Design Thinking

Chapter 4Customer Experience Mapping: The Springboard to Innovative Solutions

Jonathan Bohlmann

North Carolina State University

John McCreery

North Carolina State University

Introduction

The increasing complexities of the competitive marketplace make innovation ever more challenging for companies. Differentiation and innovation beyond the incremental become more difficult as customers become better informed and more demanding and as competitors move more quickly within compressed product life cycles. To meet these challenges, business scholars and practitioners have increasingly called for more focus on the total customer experience, in contrast to more traditional approaches of feature-based product development and innovation. Christensen, Anthony, Berstell, & Nitterhouse (2007), for example, advocate a “job to be done” perspective, whereby product and service development is related to customer motivations (what problem is being addressed?) and the benefits the customer extracts through the product/service experience. Prahalad and Rangaswamy (2003) discuss “next practices” that lay out an experience-based view of product/service design for enhanced innovation.

Consistent with the experience perspective (and likely predating its more recent emphasis in the business press), a deep, empathic, human-centered approach is the critical first step in any design effort. As articulated by Tim Brown (2008), knowledge of “human behavior, needs, and preferences” is what helps “capture ...