Customer Empathy Mapping For Professional Services Firms
Client Experience Strategy For Professional Service Firms
Transform your firm’s way of thinking, create awareness, build value, and focus your team on improving your clients’ experience (CX).
What Is B2B Customer
Empathy Mapping?
B2B Customer Empathy Mapping, or Client Empathy Mapping, is a simple way to visualize the totality of a client’s experience. A Customer Empathy Map allows you to quickly, clearly, and simply build a better picture of the underlying drivers of your customers, and then pro-actively respond to those needs.
Having an empathy mapping strategy in place can help your business shift its focus from the products and services you offer to the users behind them.
Through empathy mapping, discover your customer’s motivations, concerns, and experiences that define their goals, points of interest, and critical vulnerabilities. From here, you can gain a better knowledge of why users take certain actions.
Empathy is the first step in the design thinking process that leads you to understand your customers and their goals. It is the foundation of B2B solutions, allowing your brand to stand above the rest.
Discovering your ideal customer is one thing. Understanding them is another. An empathy mapping exercise can drill down into an existing user, teams of people, stakeholders, and even individual use cases. In addition, empathy mapping is your opportunity to conduct workshops with various groups in mind.
Distribute the empathy mapping technique to design, sales, customer service, and product development teams to acquire new insights into your product and its future users.
The Four Quadrants of Empathy Mapping
If you’re asking, “What is empathy mapping?” you’re already on the right track to uncovering the benefits of these insights. The process begins with your ideal customers. Developing a detailed analysis of your perfect client is your guide to a better understanding of the people you’re serving.
Identify the user who would benefit most from your product or service. Construct the four quadrants to deliver greater insights, better understanding, and more knowledge for an optimal customer experience. more-or-less normal distribution of letters. making it look like readable English.
Says
The first quadrant of your map details everything your ideal user tells you about your product/service and its use.
Source quick surveys through the Client Savvy platform to learn more about your ideal customer’s opinions.
Complete this quadrant of the map by factoring in the specific feedback you’ve received directly from your clients. We provide an intuitive platform that helps you make sense of what your clients are saying to you at different stages of their journeys.
Does
Determine what your user accomplishes with your product/service. Gain a better understanding of their experiences through analyzing and segmenting data about your customers’ journeys. This will enable you to map out every step your ideal user takes to reach their goals.
Be specific and highlight any potential gaps in their workflow.
Relate your feedback to existing data extracted from your user persona and within your CRM. We support you in aggregating data and discovering how your service relates to what your clients do.
Thinks
What’s going on in your customer’s head? What do they think about the experience as a whole and at each stage? Answer these questions and access knowledge that’s often hard to come by with Client Savvy.
Delve into the mind of your ideal customer with your empathy map template. Break down each component of the “Does” section and consider what they think at each step.
Unpack the entire experience with your empathy mapping exercise with qualitative research and direct feedback as your guides.
Start noting the overlap between the “Thinks” and “Says” sections for potential discrepancies.
Feels
Adopt the habit of seeing past the data and metrics and viewing your client’s through an emotional lens.
Highlight contrasting feelings at each specific step to uncover positives and negatives. Understanding how your ideal clients feel at each stage forms the foundation of constructive solutions that can help you perfect your user experience.
The Customer Empathy Mapping Process For Professional Services Firms
The way your customers respond says a lot. We help you measure their emotional needs, drivers, fears, questions, and anxieties through Empathy Mapping. You can use this powerful tool to create winning proposals, reduce client and/or employee churn, and increase loyalty.
Get a deeper understanding of your customers
Kickstart your journey to a superior customer experience with a UX empathy map that serves as a journey map into your target audience. Then design an experience with greater confidence that it will meet their needs and address any underlying concerns they may have.
Kickstart your client experience program
Use empathy tools to ignite excitement from your team towards CX. There's no faster way to curate insights to spark service innovation.
Increase share of wallet with key customers
Gain deeper insights into what your customers care about most, then adapt to meet their needs better than your competitors.
Understand how to maximize stakeholder buy-in
Time is costly – especially in professional service firms -- but diverse perspectives from many players build better maps and ultimately provide an excellent experience.
Refine your product
The customer experience offers a view into the quality of your product/service. Use your empathy map UX as your command center for fine tuning the details that make your brand’s offerings unique.
Effective, easy templates for future success
Simplify your outreach program content by delving into how your customers feel. Take advantage of a streamlined approach to empathy mapping through templates that are easy and tailored specifically to your business.
Embark upon the design thinking process
Empathy is only the first step to a more expansive design thinking process that drives your business forward. Build the foundations of a data-driven company with empathy mapping based on facts, not assumptions.
How Empathy Mapping Works
An empathy map is a collaborative visualization that takes only a few steps to generate.
Complete your empathy mapping workshop in as little as three hours. Educate your team on vital questions like, “What is an empathy map?” and provide empathy map examples that will increase their understanding and engage your team.
Your journey begins with a series of virtual sessions or an on-site workshop. Work with Client Savvy’s client experience experts to develop a critical skill that can give you a leg-up on the competition.
No Preparation Required
Empathy mapping’s beauty is in its simplicity. Your workshop requires no preparation. All your team needs to bring is an open mind and a willingness to engage in the process.
Your facilitator is the only figure who needs to prepare for the session ahead, and Client Savvy serves as your five-star facilitator.
Practical Exercise
Our workshops begin with a practice exercise to familiarize your team with the process. This exercise aims to ease your team into Client Savvy’s revolutionary empathy map design thinking model.
Learning how to think in a new way is the value teams acquire from empathy mapping. Starting with a familiar situation, such as entering a restaurant, immediately engages the mind.
Your restaurant experience begins with five phases that replicate the five phases you’ll encounter in a real-world business:
- Enticed – You are enticed by dining options.
- Entering – You make a reservation and thus are entering into a business transaction.
- Engaged – You are sitting at your table and are engaged with your dining experience.
- Exiting – You finish your meal and pay the bill, which is similar to exiting the experience.
- Extend – You extend the experience with feelings, sentiments, and thoughts.
At Client Savvy, we emphasize the five Es because they match up with every business interaction. Your practice session lets you map out each phase as part of the world’s best dining experience.
Mapping Your Customer Experience
Once you have equipped yourself with the fundamentals in your practice session, the next step of empathy mapping is to practice genuine empathy with your customers.
Collaborate with your Client Savvy facilitator to create an ideal client persona for your business. Use the five Es to engage with the process and consider what your ideal customer wants from working with your firm.
With your new skills, you can create a valuable empathy map that relates to your company’s target audience.
Applying Your Mapping Skills to New Contexts
The final step in the empathy mapping process is applying these skills to benefit your firm.
Get started with customer empathy and apply it to various situations throughout your organization, including:
- Launching your company’s first customer experience program
- Expanding into a new market
- Turning your firm into a global brand
- Increasing average customer value
- Combatting increasing competition
- Reversing customer attrition
Your journey to the perfect customer experience begins by consciously understanding the people you serve. It also helps to be able to organize your data. Empathy maps will make it easier to sort through all of the valuable information right before you and better evaluate it.
Sign up for Client Savvy and engage with our team of customer experience professionals who are prepared to help streamline your user feedback from start to finish.
Get Actionable Help In All Stages Of Customer Empathy Mapping
Get help creating customized maps for your clients while creating excitement around customer experience thinking. Then, get a prioritized list of the actions you can take to improve that experience.
Empathy Mapping Services FAQ
How long does a CEM take to create?
Maps vary in complexity depending on your need. However, most firms are able to create a compelling map in a half-day onsite workshop, or over three virtual sessions lasting ~90 minutes each.
Who should be involved in creating a CEM?
Any size team can create a Client Empathy Map, with ideal teams being 10 - 20 in size. Larger teams can move faster, and assure a more complete picture of the client's world. Diverse teams are encouraged, including front-line professionals, leaders, and back-of-house support staff.
What’s the difference between an empathy map and a user persona?
User personas are fictional characters that serve as a template for developing and marketing your products and services. They are designed as an exercise for determining who your customers are in the first place.
Your empathy map begins with the assumption that you already know your general audience, but you want to learn more about their attitudes and behaviors. While existing user persona models can help, they only offer shallow insights into your target market's feelings.
What comes after empathy mapping in the design thinking process?
You may have already heard of using this mapping technology as part of the design thinking process. Typically, empathy is the first and most vital step in building the foundations of future versions of your brand. Without empathy, it becomes impossible to create a genuinely client-driven experience.
Four design thinking stages come after empathy: defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing. Embarking upon a streamlined design thinking process as part of a forward-thinking team will enable you to create higher-quality solutions for your clients.
What do I do with my map when done?
Each Client Empathy Mapping session generates a prioritized list of potential service / experience innovations you and your team can implement. If you need assistance with implementation, Client Savvy can help!
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Get Started With Customer Empathy Mapping
Empathy Mapping is one of many services related to Client Experience (CX) we provide. Contact us today to schedule a video meet and greet so we can show you how we can empower your firm to make positive CX changes.