NETTING IT OUT

You can work with your customers to co-design new products and services, to streamline their (and your) business processes, and/or to develop a unique and valuable customer experience. Many of our clients find that running half-day or full-day customer co-design sessions using our Customer Scenario^® Mapping techniques is a great way to jumpstart their customer-impacting projects.

To get the most out of these customer co-design sessions, you want to plan carefully. You want to be sure that you have the best possible high-level support, engagement, and resources from your executives for the co-design session itself. You want to be sure that you’ve chosen your customer co-designers thoughtfully for the scope of the project at hand. You want those customers to find the Customer Scenario Mapping session a valuable use of their time.

This CSM Guidebook is designed for CSM Facilitators and CSM Consultants. It is also an important read for the executives who want to ensure the success of investing in working closely with customers on an important initiative. It should also be required reading for the key stakeholders who will be participating in the Customer Scenario Mapping session—your internal subject matter experts. Finally, we recommend that anyone who plays a supporting role in planning and executing these customer co-design sessions read this guide so they’ll understand the importance of the supporting role(s) they’ll be playing.

In this section of the CSM Guidebook, we provide an overview of the eight steps you’ll want to be sure are taken before each Customer Scenario Mapping event to ensure that your customer co-design sessions are successful and impactful!

YOUR CSM GUIDEBOOK

Since 1989, Patty Seybold and I have been planning and facilitating successful customer co-design sessions for our clients using our proven Customer Scenario Mapping (CSM) methodology. And, since 2005, we’ve been training like-minded clients on how to plan and facilitate sessions on their own with their end-customers and ecosystem partners. Our facilitators-in-training quickly embrace and understand the underlying principles and concepts of customer scenarios—a set of tasks that a particular group (segment) of customers is happy to do in order to accomplish their desired outcome(s); they learn the “rules” of mapping—always approaching things from the customer point of view, the order in which to map different layers, the importance of capturing success metrics; and they become fluent in “scenario-speak,” dropping terms like Moment of Truth, Desired Outcome, and “We Should’s” into everyday conversation. But there are areas that they often gloss over in their zeal to become proficient at the art of facilitating the actual mapping sessions. The first of these areas is the detailed planning that needs to happen before the session. So in this first section of our CSM Guidebook, we’ll focus on the planning activities required to ensure a great customer event.

THE EIGHT PRE-SESSION PLANNING ACTIVITIES

There are eight planning activities that you need to make sure take place before each Customer Scenario Mapping workshop...