the blog for experience innovators

CX Industry Insights

two people shaking hands and making business

December 28, 2023

The b2b customer journey: experiences delivered from business to business

In today's fast-paced business environment, understanding the customer journey is essential for success. This is especially true in a business-to-business (B2B) context, where the sales cycle can be complex and lengthy. By mapping out the customer journey, businesses can gain valuable insights into their customers' needs, preferences, and pain points. This article will delve into the intricacies of the customer journey in a B2B context, providing a comprehensive understanding of the path to success.

Isabel Grillmayr

Jewerly and handbag as a symbol for luxurious products

December 27, 2023

The Customer Journey of Luxury Brands: Experiencing Exclusivity and Elegance

In our consumer-driven world, luxury brands have become synonymous with exclusivity, elegance, and sophistication. These brands have carefully crafted their customer journey to ensure a seamless and memorable experience for their discerning clientele. The customer journey of luxury brands encompasses various stages, each unique in its own way. From the initial attraction to the final purchase, luxury brands leave no stone unturned in creating a sense of desire and anticipation. In this article, we will delve into the intricacies of the customer journey of luxury brands, exploring the strategies employed by these esteemed companies to captivate and engage their affluent customers.

Katharina Rainer

towels and shampoo, illustrating a hotel's bathroom

August 21, 2023

Navigating excellence: crafting a Hotel Customer Journey Map for unforgettable stays

In the realm of hospitality, delivering exceptional guest experiences is paramount. Hoteliers keen on leaving a lasting impression need to understand every touchpoint a guest encounters during their stay. This understanding is where the concept of the hotel customer journey comes into play. By charting out each phase of a guest's experience, hoteliers can fine-tune their services to perfection. In this article, we'll delve into the essence of a hotel customer journey map, providing a comprehensive guide on its creation and sharing an example.

Isabel Grillmayr

a road symbolizing the way into the future

June 14, 2023

The 5 most outstanding trends in customer experience management in 2023

The pursuit of customer-centricity has led organizations to continually evolve their strategies to meet the continuously changing expectations of their customers. To succeed in this dynamic environment, businesses must stay ahead of the curve and embrace the industry’s latest customer experience trends and opportunities. In this article we delve into the exciting trends of customer experience management, exploring the emerging changes that are reshaping the way organizations engage with their audience.

Michael Steingress

A female receptionist behind a desk talking to a man in an office environment.

April 11, 2023

Journey mapping for customer success teams

Customer journey mapping is important for customer success teams because it helps them to better understand their customers' needs and pain points, which in turn helps them to improve the overall customer experience. By mapping out the customer journey, teams can learn how to better support customers on different channels like the helpdesk, phone, or forums – leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Zsofia Szatmari-Margitai

photo of a young female doctor doing eye surgery

November 2, 2022

11 impressive examples of how to design healthcare experiences

We collected a few great practice examples from all over the world to demonstrate that sometimes it doesn’t take much effort to ease difficult situations – it just takes empathy and the knowledge of pain points.

Isabel Grillmayr

colorful wall with sign: "accessible entry"

June 21, 2022

38 examples of how to design for diversity, inclusion and accessibility

Users of products and services are diverse; they have different needs, abilities, interests, and desires. As service designers / CX managers we must consider diversity, and design for it. But how can we make products and services inclusive and accessible to everyone? We collected a few best practice examples from all over the world to show: Sometimes it doesn’t take much to design for diversity.

Isabel Grillmayr

June 14, 2022

Legal design: how to innovate the experience of law services with journey mapping

For the legal profession, customer experience is of the utmost importance. Legal practitioners are constantly in contact with people in delicate situations. May it be going through a divorce, being accused of a crime, or having experienced severe financial or bodily damages, oftentimes the very fate of the affected individuals is at stake.

Isabel Grillmayr

Shoes and handbags displayed in a nice store.

May 25, 2022

7 products and services that improve experiences in shopping and retail

In some cases, small changes and improvements make a big difference for customers when consuming a product or service. In the following examples you get an idea of how service design could improve shopping and retail experiences. Enjoy!

Isabel Grillmayr

A photo of houses on the hillside with colorful facades

April 26, 2022

8 products and services that improve customer experience in architecture, interior, and building

In the following images, you can see some extraordinary experiences in the field of architecture, interior design, and building that might be helpful and convenient –or, in some cases, even life-saving. The examples range from easier evacuation in case of emergency, over clever space-saving hacks in hotel rooms, to a practical and fancy-looking way of storing skateboards in schools.

Isabel Grillmayr

A friendly doctor looking after a woman who just gets her bloodpressure checked

February 23, 2022

What is patient journey mapping and how to do it?

Patient journey mapping is a powerful tool that allows healthcare providers to visualize and analyze the various touchpoints and interactions patients have throughout their healthcare journey. For this article, we talked to an expert service designer with many years experience as a paramedic and flight rescuer to learn: what is patient journey mapping? Why is it important? And how to create a patient journey map?

Katharina Rainer

a bike standing in a room with art in the background

February 22, 2022

10 surprising examples of customer experience innovation from traffic and transportation

Sometimes it doesn’t take much to make a product or service come with a better customer experience. Here are some examples where (service) designers, based on the pain points they found and after some out-of-the-box thinking, further developed services that sometimes even go beyond the initial purpose.

Isabel Grillmayr

Display panes at an airport showing the departure and arrival of planes.

July 6, 2021

Customer journey mapping in tourism

Customer journey mapping has huge potential to change the travel & tourism industry in a positive way. As individual suppliers harness the potential journey mapping offers, they can craft more compelling experiences for their guests. Whether approaches are applied to services in a small hotel, or within a large destination management organization (DMO), journey maps can be created to suit different contexts and use cases within the travel industry.

Isabel Grillmayr

Sheets of paper with a cup, a mouse and a pen.

June 30, 2021

Improving citizen experience: Customer journey mapping for government services

When was the last time you used a government service? Sometimes it can be hard to bring a particular service to mind because they often play such a background role in our lives, only standing out during moments when they inconvenience us. However, in people's everyday lives they benefit from a vast range of different government services that support the way that they, as well as their communities, are able to function.

Cambrian Berry

MacBook standing on a desk. On the screen a yellow couch is visible.

March 4, 2021

Create an e-commerce customer journey map with a free tool

Customer journey mapping in e-commerce is a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through in engaging with your online business. It starts when they first become aware of your products, to completing a purchase. It can extend to after-purchase care.

Antonia Cramer

little kids waiting for school to start in front of a building

February 2, 2021

Education journey mapping: understanding learning experience

Education has the power to change people's lives and the world we live in. By understanding and mapping the education journey, we are much better prepared when creating meaningful educational experiences and we can thus achieve better outcomes with our learners. Education journey mapping can help us understand and improve the education journey.

Cambrian Berry

A man playing chess and drinking coffee.

November 18, 2020

Journey mapping in strategic planning

Customer centricity is the core of every successful business. Only if we plan and deliver products that solve real customer needs, our business will survive in the long run. Hence, having a clear understanding of what the customer needs and how we can meet these needs better than any other actor on the market is key to sustainable success.

Katharina Rainer

Candidate journey mapping improving the hiring process

November 11, 2020

What is the candidate journey and how to successfully recruit with journey maps

Recruiters know: The candidate has moved into a powerful position and has changed our game. It’s not only on the candidate to apply and perform, but also on us recruiters to convince the candidate to become part of our organization. It’s on us to leave a good impression and to provide a great candidate experience in order to stand out and compete with other organizations.

Melina Savvidis

November 9, 2020

Customer journey mapping in banking: what it is and how to get started

Like many other sectors, the world of banking is facing persistent pressure to innovate within a society undergoing rapid technological, environmental and social change. Due to these changes, the way we engage with banks and access money isn't the same as it was five years ago. Short: the customer journey in banking has changed – and it's highly likely it won't be the same five years from now into the future.

Cambrian Berry

Women sitting at a table, discussing the importance of journey mapping in SaaS

October 21, 2020

Customer journey mapping in SaaS: innovating software experiences

As a software-as-a-service company that develops SaaS tools for journey mapping, this topic is at the very heart of our culture. Throughout the last few years, journey mapping has grown deeper and deeper into our daily routines, now we are using it along the entire business lifecycle, with the entire team, and not only on an operational level but also on a strategic level too.

Klaus Schwarzenberger

a person's hands leaning on a table with sharpies, color samples, files and coffee

September 30, 2020

Customer journey mapping in marketing

Customer journey mapping and marketing go so much hand in hand that one might think it’s self-explanatory. But just like for any other person, also marketers sometimes have a hard time empathizing with customers. Customer journey mapping can help marketers to ensure they act for the customers’ sake and that it’s really the customer who’s in the focus of what they’re doing – rather than tools and processes.

Katharina Rainer

little girl and woman holding hands and walking away

September 22, 2020

Volunteer journey mapping: managing experiences with NGOs

Volunteer journey mapping is an important tool for nonprofits looking to create engaging and rewarding experiences for their volunteers. By mapping out the volunteer journey, nonprofits can identify pain points, opportunities for improvement, and ways to enhance the overall volunteer experience.

Katharina Rainer

Mother with a newborn baby, holding it tight.

March 1, 2019

Case study: journey mapping in healthcare

This case shows how the Community Empowerment Lab, a global health research and innovation organization, used Smaply to help design a model for scaling Kangaroo Mother Care in rural India.

Katharina Rainer

July 11, 2017

Case study: journey mapping in a global japanese electronics corporation

This case shares how a global Japanese electronics company used journey mapping to improve its business to business operations, specifically with external partners. Through a number of service design workshops internal staff gained awareness of the problem of poor service delivery and became part of the solution.

Katharina Rainer