Customer Journey Map & Service Blueprint for B2B

Facilitating a customer journey workshop to kick start a B2B e-commerce platform, by helping the team find clarity in the huge amount of information.

As the project was done at Henkel, some info are hidden. This case study reflects the process but not the content.

Color-coded website sitemap diagram with a featured image of a man in safety goggles testing a tube, and a mobile view of a website with the phrase "Knowledge is Power" and a red button labeled "Technological Discovery."

Role: Workshop facilitation & UX Design

Tools: Miro

The Adhesives Technology business at Henkel planned to launch a new B2B e-commerce platform to improve digital engagement with its clients and partners. There was a huge amount of information available about the customers needs and business demands. Interviews and survey results has been collected, competitor analysis has been conducted. But the dots were still scattered and yet to be connected.

My challenge was to help the team find clarity in the huge amount of information, understand their customers needs, guide them to first create customer journeys and then map out a holistic service blueprint.

Within a 3-month period, I conducted 10 workshop sessions with ~45 participants in total and helped the team created a service blueprint, that served as a roadmap to launch the B2B e-commerce platform.

Setting up and conducting the workshops

I conducted a series of remote workshops via Miro, with 10 sessions in total. In total there were ~45 participants from different departments and across the globe. About 8-10 people participated in each workshop session. Depending on the topic, each workshop lasted 2-4h.

There were 3 rounds of workshops:

Round 1

Customer needs

(4 sessions x 2h)

Round 2

Customer journey map

(4 sessions x 4h)

Round 3

Service blueprint

(2 sessions x 2h)

Round 1: Understand the customers and their needs

In each session we looked at one customer group. Using the human-centered approach from Design Thinking to understand their needs. Taking information from interviews, surveys and customer analysis, we created customer jobs and framed How-might-we questions. Later on, these HMW questions helped the participants in ideating about activities the customers might be doing along their customer journey.

Round 2: Design customer journey map

We created a journey map for each customer group using the HWM questions as a guide to ideate about the customer activities and design opportunities. During the second workshop round, it became evident, that for the third workshop round, the 4 customer journey maps should be combined into one big map to fully understand the impact. Even though each customer group is different, lots of their activities and needs overlap.

Round 3: Create service blueprint

In the last workshop round, participants from business and digital innovation came together and gave their input on what should be done from different teams and departments to offer the proposed journey seamlessly to the customers. After the workshops, I compiled the final service blueprint, that shows the bigger picture.

The service blueprint showed the bigger picture and a generous overview of customers needs, business demands and technical requirements. It helped the stakeholders making strategic decisions. And most importantly, supported the successful launch of the B2B e-commerce platform.

Design opportunities

Launching a new e-commerce platform is a huge task taking lots of effort and resources. Understanding the scope and having actionable points and to-dos are important to kick start such projects. The workshop sessions helped the diverse group of participants, who are all quite knowledgable in their field, share their input and opinions in a structured and constructive way, and create actionable to-dos.

The customer journey map and service blueprint from the workshops kicked off the project, and brought structure into the big mass of information. One and a half years later, the e-commerce platform was successfully launched. After launch, I joined the team as UX designer to improve usability and increase conversion.

The final deliverable - service blueprint - served as the project roadmap:

A detailed service blueprint with various color-coded sections, lines, and icons representing different processes and interactions in service documentation.

Challenge

The biggest challenge was the facilitation itself. This was the longest workshop series I worked on with lots of participants, all knowledgable experts in their subject field and with lots of information to share. During the workshop sessions my main tasks was to give each participants the space to share their insights. I put an emphasis on quiet individual activities, for example quiet brain-writing activitied where people can simply write down their thoughts. However, during each workshop there were still many heated discussions, often off-topic, and I needed to guide the participants back to the actual task, and sometimes firmly but friendly cut people off.

For another workshop series with such a big scope and many people involved, I would improve on two aspects:

  1. Limit the numbers of participants even more. One representative from each team is enough.

  2. Gather even more information upfront from all teams and work out example journey maps on my own. Take that as a basis for the workshop, so participants can ideate and improve. This way we might save some more time.