Experience Mapping and Post Booking Strategy

We wanted to understand the customer experience through the whole product lifecycle. This would not only help us identify areas to improve the Customer Experience but also by sharing the document we wanted to help increase fluency in user experience throughout our organisation.

My role

From previous research we already had some of the core building blocks in place

1. Customer personas
2. Customer needs throughout the customer experience

I interviewed a number of subject matter experts running through the full customer journey from research, booking and through to being on holiday and returning home.
For each step in the journey we talked about user needs, and rated on how well they were being met for our two main customer types.
We wanted this map to be a living document that could easily be adjusted when more learnings came to light. We mapped two personas along the journey. This helped build a clear picture of where Sovereign are doing well and also where they had opportunities to improve their service.

Post booking strategy

Off the back of the CX map the business began to realise that there was a lot of opportunity at the post booking stage of the Customer Experience. I was asked to bring together people from across the business to build up a set of insights which could be used to drive innovation. This led to the production of a set of recommendations.

Documentation

Our booking documentation was little more than a porly formatted email so this needed urgent attention. We set about understanding the problems by organising some time with the call centre listening to calls. This gave us a huge amount of knowledge and understanding when it comes to knowing what customers are thinking and saying and helped us focus on particular issues.

• Hard to find flight information
• How to check-in online
• What is my baggage allowance for multiple flight operators
• Where do I pick up my transfers
• A lack of brand recognition/coherence

Working with the sales teams

With a better idea of the problems that our customers were having we set up workshops with the sales team to ascertain whether our findings were consistent with their experience. This proved invaluable as the sessions served to underline the already highlighted customer issues with repeated anecdotal evidence from the team. They were keen to fix the found issues so that they would receive less calls of complaint meaning they could focus on selling and could generate better and more coherent quotes.

“It’s so hard to defend the confusing layout of our documents when a customer has often spent a lot of money on their dream trip…”

Call centre staff member, 2016

The technical challenge

With a green light to kick off the piece of work we gathered together as a team, which included our content strategist, document developer, project manager, and business analyst to discuss the technical limitations and set project goals. We established that the documents had become bloated with unnecessary information and that we needed different content strategy approaches dependent on document type.

Quotes should clearly display pricing and breakdown with clear calls to action and should also inspire.

Departure documents should be mostly functional but also inspire and clearly show the key stages of the holiday journey plus any flight, transfer and visa information necessary.

Invoices should be purely functional with clear deposit, balance and payment due dates.

By using our existing CMS and Travelink booking system our developer established that we could inject the rich data we needed at quote stage from our CMS and we created wireframes of the new content using omnigraffle.