When asked whether she would recommend customer journey mapping to other nonprofit organizations, Dina Thachet said, “Absolutely!”
Dina, the Medical Case Manager at Make-A-Wish Illinois, continued, “The customer journey mapping process gave us the ability to visually see the work that we do and to validate the things that we know, believe, or assume to be true. The ability to take a step back and look at where we do well and where we have room for improvement was invaluable and re-energizing.”
Like many nonprofit organizations, Make-A-Wish Illinois wanted to create a bigger impact for the people they serve — but the 35-year-old organization felt stuck. In order to grant more life-changing wishes for critically ill children and their families, they needed to re-examine their wish granting process.
When Make-A-Wish met Highland’s Customer Experience team, they knew they had found the right partner to help them design a more impactful wish experience.
With an ambitious and important goal of increasing the medical and emotional impact of a wish experience, Highland and Make-A-Wish decided to create a customer journey map. These maps show the path of a customer in relation to the organization. In the case of Make-A-Wish, their “customer” is wish kids and their families.
The Customer Journey Mapping Process
David Whited, Highland’s CX Practice Lead, says that, “The true gift of journey mapping is distributed cognition.” He continued, “Getting what’s in everybody’s head and in everyone’s computer out into the real world feels so good. It gets critical information out of the organizational silos and into the open so you can see it.”
Make-A-Wish’s customer journey mapping project took about six weeks to complete. During this time, Make-A-Wish and Highland worked together on the following milestones:
- Kick-Off Meeting: An initial meeting between all members of the project team to clarify who the customer segment is that we want to understand and what the point of view of the map should be.
- Developing a Research Packet: An overview of data provided by Make-A-Wish that would help create an inclusive, effective map; we needed to narrow down many pages of data to produce one succinct research packet that everyone on the team could study prior to the actual mapping exercise.
- Customer Interviews: Interviews with 8–12 constituents (in this case, wish kids and families) to understand their unique customer journeys.
- Journey Mapping Workshop: A multi-day workshop to identify the stages in the customer journey and understand the customer’s thoughts, feelings, and touch points along the way.
- Strategy Session: A follow-up session to the Journey Mapping Workshop, in which Highland and Make-A-Wish worked together to clarify the insights that came out of the journey mapping process and what actions to prioritize; together, we co-created a timeline and a plan for rolling out the most critical next steps.
Through the customer journey mapping process, Make-A-Wish identified opportunities for improving the wish experience that they couldn’t have seen otherwise.
