So, hi. Welcome back. In the previous class, we focused on the stages of a customer journey. Now, we're going to focus on the horizontal tracks. Again, even if you have experience building customer journey maps, I will be introducing some new ways of thinking about how to approach them. A lot of customer journey map training emphasize one or another template. But it's critical to recall that the objective of customer journey is to enable colleagues throughout the whole organization to have a shared view of the most important aspects, to consider when defining their activities, and how they impact customer touchpoints. As such, customer journeys are above all a communication tool. They should be adopted to emphasize the most important concepts, describing customers interactions with your company. So, one aspect that we haven't yet spoken about is the persona. So, user persona are a description of the most representative customer profiles or profiler profiles, who will be going through your customer journey. They help your colleagues get a shared vision of the contexts, in which a typical user thinks about consumes or uses your company's products and services. The reason it's important to call out persona now is that, you need to define customer journeys for each individual persona that you have defined in your company. If your company has complex products and services with multiple usage scenarios, you might have to do some good research that identify the set of the most relevant personas. I've included suggested reading material that you can use to learn more about how to do personas, how to research them, how to define them, and how they can be used. So, now let's focus on the horizontal tracks that demonstrate the how, why, and the what effects that persona interacts with the company during each stage of the customer journey. It's important to recognize that the exact horizontal tracks that you define in the customer journey are not cast in stone. They're dependent on the products and services, but also what are the key inflection points along the customer journey. Generally, the horizontal tracks reflects some aspect of the following; goals, touchpoints, emotions, and satisfaction of having their goals met. In addition to these four basic tracks, you may want to add new concepts depending on what is important for the customer journey, and what you need to communicate to your colleagues. So, our external touchpoints, an important factor in the customer journey. For example, a lot of products rely on review sites managed by third parties and during the consideration phase, or the use phase, or might have product support boards, these are external to your company. They might be worthwhile pulling out, because it's managing those touchpoints, is different from those managed internally. You may also include a track highlighting opportunities for improving any given touchpoint. So, then might happen later in your customer journey work, but it might include for example, references to the back office processes, the website search, the billing department, the support case qualification processes, anything that might be important for driving discussions with different colleagues and different departments. The point is, the horizontal tracks you surface in a customer journey, just like the stages we talked about last time, should be defined by the context of your organization, its products, and the goals you have for addressing the issues that may emerge. In the next class, we'll spend some time with Bien Macaroon ,an expert service design consultant, who's led many customer journey research projects. She'll provide some real-world insights that will help you and your customer journey activities. See you next time.
