The papers and books worth reading next, and what to take from each.
Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer JourneyKatherine Lemon and Peter Verhoef, Journal of Marketing, 2016The research view of the journey: its stages, the four kinds of touch point, and how little of it a firm controls. Start here.
Service Blueprinting: A Practical Technique for Service InnovationMary Jo Bitner, Amy Ostrom and Felicia Morgan, California Management Review, 2008How to draw the backstage, with worked company cases. The most useful single paper for chapter 7.
Designing Services That DeliverG. Lynn Shostack, Harvard Business Review, 1984The original blueprint. Read it for fail points and for the idea that every step has a time standard.
The Truth About Customer ExperienceAlex Rawson, Ewan Duncan and Conor Jones, Harvard Business Review, 2013The consulting case for managing journeys rather than touchpoints. Take the direction, not the percentages.
The Voice of the CustomerAbbie Griffin and John Hauser, Marketing Science, 1993How many interviews it takes to hear most of what customers need, and why one-on-ones work as well as groups.
Competing Against LuckClayton Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David Duncan, 2016Jobs to be done at book length. Use it to name stages for the customer’s progress and to run better interviews.
The Effortless ExperienceMatthew Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick DeLisi, 2013The effort argument in full, from the firm that ran the research. Read it alongside de Haan, Verhoef and Wiesel (2015) for the counterpoint.
Full references, including the research on memory in chapter 9, are in Appendix C.