Customer Journey Map

Customer Journey Map Solutions

A customer journey map is an incredibly useful tool that allows you to better understand the perspective of your customer throughout each stage of their experience with your business. They show a customer’s desires, frustration, concerns, and more. By creating and analyzing a customer journey map, you can better grasp what it’s like to be your customer and how that experience can be improved. This can lead to dramatic results that directly impact ROI including increased loyalty. See what happens when you put the customer at the core of your business. Learn more below.

Journey mapping tools don’t address the most critical challenges.

November 15, 2018/0 Comments/in Customer Centric Culture Change, Customer Experience, Customer Experience Surveys, Customer Journey Map, Customer Personas, CX Vision, Employee and Customer Engagement, Minneapolis CX, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

There are a ton of journey mapping tools out there. I’m most familiar with Touchpoint Dashboard, but I’ve had demos from many others. They all excel at certain components of journey mapping, but they don’t (and probably can’t) address some of the largest problems.

That’s because the biggest reasons journey maps fail have nothing to do with digital problems; they’re analog. As we’ll discuss tomorrow, the biggest problem in journey mapping is that it’s done in silos. Small teams are created to do journey mapping. Those small teams intimately learn the customer experience, but because they don’t control the critical touch points, the effort fails to drive change.

Too many see journey mapping as an employee workshop.

November 14, 2018/0 Comments/in Customer Centric Culture Change, Customer Experience, Customer Experience Surveys, Customer Journey Map, Customer Personas, CX Vision, Employee and Customer Engagement, Minneapolis CX, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

What is journey mapping?

That may seem like a strange question from a blogger whose title is “Mapper-In-Chief,” but there’s so much confusion on the topic that it’s a question that needs to be asked.

This confusion is fueled by vendors who offer “journey mapping workshops.” This is a half- or full-day workshop where you gather a bunch of employees who each adopt a customer persona and use Post-It Notes to document your perceptions of that customer’s journey. Oracle hosts this type of workshop, and by all accounts it’s a ton of fun. It’s possible they mention the need to actually talk with customers, but the attendees I’ve spoken to don’t remember them saying that.

We still have challenges navigating trade-offs when deciding what to map.

November 13, 2018/0 Comments/in Customer Centric Culture Change, Customer Experience, Customer Experience Surveys, Customer Journey Map, Minneapolis CX, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

Most journey mapping projects fail to drive change. That’s what we discovered when we surveyed practitioners who have conducted such projects (learn more about this survey in our white paper, “Driving Change Through Journey Maps”).

One leading success factor is selecting the right journey to map, and it’s the first place that problems occur because it requires trade-offs. Do you want an end-to-end map or one of a specific sub-journey?

An end-to-end map is interesting. Seeing the customers’ journey from beginning to end helps us to understand where the points of friction are and helps prioritize places where issues need to be fixed. Unfortunately, that end-to-end view isn’t always the best way to improve the customer experience.

Journey mapping has become a must-have approach to customer experience

November 12, 2018/0 Comments/in Customer Centric Culture Change, Customer Experience, Customer Journey Map, CX Vision, Employee and Customer Engagement, Minneapolis CX, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

Before it became a business five years ago, Heart of the Customer was a blog I started when I was leading CX at a Fortune 100 company. Along the way I learned about journey mapping, and created the post Customer Journey Map – the Top 10 Requirements to reflect the limitations I saw at the time. That post has since had over 108,000 views, including over 4,000 in the last year. When I started the business, that post drove us to number 1 in any Google ranking on the topic – journey map, customer journey map – even “journey mapping software,” we didn’t even offer software!

Since then, journey mapping has become even more popular, as you can see from the chart on the right.

Journey mapping is now the go-to customer experience tool, and has been discussed in Forbes, the Harvard Business Journal, and countless other journals.

Reflections after Five Years of Journey Mapping

November 8, 2018/0 Comments/in Customer Centric Culture Change, Customer Experience, Customer Journey Map, CX Vision, Minneapolis CX, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

Last month we celebrated Heart of the Customer’s 5^th year anniversary. The team got together to share where we are, discuss best practices, plan for the future, and—most importantly—to celebrate! We were also grateful to have Angelica Bonacci from Allianz come to tell us about the ways her organization is using our journey mapping work to drive internal change.

This led me to reflect on what has occurred over the last five years in terms of journey mapping as an art. Next week, we’ll have five posts discussing journey mapping and how it has changed. The five are:

Journey mapping has moved from a nice-to-have to a must-have in customer experience.
We’re still challenged by navigating trade-offs when deciding what to map.
Too many see journey mapping as just a workshop.
Journey mapping tools still don’t address the most critical challenges.
Journey mapping is still happening in silos.

These all reflect, to varying degrees, the five journey mapping questions that you should consider before embarking on a project: Read more

It’s not Necessarily a Design Issue

October 25, 2018/0 Comments/in Customer Centric Culture Change, Customer Experience, Customer Journey Map, Customer Personas, CX Vision, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

I regularly receive emails that go something like this:

I have almost completed my organization’s journey map! Can you give me some design suggestions before I share it with my company?

This request comes from a good place, a desire to educate the company about the customer’s journey, but after a few questions, it quickly falls apart. There are at least three problems with this request.

Why do you need to talk to customers?

September 6, 2018/2 Comments/in Customer Journey Map, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

I was talking with a prospective customer last week, and I walked through our customer journey mapping process – first you collect companies’ hypothesis and existing data, then go out to their customers to interview them in their places of work (they’re a B2B company), and finally bring that voice of the customer back to your teams to drive change.

He had attended a journey mapping training class and truly drank the Kool-Aid. He talked about how he put together a workshop and wanted to expand the methodology. Then, at the end of the conversation, he asked: “Jim, I trust you; you do this professionally, but why exactly do you need to talk to customers in journey mapping?” Read more

CX Webinar Invitation, August 27th

August 22, 2018/1 Comment/in Customer Centric Culture Change, Customer Experience, Customer Journey Map, CX Vision, Employee and Customer Engagement, Journey Mapping Resources & Tools, Minneapolis CX, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

Do your employees love your company?

Jim Tincher joins Shiftonomics to break down the customers’ journey, and how strongly it is impacted by corporate culture and the effort the company puts into empowering its frontline teams.

You’ll Learn

How to hire people who care
Keys to maintaining employee engagement
How to map each customer’s journey

About Taylor Pipes and Jim Tincher

Taylor Pipes, an industry specialist from Branch Messenger, is joined by Jim Tincher to talk about the customer and employee experience. With a lifelong passion for customer experience, Jim founded Heart of the Customer to help companies of all sizes increase customer engagement.

Reserve your spot here.

Interested in workshops? Read more here.

Interested in journey mapping? Read more here.

Interested in improving your CX? Read more here.

What is the point of a journey map?

June 8, 2018/1 Comment/in Customer Experience, Customer Journey Map /by Jim Tincher

We held an offsite today. As our team expands, it’s important to connect and learn from each other, and this was one of those rare opportunities.

Engagement Lead Kathleen Hoski led us in an exercise to review our past journey maps, discussing and aligning on best practices. As she led the discussion, something interesting happened.

Even though we were in a room with sixteen people whose job it is to create customer journey maps, we had slightly different ideas as to the exact role of the customer journey maps: Read more

The Top 10 Reasons Customer Journey Mapping Fails

May 17, 2018/1 Comment/in Customer Journey Map /by Jim Tincher

I just came back from hosting the CXPA’s Insight Exchange and talking all things customers. Of course, I tended to hang out in the customer journey mapping sessions. While the practice is maturing, there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

In the spirit of sharing best practices, we at Heart of the Customer put together our Top 10 Reasons that Journey Mapping Projects Fail, a la David Letterman.

Without further ado, let’s proceed!

10. Not doing your homework. Too many try to rush into journey mapping projects, without taking the time to dig out what’s already known in the organization today. And we don’t just mean existing customer research. Call center logs, operational KPIs, social media complaints – all should be included in the approach. Read more

Customer Journey Map