables, tools like Indeemo are playing an increasingly important role.
Resources
Here are some additional resources to get started: