Customer journey mapping
A wedding journey
Understanding the customer journey from “yes” to “I do”
Nelly Naylor is a self-employed photographer who specialises in LGBTQ+ weddings.
This led to insights about Nelly’s pricing structure and identified opportunities to add further value.
Together, we created a customer journey map so that we could analyse the business from her customers’ perspectives.
I facilitated a half-day workshop with Nelly to understand her customer journey.
An independent business
Nelly is passionate about LGBTQ+ wedding photography and the reviews she receives make it clear that she is very skilled at it.
However, as an independent, small-business owner, it can be difficult to find the time to take a step back and focus on things like processes and strategy.
I suggested a half-day workshop and asked Nelly to think about what she would like to prioritise.
Like many businesses, particularly small ones, Nelly was concerned about her pricing structure and cash flow. Did her pricing structure accurately reflect the time she spent on each client’s photographs? Were there any ways she could improve cash flow?
Although Nelly does professional headshots, she is primarily a wedding photographer. In that industry, it can be a long time between an initial meeting with a client and the final payment - often up to two years.
Answering questions
After mapping out the customer journey, Nelly and I identified her tasks and activities at each stage. We then assigned estimated durations to each one.
This answered her questions about the pricing structure and helped us identify opportunities to improve the consistency of her cash flow.
The exercise also gave us additional insights. Seeing the customer journey mapped out on a wall made it easier to spot tasks that Nelly could group together and save time.
Adding value
Throughout the customer journey, we identified lots of small, thoughtful touches Nelly adds to improve the experience for her customers. While these things don’t necessarily impact her pricing or cash flow, they do contribute towards her uniqueness as a business.
Identifying these things and seeing where they fit into the overall journey gave us some ideas about how Nelly could improve efficiency around these elements and highlight them in her marketing messages.
Future steps
It was a short but useful session which gave Nelly an opportunity to see her business from a different perspective. We answered some important questions and identified parts of the process that she wanted to spend more time improving.
It would be really fantastic to do a part two sometime to look at:
Grouping and scheduling tasks to make time management easier and more effective
Checklists and other tools to help speed up some of Nelly’s processes
Given that we’re both busy, small business owners, finding time for a part two might take a while! Watch this space though!
Check out Nelly’s website
All of the photos featured in this case study were taken by Nelly. If you would like to explore more of her work, have a look at her website.
Find out more
If you found this case study interesting and would like to learn more about my thoughts and reflections on other projects, you can explore the blog posts below.
