Customer Journey Mapping for the Public Sector

Benji Crooks, Marketing Director at Public Sector Network, sat down with Pete Saunders, customer experience and service design consultant, ahead of his upcoming course with Public Sector Network, Customer Journey Mapping. Saunders shared why many journey maps stall as internal workshops, and how outside-in research, strong personas, and practical mapping techniques help public sector teams reduce friction, improve service delivery, and turn insights into action.

Pete Saunders: My name is Pete Saunders. I'm a consultant and I work primarily in customer experience, service design, and innovation in the public sector, so government services, health, education, that kind of thing. And the course that I facilitate is customer journey mapping.

Interviewer: Excellent. So customer journey mapping, who is this for and why should someone attend?

Pete Saunders: It's a pretty broad course. So if you work in anything around customer experience, in marketing, in service design, or service delivery, then it's really good for you. We also have business analysts and more technology-focused people attend and they love it.

In terms of why you should attend, we talk through a whole range of different skills and applications, and how to make customer journey mapping relevant both to the organization itself as well as to your role within it. So it mixes a bit of theory with a lot of practical.

Interviewer: Perfect. So in simplistic terms, what is customer journey mapping, and why is it especially valuable to the public sector?

Pete Saunders: I think it's important to start with what customer journey mapping isn't. And it's a common misconception that I find that a customer journey map, for a lot of people, is how someone might move through a particular service that you have, whether it's a website or something in the public-facing. And that is more of a process map or a service blueprint.

A customer journey map actually looks outside of the four walls of the organization and really thinks through the customer story and their context. And it's designed to create a good impression of what someone is going through in the lead-up to engaging with your service, as well as around your service and after the fact.

So it gives you a much wider, more holistic view of the customer, which then informs how you can better design services to meet their needs. So it's really valuable in the public sector because it takes into account the customer's overarching context and their overarching goals, and gives a lot more clarity on the role and function of the public service that should be provided, and how to design that for the needs and wants of that customer from an outside-in perspective.

Interviewer: Excellent. And so drilling into the course, what kind of activities can someone expect to be doing, and what kind of learning outcomes can they expect to be walking away with?

Pete Saunders: So we make it a really practical course. It is a whole day. So the first part at the beginning is more of the theory, the background, kind of what customer journey mapping is and why it's important.

Then we move into persona development, so we actually undertake an activity on creating a persona around a particular problem. We go into details on the types of information to capture, research tips on qualitative and quantitative research.

And then in the afternoon we spend time actually building out a customer journey based on that persona. So there's continuity through the day. All the activities, while they are hypothetical, they are based on the organization, so they have practical realities for participants. So we try to make it as real-world as possible.

And then in terms of outputs, I'm really big on sharing everything that I've learned. So participants get all the slides, all the information, all the course materials, all the frameworks that we use, they get everything.

And we primarily work in Miro as an online tool, and there's a private setup for each course. And the participants will retain access to that Miro privately so they can always go back and refer to past work. So it's a lot of information, but they get everything at the end of it because the whole idea is people are able to take this and learn from it and adapt it into their own practice.

Interviewer: So focusing on the participants that may need to do the course, what is one common mistake you would say that organizations usually do when trying to map customer journeys, and how does your course help people avoid it?

Pete Saunders: I think a common mistake is thinking that journey maps can be designed and created using only internal perspectives, and actually cutting the customer out of the conversation.

So it happens all the time that people will build a perception of what they think the customer goes through rather than actually spending the time interviewing people and reading the data and that kind of thing to build a representation of what a customer actually goes through, even if that challenges the assumptions that the organization has.

Which again, it's a big part of this course, how to uncover and raise and address those assumptions. But without actually going in and talking to the people that your services impact and affect, you have a very narrow, one-dimensional perspective on the journey.

So it's very common to just look internally and be kind of myopic about your own service, and the course here is very big on setting projects up for success and giving you the tools and questions you need to go and answer. And then obviously the practical tips and applications and frameworks and that kind of thing to help avoid some of those common problems.

Interviewer: Excellent. And I guess the last question I have, you probably have answered in quite a few of your answers, but how can someone apply what they've learned straightaway into their day-to-day role?

Pete Saunders: Well, I sort of reiterate some of those things. It is the methodologies and the frameworks that sit behind it. Because the courses are so practical, the intention is that you can kind of start the next day and actually get going with the things that you've learned.

So it is meant to give you momentum so you feel a little bit more equipped to get some of this stuff going in whatever your organization is. And again, it's applicable across so many different roles, so trying to give you the ways of getting other people in your organization involved so you have more momentum across the whole organization rather than…