Service Design for Dark Sky Tourism III: Map your customer's experiences

Map your customer's experience

The customer journey is a visual representation of the customer's experience throughout the service. It helps to understand the customer's feelings, thoughts, and actions at different touchpoints, step-by-step. Describing the customer journey is a key tool in service design. Visualizing the service journey helps you understand your customers' experiences holistically and identify areas for improvement at different touchpoints. This enables the design of services that provide a smooth, pleasant, and memorable customer experience. Customer journey mapping helps you identify the steps in your service that work well, and also those that need a little more work that might otherwise go unseen. 

A typical customer journey in the tourism industry may include the following stages:

• Needs recognition: The customer becomes aware of the need to travel (e.g., vacation, business trip).
• Consideration and information search: The customer looks for information about different travel destinations, accommodation options, activities, and modes of transportation (e.g., websites, social media, travel agencies).
• Booking: The customer makes a reservation (e.g., flight, hotel, excursion).
• Preparation: The customer prepares for the trip (e.g., packing, travel documents).
• Traveling: The customer travels to the destination (e.g., airport experience, flight).
• Arrival and accommodation: The customer arrives at the destination and checks into the accommodation.
• Experiencing the service: The customer uses various services at the destination (e.g., hotel services, restaurants, activities, attractions).
• Check-out: The customer checks out of the accommodation.
• Traveling back: The customer travels back home.
• Post-experience and feedback: The customer reflects on the trip, shares their experiences (e.g., reviews, social media), and possibly provides feedback to service providers.

For this module, we have created a customer journey map  template that emphasises both darkness and experiences, with an added layer of storytelling. You can download the Customer journey map from the section below. When you fill out your customer's journey map, think of the moments where storytelling could be really effective, whether it's in marketing or creating lasting memories to share to others. 

Once again, take a look at the customer persona you created earlier. Focus on their needs, their motivation and their values. Starting from the first row, we'll fill out the template from top to bottom starting with Customer's actions throughout the service. 

Row 1: Customer actions 
Describe the actions and experiences your customer goes through chronologically during your tourism offering.

• Before the service: What are your customer's inspiration to book this offering? What do they want to experience and what are their values that drive their decisions? What or how do they wish to change?
• Booking: How much time do they need for planning? Do they book 6 months in advance or do they tend to book last minute a couple of weeks before traveling? When booking, how does the experience feel to them: is the booking difficult or easy to this customer, do they hope for another way to contact your business, do the feel secure with their booking?
• The beginning: This is the starting point for the actual offering. When your customer steps into your premises, what do they see, hear and sense? Do these notifications meet their expectations, or do they bring them down? How are you or your staff welcoming your guests?
• The experience: Describe three most important stages of your offering after your customer has arrived from your customer's point of view. What does your customer experience and what is the highlight that they have been waiting for? 
• The end: The end of the offering is as important part of your customer's experience as any other part. Your customer has experienced something they have put their free time and money into. How do they feel about their experience now that it's about to end and they are returning to their every day life with responsibilities and mundane tasks?
• After: How is your customer sharing their stories about their experience? Peer-to-peer marketing is a very effective way to share the good experiences with other potential clientele. Does your offering include any after-sales services, newsletter, additional services? How does your customer react to that?