Customer journey mapping is often an afterthought to some companies. They come back to journey mapping after they’ve experienced significant issues, poor NPS, or difficulty aligning teams and have to “fix” it. By the time companies realize the extent of the issue, the customer is already dissatisfied and might even be in danger of churning. However, you don’t need to wait until there’s a problem to journey map.
Journey mapping, first and foremost, is a tool. It’s a way for customer centric customers to gain insight into what their customer is actually experiencing. This is why its so critical that when you do journey mapping, you actually bring some of your customers into the process. You should choose customers that represent a good cross section of your customer base. Some new customers, large existing customers, small enterprise customers, healthy customers, and challenged customers for example. Some companies do journey maps on their own internally and completely miss the point of the exercise. An internal journey is a good first step, but it is only a customer journey hypothesis. You need to talk to customers to get to a true journey map—one that includes their personas, sentiment, perception, and feeling through the process.
Journey maps also need to be both end to end and deep dives into specific areas. End to end is important as many times that the customer journey is fragmented happens during handoffs between different teams. This is easy to miss and most teams tend to focus within their silo on what they can control. Customer notice poor handoffs immediately. This is categorized by repetition, delays, and other inefficiencies. Deep drives help you better understand details that are missed in a high level end to end. For example, how different personas at a customer interact with your processes.
Journey maps are an essential tool for any company that strives to drive customer centricity. They should be the basis for driving improvements in the customer experience and when paired with voice of the customer insights, provide a unique lens into the mind of the customer.
