Journey Mapping

Journey mapping means writing down every real step a customer takes with you, in order, from hearing your name to the finished job. What matters is recording the steps they actually take, not the ones you wish they took. That difference is where most of the surprises hide.

Most maps are drawn wrong because they cover only the website, when a real journey crosses the counter and the telephone too. A patient sees a post, rings the clinic, waits on hold, walks in, sits down, fills a paper form, sees the doctor, pays at the desk and gets a reminder about the next visit. That is nine steps, and only one of them happens on a screen.

So draw it on paper first, with the people who do the work, because the receptionist knows more than the owner does. Ask each person what they do, what they wait for and what annoys them. Then add two columns beside every step, one for how long it takes and one for how often it goes wrong. Those two columns are the whole point, which is why Linkysoft runs the session with a whiteboard and every laptop shut.

One step is always worse than the rest, and it is nearly always a handover. A handover is the moment work passes from one person or one tool to another, like a website form that somebody retypes into a different program. Another is the message left on a busy phone that nobody returns. When Linkysoft maps a clinic before building anything, that broken handover is what we are hunting for. It is also why DocMz keeps the booking, the patient file and the invoice in one place, not three.

Do this before you buy software, not after, because a map takes an afternoon and costs only the time of the people in the room. It will tell you whether you need a new system at all, or whether one bad handover is doing all the damage. Sometimes the answer is a better phone rota, not a project, and Linkysoft says so when that is true.

Keep the map afterwards, date it and hang it where the team can see it. Change one step, then write beside it what happened, because that is how the map stays true. A map that gets updated becomes the plan for the web application you build later, and it stops you paying to speed up a broken step instead of removing it.