Conceptual Modeling Meets Customer Journey Mapping: Structuring a Tool for Service Innovation

Customer experience has become the main differentiator for competition in the digital age. Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) is a technique that aims to understand the customer's decision process and experience by taking a customer perspective and modeling his/her different steps. CJM facilitates innovation by proposing new or improved services. In a joint research project, we aimed at creating a CJM approach that allows for the participation of a broad audience in the creation process that especially has no experience in CJM or modeling. When studying the related literature, it becomes clear that methodological guidance in CJM is absent. While there are domain specific modeling languages for CJM, these do not include an overarching framework of how they should be carried out in an organizational setting. In lieu of proposing "yet another modeling language", we present a framework for CJM that embeds a modeling approach in an overarching method. We utilized the Action Design Research method to tackle our problem with the particular focus on the participation of inexperienced personnel. Then, we generalized the learnings from the development process into methodological guidelines.