Designing a customer diagram is a tool that helps teams understand how the customer sees or experiences the service process of the business. It is a diagram that visualizes relationships between people, processes, and physical and digital touchpoints related to a specific customer journey. For more on the customer journey click here.
A customer diagram is designed to reveal the multi-layered nature of how many different types of people and technologies work together, or in some cases, not in a business environment.
Each client diagram must contain:
- Step by step of a specific customer journey
- Each meeting point, one after the other, according to the different channels.
- The processes that happen behind the scenes at the same time
A good customer diagram will create a shared understanding between different teams and channels in your business.
What are the benefits of a customer diagram?
- Reminding employees how important it is to have a customer-focused perspective. Connects the mindset of the employees to a part of a more complex process.
- Creates opportunities for continuous improvement. Map-based diagrams can point out weaknesses or failures that can be the basis of a process that needs to be perfected.
- Influences your service design decisions. Creates points of shared interactions between employees and customers, to show where the customer experiences value.
- encourages a rational approach to service design. Visibility-based mapping helps make decisions about what customers should see and how employees will interact with customers.
- Helps you estimate how much the business invested in each process or touch point. By examining which processes create duplicate services, you can map where the revenue is coming from and plan how to save costs.
- Enables managers and frontline workers to communicate better to improve the customer experience. Improving service quality can be a shared responsibility, as employees share their experiences and managers find and support opportunities for improvement across channels.
The elements of a customer diagram:
Customer actions
Actions in the foreground
operations behind the scenes
support processes
physical evidence
Customer diagrams also tend to include three main lines:
The line of interaction
Direct interactions between the customer and the organization.
line of sight
Separates what is visible from what is invisible to the customer. Everything seen is above the line; What is not seen is below the line.
The line of internal interaction
Separates employees who have direct contact with customers from those who do not directly support customer interactions.
Depending on the context and business goals of the organization, you can also add:
- timing: If you offer a time-based service, you need to track how long each action takes.
- rules and regulations: Anything that dictates, by law, what can and cannot be changed, as teams look to optimize the customer experience.
- emotion: By understanding how employees and customers feel throughout the process, pain points can be identified.
- metrics: If acquisition is your ultimate goal, gather all information and visualize how time and money are being wasted due to mishaps or other operational inefficiencies.
An example of a customer diagram of a hotel-
An example of a customer diagram for providing loans





