Experience Design: A Framework for Integrating Brand, Experience, and Value

Chapter 7

Customer Journey Framework

So far we have been discussing experience design from some relatively narrow and internally focused perspectives: Brand and products/services. In this chapter we will delve more deeply into how these perspectives tie in to the ways in which customers experience value.

Nearly every large company we’ve worked with has had some form of a customer journey that they use to help teams understand how the marketing and sales process works. It’s also a way to focus on the efforts that are most likely to pull prospects into the “funnel” before converting them into customers and ringing the sales bell. Companies that understand the importance of customer experience will often extend their customer journey to include stages that address what happens after the sale, largely with an eye toward how to keep in contact with a customer (and keep the customer primed for future purchases).

Our approach to experience design suggests taking the concept of a customer journey and extending its uses beyond the marketing, sales, and relationship management functions. It suggests using it as a way to understand what the Brand is really doing in the world from the perspective of how the Brand’s efforts are experienced and interpreted by people who aren’t immersed in the planning and execution of these efforts. One of the benefits of this approach is that it forces people to think in context of time (time as it relates to the continuity of experience) and perceptions that ...