Recently, I decided to apply to the press office of Helion publishing house and register as a book reviewer. This will allow me to discover new titles and share my thoughts here on the blog.
As part of this cooperation, I get review copies of books, but I am in no way obligated to write positively about them. So you have the assurance that I will be writing my true feelings.
For the first fire came to me a copy of „Instrukcji obsługi ścieżek klienta: czyli praktyczny przewodnik po CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPS” by Katarzyna Michalak of Fuzers. I was very eager to choose this title because I’ve been dealing with customer paths in my work lately and I felt like digging deeper into this topic.
About the book
This publication is very short. The main part alone is just over 100 pages, and the whole publication closes in less than 160 pages. You can calmly read it all at once - I did it around my lunch break at work.
In it you’ll find a walkthrough of the entire process of creating customer paths: from theory, to research, to mapping the path, to updating it regularly. You will see examples of templates and references to various tools that can help you during your work.
What did I like?
There is definitely no pouring of water here. I really dislike books that spend most of the pages telling you how miraculous results you will achieve after following the methods in it, and the “meat” itself takes up just a few pages. This is definitely not the case here.
Very cool is the section in which various people who apply the client paths on a daily basis speak out. They share their insights and tell what they find most difficult. Such a collection of real, “combat” knowledge is very valuable. Until I regretted that there were not more of these contributions.
In general, the topic of customer paths is also touched on very broadly. In several places, I found myself sighing “I wouldn’t have thought of that”. Especially cool are a couple of tools mentioned in the text.
What didn’t I like?
After all the reading, I am unsatisfied. You can see that the author has a great deal of knowledge about paths, but many elements are only mentioned. It’s a bit of a shame that the reader is left to his own devices on many issues.
That being said, I wonder who exactly was supposed to be the target audience for this book. On the one hand, it is a good introduction to the general topic of user paths, but on the other hand, to have to have detailed knowledge to apply the advice from this book successfully.
Summary
I feel that this book would have been a good summary of some course, or part of a set containing templates with detailed application instructions. As it stands, it falls a little short of being a viable “manual” that you reach for every time you work on Customer Journey Maps.