Northstar’s SVP – Research, Layton Dorey, spent the afternoon of Nov. 6th guest lecturing to Professor Polina Buchan’s second-year Marketing classes at St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ontario on Customer Journey Mapping. This a field in which Layton is a recognized expert, having invented TD Bank’s approach to customer journey mapping while at The Bank.

The lecture comprised of an adapted commercial presentation. This gave students a view both into customer journey mapping and how to sell consulting services and intellectual property.

After outlining the purpose of customer journeys – to identify the customer’s path to purchase in a sequenced and ordered manner – the lecture taught students how to:

  • Use qualitative research to construct the initial customer journey framework as the initial stage of work
  • Build on the widely-used practice of qualitatively mapping the current customer journey to develop a means of also quantitatively measuring prevalence, frequency and relative importance of experience drivers at every journey stage
  • Develop an ideal future state journey from insights gathered about current state experience drivers and pain points
  • Work with the large stakeholder groups inherent to Enterprise clients (“Enterprise” refers to a large corporation that manages thousands of employees and which will typically have very large and diverse groups of stakeholders spread across many different job functions). Noting that successfully modifying the customer journey requires buy-in from all stakeholders
  • Utilize enculturation sessions to build consensus across diverse teams to identify the priority opportunities presented by the ideal future state journey
  • Re-model the current state journey with the priority opportunities in place and re-evaluate this modified journey quantitatively
  • Recognize the implications customer journey has on the entire customer experience

Finally student’s were shown static illustrations of an online digital Customer Journey Dashboard tool and its value to marketers in an environment where marketing strategies are shifting from mass-marketing – a single message sent to many – to more targeted marketing, where messages are tailored more to specific niche audiences.

St. Lawrence College was formally established in 1967 by an act of the Government of Ontario. The institution maintains three campuses in Eastern Ontario, at Brockville, Cornwall, and its main campus at Kingston.  Today the college has approximately 6,700 full-time students and 20,000 part-time registrants spanning 89 academic programs.  The school employs approximately 830 full- and part-time staff.  Faculty number approximately 415 and often come to St. Lawrence after practical careers in the field’s they now teach.  You can learn more about St. Lawrence College here

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