It’s been… a year. And while it feels a bit odd to celebrate 2020 with a “Best of” post, I wanted to share the Bodine & Co. content that CX professionals leaned on most during this trying time. Because as it turns out, customer experience is even more important during a pandemic than it ever was before. I hope these posts inspire your own work during the year ahead!

Number 10: How Can You Make The World A Little More Beautiful?

https://kerrybodine.com/how-can-you-make-the-world-a-little-more-beautiful/

I wrote this in the midst of this year’s Black Lives Matter protests, when I was really feeling down and struggling to make sense of the world. And if I had to pick my favorite post of the year, this would be it. I won’t say any more here. Just go read it.

Number 9: 5 Steps To Mapping The Customer Journey

https://kerrybodine.com/5-steps-to-mapping-the-customer-journey/

Over the past several years, we’ve refined our approach to journey mapping. We started out with 10 steps, then realized that there were many benefits in simplifying our model. So, we folded those 10 steps into the five you’ll find in this post. Consider this your high-level roadmap for developing journey maps and using them to drive action.

Number 8: The Customer Journey DOES NOT EQUAL The Customer Lifecycle

https://kerrybodine.com/the-customer-journey-does-not-equal-the-customer-lifecycle/

A customer journey is related to, but is not the same thing as, a customer lifecycle. The two main differences: 1) Customer journeys align with your customers’ goals or tasks — lifecycles don’t. After all, no prospective customer wakes up and decides they want to develop “awareness” of your company. 2) Customer journeys have a defined beginning and an end — lifecycles, as indicated by their circular representations, don’t. Read this post to understand why you need to set lifecycle diagrams aside when journey mapping.

Number 7: The Pandemic Trigger: It’s Time To Update Your Journey Maps

https://kerrybodine.com/the-pandemic-trigger-its-time-to-update-your-journey-maps/

Whenever I teach a journey mapping bootcamp, I get the following question: “How often should we update our maps?” For years, I’ve had a list of external triggers — like the introduction of a new technology or a stock market crash — that should prompt you to reexamine how your customers’ needs and expectations are changing. I never expected a global pandemic to be one of the triggers I’d talk about… But here we are.

Number 6: Why You Need To Measure Journeys—Not Just Touchpoints

http://kerrybodine.com/why-you-need-to-measure-journeys-not-just-touchpoints/

It’s taken some time for organizations to evolve from simply creating journey maps to actively using the journey as a framework for how they do business. Journey analytics is one step in the right direction. What is journey analytics? It’s the measurement and analysis of key customer journeys—not just individual touchpoints. The data I cite in this post will help you make the case for realigning your organization’s measurement strategy around journeys.

Number 5: Do Customer Journeys Drive Your Content Strategy?

https://kerrybodine.com/do-customer-journeys-drive-your-content-strategy/

I often get questions about the different ways organizations can use journey maps. This post provides inspiration of how to take a journey-centric approach to your content strategy by showcasing an example from The Exploratorium, a science museum based in my hometown of San Francisco. (Btw, if you want to learn how to do this yourself, join my bootcamp in Feb/March 2021.)

Number 4: 3 Questions To Guide Your “New Normal” Customer Experience Strategy

https://kerrybodine.com/3-questions-to-guide-your-new-normal-customer-experience-strategy/

As 2020 unfolded, we all spent time wondering what our “new normal” would look like, both personally and professionally. This post outlines key questions that organizations need to answer in order to proactively develop a customer experience strategy that will serve both their customers’ needs and their business objectives during — and beyond — the pandemic.

Number 3: 5 Ways To Rethink Customer Experience In The Face Of The Coronavirus

https://kerrybodine.com/5-ways-to-rethink-customer-experience-in-the-face-of-the-coronavirus/

I wrote this post two days after San Francisco locked down. To be honest, I felt really helpless at the time — and writing this post enabled me to put something semi-helpful out into the world. And while this post is definitively of that time, the advice is timeless: Be generous with your resources and just do the right thing.

Number 2: How To Use Our FREE Journey Mapping Template

http://kerrybodine.com/how-to-use-our-free-journey-mapping-template/

On of the most popular pages on our site gives you access to our free journey mapping template. So, it’s no big surprise that our post on how to use said template is also a hot item. Read this post to get the most out of modifying our template for your own journey mapping efforts.

Number 1: The 4 Types of Customer Journey Maps

http://kerrybodine.com/the-4-types-of-customer-journey-maps/

I wrote this post back in 2014, yet it remains our top blog post year after year — and one of the top 10 pages on our site overall. Read this post to understand (yup, you guessed it) the 4 types of journey maps and which business objectives each type is best suited to help your organization accomplish.

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What do you want us to write about in 2021? Let us know below!