Objective of the Tool
The Circular Customer Journey (CCJ) helps companies to understand customer experience through circular lens and translates these findings into actionable outcomes in design and business model development. Good customer experience in B2B (business-to-business) or B2C (business-to-consumer) is critical for differentiation from competition, ensuring customer loyalty and continuous partnership, and enabling reuse behaviours for circular economy. In a nutshell, customer journey is a visualization method for understanding how customers interact with specific offerings, identifying gaps through a perspective shift, and creating a link between value creation and customer experience.
CCJ operates as a tool to preliminary outline assumed customer perspective towards product/service and modelling this through touchpoints, pain points, emotions, and motivations. CCJ can be utilized in several stages of development, from preliminary design or business model mapping, or improving customer experience for established products. It is important to note that customer experiences and modelling them through tools such as CCJ should always be based on existing data about real customers, or it should be explicitly understood if the data is based on subjective assumptions.
What the Tool Is
The CCJ includes a customer journey touchpoint map for identifying interactions with the product/service throughout the lifecycle, as well as canvas used for structuring the different customer-oriented lifecycle phases through the touchpoints, pain points, emotions, and opportunities.
This enables understanding the product/service from simultaneously customer-oriented and circular perspective, identifying possible blind spots or gaps in keeping the customer engaged throughout the lifecycle to ensure optimal end-of-life outcomes, and discovering potential process steps to implement education or additional value-creation mechanisms.
The outcome is a map describing the journey customers go through when interacting with a product/service, as well as pointers on possible barriers and opportunities for development.
When to Use the Tool
The CCJ can be utilized in several stages of development, from preliminary design or business model mapping, or improving customer experience for established products. It is critical to note that for creating preliminary understanding of the customer perspective, subjective assumptions or AI assisted personas can be used, but for robust application customer research and data about the actual customers is demanded.
How to Use the Tool
Step 1 – Collect Critical Data: Utilizing previous customer research, conducting new segmentation studies, or opting for data-driven AI-personas.
Step 2 – Map Customer Journey Touchpoints: Identify the different ways customer engages with the product/service throughout the lifecycle.
Step 3 – Describe actions, pain points, emotions, and opportunities: Analyse from the data what different actions are connected to the touchpoints, what kind of pain points there are or might be, what the customer is feeling, and what opportunities the company could offer/create for each lifecycle phase.
Step 4 – Identify Barriers and Critical Factors: Where are the biggest pain points? What are the negative or unsure emotions connected to? Are there knowledge gaps?
Step 5 – Update Map based on Supporting Evidence: Enrich with additional information.
Step 6 – Re-evaluate, Implement and Restart: Estimate updates, implement findings to the product/service lifecycle, and continually evaluate possible changes or blind spots.
