In its bid to create great customer experiences, Lake Macquarie City Council in New South Wales is using customer journey mapping to systematically identify and remove ‘pain points’ in its service and information pathways.
Customer journey mapping is a diagnostic tool that helps organisations learn more about customer needs by documenting their experiences with specific services or facilities.
The mapping process uncovers points of ‘pain’ and ‘delight’ in customer interactions, providing a clear picture of how well systems and channels are working.
Council’s Manager Organisational Development Laura Kendall said that the tool has boosted her organisation’s capacity in customer experience management and could prove useful for other councils, especially those that aim to go beyond improving individual services and refocus their efforts on end-to-end solutions.
“Customer journey mapping helps our organisation focus squarely on how users think and feel when we design our internal processes to deliver services to the community,” Ms Kendall said.
“Increasingly customers are choosing online as their primary source for finding information, completing tasks and seeking services, and they expect integrated and consistent experiences across all touch points and channels.
“By understanding our customers’ needs and behaviours, we can progress from mapping current customer experiences, to designing the future experiences that we want our customers to have,” Ms Kendall said.
To date the Council has trained 30 of its staff in journey mapping methodologies, with another 15 to receive training in August.
“We’ve also developed a toolkit of guidelines and templates to make it easy for project teams across the organisation to use customer journey mapping to improve experiences for their customers,” Ms Kendall said.
Lake Macquarie City Council is happy to share its experiences with customer journey mapping and make its Toolkit available to other local government organisations.
