Path Analysis: Discovering Customer Experience Pitfalls
In northern Virginia, we are plagued by shopping centers with the most horribly engineered parking lots ever seen—some lots capable of holding thousands of cars, but with as few as ONE entry/exit! And many of these goofily engineered areas seem to be plagued with "parking pockets": Just when you turn a corner and think you're on your way to escape from the "lot of doom," you dead-end at a random curb and are forced to turn around and find another way out.
As I toured one such parking lot one weekend, frustrated and digging my nails into the leather on my steering wheel, it occurred to me how much this is like customer experience on a larger scale.
Imagine a plot of land from the top down. Beyond a parking lot, your landscape may be a piece of land that is relatively untouched terrain or a plot of ground with existing buildings, roads, signs and features. Let's call this parcel of land your "landscape for brand discovery."
People can enter your property in many different ways. They may drive right through it, follow a trail, fly by, hike through the forest, paddle in on a canoe, drop in with a parachute, hitch a ride with someone... or, heck, swing in from a vine! Sometimes we can predict where they'll come from, and sometimes they'll just surprise us. You get the picture. These are our customers.
We are marketers, product managers, business planners, customer service experts, designers, IT professionals. We are the architects, the engineers tasked with collectively sculpting the landscape to create an organized, safe, and pleasing environment for exploration and discovery. Our job is to anticipate where the people will come from and carve out a system of paths, signs, or instructions that will lead customers to a desired and satisfying end.
Often, the challenge is that we work in teams in a disjointed manner. As a result, we can often fail to fully complete or connect customer pathways (at a programmatic level) to ensure customers have a cohesive experience—or set of experiences. As a result, the customer landscape is often complicated by challenges that can frustrate the journey and undermine success.
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